GoKawiilI write (and think) about AI for a living. In any given 30-minute period, I waver between worrying that AI will destroy everything I know and love, and believing -- or at least wanting to believe -- that it could change humanity for the better.
Dread turns into optimism, which seeps into ambivalence, which then turns back into dread-induced cynicism. Rinse, repeat. Goodness, my central nervous system needs a break.
That debate is at the heart of a new documentary arriving in theaters today, March 27. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (104 minutes) first premiered at Sundance in January and later screened at SXSW. The film explores the wild industry and mind-melting world of artificial intelligence. It takes an unflinching look at the tension between those who feel extreme doom versus those who feel extreme optimism about the AI boom, and how to make sense of that polarity.
The documentary's two directors, Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, were soon-to-be fathers during the filmmaking process, their kids born a week apart. Through the lens of fatherhood, the documentary makes use of hundreds of interviews, both onscreen and offscreen, with key technology and risk experts worldwide -- from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety -- to explore whether AI is the greatest existential threat we've ever known, or the most singularly exciting technology we've ever known, or something else entirely.
Roher won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Navalny (2022), and Tyrell was on the Oscar shortlist for his documentary short My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes (2018). The AI Doc was also produced by the teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker).
I spoke with Tyrell this week, before the documentary's theatrical release, to discuss fatherhood, the two-and-a-half years of making this documentary, inspirations, goals and society's future with AI.
The interview below was edited for length and clarity.
I know you've made documentaries before, but how did you prepare, going from a deeply personal short documentary to a documentary like this, that really looks at the biggest, impactful thing that is AI?
Tyrell: I mean, there was no preparing. Daniel Roher is the one who brought me into this film, and I can't remember how many features he had made before this, but more than me. And it was just confidence in each other. And not just in Daniel Roher, but in the rest of the team to be going through it together and kind of, "We don't need to have a plan, we'll make the plan as we go."And not necessarily being cavalier about it, but just knowing we had a job to do and a goal, and just keep moving forward toward that.
So how did I navigate? Just with faith in the people around me. Coming from a personal short before this, I still tried to apply a lot of my personal sensibilities and POV to this story. It's through the lens of fatherhood, and I became a father the same week that Daniel did. So a lot of his feelings were my feelings, and vice versa.
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