The AI Doc Explores How We Can Survive an Uncertain AI Future

How to Survive AI

After a year when chatbots have infiltrated virtually every aspect of our social consciousness, it wasn’t a surprise to see that AI was a big theme in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival programming. On top of over a dozen industry panels and artist talks addressing uses of AI in storytelling, the festival — the last to be held in Park City, its historic home — also included not one, but two feature documentaries directly grappling with today’s AI d…

‘The AI Doc’ Asks: What Kind of World Are We Building for Our Kids?

In 2023, around the same time that director Daniel Roher began working on a film about AI and the future of humanity, he and his wife Caroline found out that they were having a baby. Making a 90-minute film about a “huge, important, gargantuan” like AI had felt “almost impossible,” says Roher. But the birth of his family’s first child provided a way to ground the film. “People can relate to babies. People love babies!” Roher said on a Sundance F…

The AI Doc explores how we can survive an uncertain AI future

Anxiety, more so than technological rigor, sits at the heart of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Director Daniel Roher is anxious about the future he's bringing a child into — will it be an AI-driven utopia? Or does it spell certain doom, something explored in countless sci-fi stories. To figure it all out, he interviewed some of the most well known AI proponents and critics, including The Empire of AI author Karen Hao, AI research…

A New AI Documentary Puts CEOs in the Hot Seat—but Goes Too Easy on Them

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” seeks the middle ground on a polarizing technology—and ends up letting tech execs like Sam Altman off the hook.

Review: AI is crucial for us to understand. So why does 'The AI Doc' feel made by a machine?

Daniel Roher, the documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar for "Navalny," takes on the weightiest subject of our day, sacrificing clarity for a crazy quilt of ideas.

Review: THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST

by Rob DiCristino The end is extremely f*cking nigh.