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.

It’s not easy to get an interview with Sam Altman—just ask Adam Bhala Lough, the filmmaker behind the recent documentary Deepfaking Sam Altman.

Lough originally planned a feature exploring the potential and perils of AI that would center on a conversation with the OpenAI CEO. But, after having his inquiries ignored for months, he opted instead to commission a chatbot that mimicked Altman’s speech patterns and approximated his facial expressions by way of a digital avatar.

The real Altman did sit down, however, for the new feature The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which hits theaters March 27. So did Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, a cofounder and CEO of Google ...