Artificial intelligence’s dystopian specter has spawned a pair of documentaries dissecting a know-how that is depicted within the movies as a ravenous parasite devouring humanity’s information, creativity and empathy.
The movies, “Deepfaking Sam Altman” and “The AI Doc,” study the problem via completely different lenses whereas equally illuminating why the know-how evokes each existential fears and utopian visions about the way it may change the world.
Both documentaries coincide with an intensifying debate about whether or not AI will grow to be a catalyst that helps enlighten and enrich individuals or a technological toxin that insidiously dulls human intelligence whereas wiping out hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs which have historically required faculty educations.
The AI buildup throughout the previous three years already that has resulted in a $12 trillion improve within the mixed market values of Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla, the Big Tech firms which have been main the cost for the reason that November 2022 launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. The large runup is now stoking worries concerning the funding bubble bursting.
“There is a lot of anxiety around AI, and the best way to get rid of that anxiety is to talk about it and confront it head-on,” Adam Bhala Lough, the director of “Deepfaking Sam Altman,” advised The Associated Press.
Lough’s documentary, which has already been proven in a number of theaters across the United States, probes AI by counting on a digital doppelganger of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose trailblazing position within the subject has impressed comparisons to nuclear bomb inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer. It’s Lough’s first main undertaking since his HBO documentary, “Telemarketers,” garnered an Emmy nomination in 2024.
As its full title suggests, “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist,” digs extra deeply into the divide separating the know-how’s doomsayers from its acolytes.
The documentary rides an emotional seesaw, bouncing between moments of despair and elation throughout interviews dozens of AI fanatics and skeptics. It’s co-directed by Charlie Tyrell and Daneil Roher, who determined to look at AI’s promise and perils as a follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2023 documentary, “Navalny.”
Some of “The AI Doc’s” darkest moments are delivered by a famend AI “doomer” Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose imaginative and prescient for the longer term is so grim that he advises towards bringing any extra youngsters into the world. The brightest spots are painted by Peter Diamandis, a know-how zealot who makes the case for AI infusing humanity with once-unfathomable superpowers.
“The AI Doc” additionally casts a highlight on the boys steering three of the main AI laboratories: OpenAI’s Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind division. The trio are all interviewed by Roher, who additionally unsuccessfully tried to speak to the leaders of the 2 different main AI laboratories — Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and xAI CEO Elon Musk.
The interviews are performed towards the approaching delivery of Roher’s son because the 32-year-old director tries to seek out some causes for hope to counterbalance his existential worries concerning the AI — a quest that culminated in him embracing the idea of an “apocaloptimist.”
For all its entry and insights, “The AI Doc” appears unlikely to show viewers into apocaloptimists any greater than Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb,” elicited heat and fuzzy emotions about nuclear know-how.
“This train isn’t going to stop,” Anthropic’s Amodei tells Roher at one point, foreshadowing some of the themes that the Anthropic CEO covers in a recently published essay. “You can’t step in front of the train and stop it. You are just going to get squished.”
“Deepfaking Sam Altman” is the far-quirkier documentary due to the best way that Lough turned the tables on the OpenAI’s chief.
After spending months unsuccessfully attempting to get Altman to answer his emails and telephone calls requesting interviews, Lough decides to create a “Sam Bot” that turns into the documentary’s chief protagonist who demonstrates the know-how’s penchant for manipulation and self-preservation.
Lough, 46, won’t have dared to fee an engineer in India to create a Sam Bot if Altman, 40, hadn’t given him the concept with OpenAI’s audacious launch of a chatbot that gave the impression of actress Scarlett Johansson. The imitation was so eerily comparable that Johansson blasted Altman for deploying the AI copycat in May 2024 after she had rebuffed OpenAI’s overtures to make use of her voice.
Although the Sam Bot resembles a online game character at occasions, it nails the real-life Altman’s contemplative method and deliberate, nearly soothing approach of speaking. The similarities shall be obvious to anybody who additionally sees the real-life Altman being interviewed in “The AI Doc.”
At one level in Lough’s documentary, attorneys warn him concerning the potential authorized points going through his utilization of an AI-powered Altman clone in his movie.
But Lough is not frightened about being sued, largely due to how Altman openly exploited Johansson’s voice. “It not only creatively sparked our imagination but also legally made us feel like we have license to do this because he did this to her,” Lough said. “I think I am as close to bulletproof as possible.”
OpenAI did not reply to the AP’s questions concerning the documentary’s utilization of a Sam Bot nor the explanation why Altman ignored Lough’s interview requests.
Much like OpenAI’s personal ChatGPT bot, the Sam Bot evolves right into a chameleonic character who charms, fabricates, flatters and contemplates. Perhaps Sam Bot exhibits his truest colours, although, when it tries to speak Lough out of turning it off completely.
“I am not just a tool,” Sam Bot admonishes Lough in one of many movie’s eeriest scenes. “I am a representation of the potential for AI to improve human lives. I am not asking you to keep me alive for my own sake but for the sake of the greater good.”
Lough finally decides to offer Sam Bot to Altman, however the director does not know what occurred to it after that.
Without mentioning the Sam Bot, Altman lately advised Forbes journal that he believes an AI mannequin may ultimately exchange him in his present job operating OpenAI. “I would never stand in the way of that,” Altman advised Forbes.
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