The AI:Doc Should Be Required Viewing in Schools

Students need to understand how those closest to AI are actually talking about it

Schools should screen the new AI Doc - teachers, students, and parents should all watch this film. Preferably together. The reason is not because the documentary is especially illuminating on education. It isn’t. The current controversial and pressing questions about AI and schools are not the focus. This movie is not about AI and writing or cognitive offloading.

The reason the film should be viewed is to provide common vocabulary for us to have conversations about a technology predicted to be the most transformative in history. More importantly, it serves as an excellent primer for viewers unfamiliar with the existential debates surrounding AI acceleration and gives them exposure to both the apocalyptic and messianic positions those closest to the technology hold. Citizens, especially students, cannot challenge positions they don't know exist.

I recently saw The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist with a colleague. The documentary arrives at a critical juncture. I recommend the documentary to everyone because it details the range of extreme positions taken by AI’s creators, risk assessors, and others in the field who are setting the framework for the debates.

What the Film Does

The basic conceit of the film is that co-director Daniel Roher¹, an artist and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who serves as a stand-in for the audience, and his wife Caroline (also a filmmaker), are expecting their first child. Both are smart and likable - but Daniel's anxiety grows the more and more he learns about AI. He decides to investigate and make a documentary.

Some of the most recognizable names in tech agreed to sit and be interviewed in his makeshift studio, including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei, the CEO of OpenAI, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, and CEO of Anthropic, respectively. The reaction shots of Daniel as he listens to one extraordinary claim after another are priceless - first the doomers predicting catastrophic outcomes due to unregulated AI development followed by a parade of AI optimists who tell Daniel this is absolutely the best time ever to be born. The doomers talk about AI leading to the collapse of humanity (or, as Eliezer Yudkowsky politely interjects, “abrupt extermination”) while the optimists describe a utopia where no one has to work, cancer is cured, and AI ushers in a world of abundance such as we’ve never seen.

For viewers who are hearing tech folks speak this way for the first time, Daniel is an everyman who articulates what the audience is thinking. Why are we doing this if these horrific outcomes are possible? How much and who am I supposed to believe about any of this? He falls into despair. Mid-film, there is an amusing and creative discussion with his wife via a cartoon flip-page notebook in which she begs him to become more hopeful as she carries their first child to term.

To watch the film is to accept the premise that AI is going to be a very, very, big deal.

But the hyperbolic venting of all these people is the point. In the back half of the movie, Roher comes to the quite reasonable conclusion that most of the issues associated with these fantastical prognostications are coming from the founders and developers themselves.

Altman comes off the strangest here in my opinion, partially due to the incredibly long pauses and cryptic answers he gives to some of the most direct questions. When asked if there are protocols in place for what happens if one of his models goes rogue and starts to do tremendous damage he says yes, but fails to elaborate on what they are. The fact that he is more than aware and clearly planning for the possibility is disturbing enough.

Why It Matters for Schools

Students are understandably tired of only hearing about AI in the context of cheating. Teachers are tired of harping on it. Education will be dealing with the fallout of AI for years, but the conversation is going to expand and only get more divisive and confusing as the technology continues to improve. I’ve argued previously that schools need to engage the larger issues about AI and The AI:Doc offers precisely that entry point. I can easily envision assemblies, advisory discussions, and guest speakers brought in to elaborate and answer questions about issues which, while they are going to affect everyone, will have a disproportionate impact on students enrolled right now. The purpose is not to accept the views of the film’s participants as gospel but to serve as a jumping-off point: for additional readings, other interviews, and opportunities to hear missing pieces and critical commentary.

Students will be rattled by the film. Public viewings will spur useful conversations that rise above the simple context of cheating and cognitive offloading that currently swamps the debate about AI and education. If this documentary is any indication, those issues are going to quickly become supplanted by much larger ones and I think everyone, but especially the younger generation, should gain access to the different sides of the debates.

These are the actual conversations a very small number of people are having when it comes to AI. What The AI Doc does is put forward a series of arguments and positions in front of the audience who may not be inclined to realize exactly how much and why Silicon Valley is focused on AI to the exclusion of almost everything else. There are statements made in the film that give the sense that the people who are closest to AI development lie awake at night contemplating the end of humanity. Others insist we're standing at the threshold of unprecedented human flourishing. Those are radically different perspectives.

There is an amusing sequence as Roher does a series of Google searches investigating how to survive off the grid if things go kaput, basically modeling how and why some people are turning into “preppers” for the world’s collapse.

The primary argument of the documentary is what might happen if we end up getting AI wrong, even if it approaches only a fraction of what’s being predicted, and how the general public should respond. The issues are significant enough that politicians, policy makers, educators, and anyone with an interest in the future for their children, need to be aware of what the people building these models think is at stake.

Yes, the Middle Position is Missing

Critics of the film will rightly point out that the missing middle conversation is left out. Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, both well-known skeptics of imminent AGI, are not featured (Emily Bender gets a single quote).² There is no exploration of “AI as Normal Technology.” Exponential AI scaling is taken as a given and the assumed timelines for AGI by most of the speakers are on the aggressive end of the spectrum. But I actually think that’s a benefit. It will be instructive to look back in 5 years to see whether this film was prescient or overblown.

One participant has invoked similarities to The Day After and I would also liken it to An Inconvenient Truth. The AI:Doc is a wake-up call. The people with the most direct knowledge of where AI is headed are genuinely alarmed, and quite a few are begging for government regulation - that includes the ones building it, like Amodei.

The sooner more people learn about these predictions, investigate these claims, and learn for themselves what’s likely to be true and what isn’t, the better. If screening the AI:Doc in schools has that effect, it can’t come soon enough.

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1. The film is co-directed by Charlie Tyrell.

2. Bender co-authored “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots“ (2021), which argued that large language models produce text by pattern-matching, not understanding.