How do you make a movie about AI that’s not going to be out of date within 24 hours? That was the question that Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, co-directors for the blistering new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, had to grapple with over the course of the three years that they worked on the film. The film was conceived when Roher learned that he and his wife, fellow filmmaker Caroline Lindy, were expecting their first child, and he — well — had a crash-out over whether now was a good time to raise a kid. His fears especially circled around AI, a technology that even three years ago was getting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment from big tech companies. Today, the spending on its development can be measured in trillions. As such, what was expected to be a one-year production turned into three as investments rose and the technology made more and more advancements.
“One of the biggest challenges making the film is, how do we find the evergreen version of the story that's going to maintain relevance beyond the news cycle of AI?” Charlie Tyrell tells Inverse. “It is so rapidly evolving. And we, I think, found a way to do that with this film.”
