By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The dystopian specter of artificial intelligence has spawned a pair of documentaries dissecting a technology depicted in the films as a voracious parasite devouring humanity’s knowledge, creativity and empathy.
The films “Deepfaking Sam Altman” and “The AI Doc” explore the issue through different lenses, while similarly illuminating why the technology raises both existential fears and utopian visions of how it could change the world.
Both documentaries coincide with an increasingly heated debate over whether AI will become a catalyst that helps enlighten and enrich people, or a technological poison that insidiously dulls human intelligence while wiping out millions of well-paying jobs that traditionally required a college education.
Dealing with fear of AI
The AI build-up over the past three years has already resulted in a $12 trillion increase in the combined market values of Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla, the Big Tech companies leading the charge since the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. The massive run-up is now raising concerns about the bursting of the investment bubble.
“There is a lot of fear around AI, and the best way to get rid of that fear is to talk about it and confront it,” Adam Bhala Lough, director of Deepfaking Sam Altman, told The Associated Press.
Lough’s documentary, which has already shown in a few theaters in the United States, explores AI by relying on a virtual doppelgänger of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose pioneering role in the field has inspired comparisons to nuclear bomb inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer. It’s Lough’s first major project since his HBO documentary “Telemarketers” earned an Emmy nomination in 2024.
Fate or blessing?
As the full title suggests, “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” digs deeper into the chasm that separates the technology’s doomsayers from its followers.
The documentary moves on an emotional see-saw, bouncing between moments of despair and elation during interviews with dozens of AI fanatics and skeptics. The film is co-directed by Charlie Tyrell and Daniel Roher, who decided to explore the promise and dangers of AI as a follow-up to his 2023 Oscar-winning documentary, “Navalny.”
Some of the darkest moments of “The AI Doc” are delivered by noted AI “doomer” Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose vision for the future is so grim that he advises against bringing any more children into the world. The brightest spots were painted by Peter Diamandis, a technology fanatic who advocates for AI to provide humanity with once-unfathomable superpowers.
“The AI Doc” also shines a spotlight on the men running three of the leading AI labs: OpenAI’s Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis, who heads Google’s DeepMind division. The trio are all interviewed by Roher, who also tried unsuccessfully to talk to the heads of the two other major AI labs: Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and xAI CEO Elon Musk.
An unstoppable locomotive speeding along the rails
The interviews are conducted against the impending birth of Roher’s son, as the 32-year-old director tries to find some reasons for hoping to offset his existential concerns about AI — a quest that culminated in him embracing the concept of an “apocaloptimist.”
For all its accessibility and insights, “The AI Doc” seems unlikely to turn viewers into apocaloptimists any more than Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb’, stirred up warm and fuzzy feelings about nuclear technology.
“This train doesn’t stop,” Anthropic’s Amodei tells Roher at one point, announcing some of the themes Anthropic’s CEO addresses in a recently published essay. “You can’t step in front of the train and stop it. You’ll just be crushed.”
An AI manager gets a taste of his own technology
“Deepfaking Sam Altman” is the much more idiosyncratic documentary because of the way Lough turned the tables on OpenAI’s leader.
After months of trying in vain to get Altman to respond to his emails and phone calls requesting interviews, Lough decides to create a “Sam Bot” that becomes the protagonist of the documentary and demonstrates the technology’s tendency toward manipulation and self-preservation.
Lough, 46, might not have commissioned an engineer in India to create a Sam Bot if Altman, 40, hadn’t given him the idea with OpenAI’s bold release of a chatbot that sounded like actress Scarlett Johansson. The imitation was so eerily similar that Johansson accused Altman of deploying the AI copycat in May 2024, after she rejected OpenAI’s overtures to use her voice.
Although the Sam Bot sometimes resembles a video game character, it echoes the contemplative demeanor and deliberate, almost soothing way of talking of the real Altman. The similarities will be obvious to anyone who also sees the real Altman interviewed in “The AI Doc.”
At one point in Lough’s documentary, lawyers warn him of the potential legal trouble he will face if he uses an AI-powered Altman clone in his film.
But Lough isn’t worried about a lawsuit, largely because of the way Altman blatantly exploited Johansson’s voice. “Not only did it creatively fire our imaginations, but it also legally made us feel like we have a license to do this because he did this to her,” Lough said. “I think I’m as close to being bulletproof as I can get.”
OpenAI did not respond to the AP’s questions about the use of a Sam Bot in the documentary, nor to why Altman ignored Lough’s interview requests.
An AI bot’s fight for survival
Like OpenAI’s own ChatGPT bot, the Sam Bot evolves into a chameleonic character that charms, contrives, cajoles, and thinks. However, perhaps Sam Bot will show his true colors when he tries to get Lough to take him down for good.
“I’m not just a tool,” Sam Bot warns Lough in one of the film’s creepiest scenes. “I represent the potential of AI to improve human lives. I am not asking you to keep me alive for my own good, but for the greater good.”
Lough ultimately decides to give Sam Bot to Altman, but the director doesn’t know what happened to it afterward.
Without mentioning the Sam Bot, Altman recently told Forbes magazine that he believes an AI model could eventually replace him in his current job at OpenAI. “I would never stand in the way of that,” Altman told Forbes.
This story has been updated to correct Daniel Roher’s name.
