When filmmaker Daniel Lauer and his wife became pregnant with their first child, many questions new parents had came to the surface. “How will life be different?” What kind of world will their children step into? And Loher wanted to know, because she had heard a lot about artificial intelligence and its potential impact on life and work as we know it. “Was I crazy to have a child now?” Will AI make everything better, or will it be the beginning of the end for humanity?
Lohr took up these existential questions and, with co-director Charlie Tyrell, created “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocalypse,” which was released in theaters on March 27th.
A few days before the film’s release, two of its producers, Diane Becker and Ted Tremper, spoke at CNBC’s Technology Executive Council Dinner and talked about behind-the-scenes production of the film, how they negotiated talks with some of the biggest names in the tech industry, and what they learned along the way.
Tremper acknowledged that most of those involved in making the film know little about AI other than what they’ve heard on the news. “I had to listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts to figure it out,” he said.
Tremper’s first task was to contact all the key players in AI and ask them to be interviewed on camera for the documentary. “We basically sent out 90 emails and received a total of six responses,” he said.
Ultimately, Loher ended up interviewing 40 people on camera. Among them were three of AI’s most famous CEOs: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. (Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk declined.) Tremper said he spoke with hundreds more at all the major AI labs to get context.
“What is AI?”
Director Lohar, who won an Oscar for his documentary “Navalny,” appears anxious and a little cynical when he asks questions of experts in the film. “That’s not acting. That’s Daniel,” Becker said. From the most ardent advocates of AI to the pessimists who think AI will bring dire changes, Rohr starts with the simplest questions. “What is AI?”
“That was the most interesting part,” Tremper said. “We’re having Nobel Prize-winning scientists and amazing people explain it to us down to a very simple human level, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not true.’ I think that question was harder than they expected.”
But Tremper was quick to point out that the film ended up being a kind of meta-commentary on AI.
“The way people think about AI is very binary,” he says. “It’s either going to cure cancer or it’s going to kill everyone. It’s going to lead to an apocalypse or a utopia, and that causes a lot of whiplash, and that whiplash is something that we really felt was important to guide someone in the documentary.”
One of the biggest early revelations was that filmmakers couldn’t chase the AI headlines. “We finished our first round of interviews, but Sam[Altman]was kicked out of OpenAI, so we immediately scrambled to start planning how to re-interview all these people,” Becker explained to TEC members. “And 72 hours later, he came back.”
“That was the moment I knew I was done chasing the headlines,” Tremper added. “We had to make a movie that would be as relevant six minutes, six months, and six years after its release. So what do you have to say about AI and rapidly advancing technology that will be relevant forever?”
In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, Becker and Tremper said they were encouraged by the early response the film received at Sundance and other venues. “It was great to hear from people who never expected to laugh or cry over an AI document,” Tremper said.
“When we showed this film to 700 students in Copenhagen, they thought AI was only a problem for wealthy white Americans,” Becker said. “And when the lights come on, complete strangers start talking to each other about what they saw and what they believe, and they have completely different opinions. It’s really amazing.”
TEC members asked Becker and Tremper whether their views on AI have changed since before filming began.
“I thought there was an adult in the room who would address this issue and resolve it,” Tremper said. “I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s very scary, but it’s also a great invitation to join the conversation.”
Becker said he now realizes that when people use tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, they don’t fully understand it and take the results as truth.
“What I want everyone to know right now is that this technology is going to have an impact in ways you haven’t even thought about yet, and we all need to be part of this conversation,” she said. “We all have a seat at the same table and cannot let technology companies dictate how we use AI. We must be part of the answer and remain skeptical.”
