The AI Economy Is “Propped Up by a Ponzi Scheme,” Says Director of ‘The AI Doc’ (original) (raw)

“Fuck them. Utah just became 35% culturally less relevant, and good riddance to them. They don’t deserve it. Moving on, over and next.” Those were among the first words out of director Daniel Roher’s mouth as he sat down with his codirector, Charlie Tyrell, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to discuss their film The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Roher, who won an Oscar for best documentary feature for 2022’s Navalny, is opinionated—not just about the festival moving from Park City to Boulder, but on a whole host of topics. But he views himself as an “apocaloptimist”—that’s “apocalypse” plus “optimist”—when it comes to artificial intelligence, meaning he doesn’t think it will destroy the world. As optimists go, he could be pretty biting as we chatted in a private room at Old Town Cellars on Park City’s Main Street.

Focus Features is releasing The AI Doc in theaters on March 27. If you’re even slightly interested in what’s going on with AI, it’s required viewing: The film touches on all aspects of the technology, from how it’s currently being used to how it will be used in the near future, when we potentially reach the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is a theoretical form of AI that supposedly would be able to perform complex tasks without each step being prompted by a human user—the point at which machines become autonomous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

Heady as this all sounds, the film doesn’t feel like homework. It’s informative, it’s fast-paced, and it has a gripping central character in Roher. The AI Doc is framed around his growing concern that AI will create an uninhabitable future for his unborn son. He sets out to educate himself and assuage (at least some of) his fears.

Roher interviews nearly all the major players in the AI space: Sam Altman of OpenAI; the Amodei siblings of Anthropic; Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (Google’s AI arm); theorists and reporters covering the subject. Notably absent are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. “Have you seen that guy speak? He’s like a lizard man,” Roher says regarding Zuckerberg. “Musk said yes initially, but it was right when he was doing all the stuff with Trump, and we just got ghosted after a while,” adds Tyrell. The directors tried multiple avenues to get to Zuckerberg, but it was always a no. “He’s like an alien in a human being suit,” Roher says. “So of course they don’t want him to talk.”

Altman, arguably AI’s greatest mascot, is prominently featured in the documentary. At the end of his interview with Roher, he wishes the filmmaker mazel tov on the birth of his son, showing the audience that he can actually connect with others on a human level. But Roher wasn’t buying it. “That guy doesn’t know what genuine means,” he says. “Every single thing he says and does is calculated. He is a machine. He’s like AI, and it’s in the service of growth, growth, growth. You can be disingenuous and media savvy.”

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Co-director Daniel Roher (along with Charlie Tyrell) during the production of _The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist._Courtesy of Focus Features.

So Roher isn’t a fan of Altman. He’s more forgiving of Hassabis at Google: “If I could have a magic wand and have him be in charge, he seems like a more regulated person.”

How, exactly, is Roher an apocaloptimist? “We are preaching a worldview,” he says, “in a world that’s asking you to either see this as the apocalypse or embrace it with this unbridled optimism.” He and his film are taking a stance that rests between those two poles. “It’s both at the same time. We have to try and embrace a middle ground so this technology doesn’t consume us, so we can stay in the driver’s seat,” says Roher—meaning, it’s up to all of us to chart the course.

“You have to speak up,” says Tyrell. “Things like AI should disclose themselves. If your doctor’s office is using an AI bot, you have to say, I don’t like that.” The driving message behind the film is that resistance starts with the people. That position is shared by The AI Doc producer Daniel Kwan, who won an Oscar for directing Everything Everywhere All at Once and has been at the forefront of discussions about AI in the entertainment industry.

“The number of data centers that have been blocked by communities that do not want these massive corporations to use their backyards as their playground, that has been huge,” says Kwan. When OpenAI brokered a deal with the Department of War (formerly known as the Department of Defense) after Anthropic severed ties with the Pentagon, millions of users reportedly committed to stop using OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. Kwan points to this as a good sign of things to come. “Consumers were able to vote with their dollar,” he says. “Sam Altman had to publicly scramble and undo the damage he had done. That shows me we have a lot more power than we think.”

Roher and Tyrell both use AI in their everyday lives and openly admit to it being a helpful tool. They also agree that this technology can make daily tasks easier for the average consumer. But at the end of our conversation, we get into the economics of AI and how Wall Street is propping up the industry through huge evaluations of these companies—and Roher gets going yet again.

“This is all smoke and mirrors. The entire economy of AI is being propped up by a Ponzi scheme. The hype of this technology is unlike any hype we’ve seen,” he says. “I feel like I could announce in a press release that Academy Award winner Daniel Roher is starting an AI film company, and I could sell it the next day for $20 million. It’s fucking crazy.” What about Eline Van der Velden, the creator of AI “actor” Tilly Norwood? “You think she’s in this for the art?” he quips. (Van der Velden has said that Norwood is a form of art.) “These people are prospectors, and they are going up to the Yukon because it’s the gold rush.” How optimistic is that?