There have been a number of built-in computerized assistants since the wide-spread adoption of the personal computer. In my day, it was Clippy who popped up to offer guidance on the task you were seeking to complete. Then came Siri and Alexa for iOS users and at-home entertainment and, now, companies are seeking to integrate artificial intelligence-driven add-ons into everything from your customer service experience on web and phone to your toaster and oven. And this doesn’t even get into the sticky wicket of integration into governmental tasks. Upon recognizing the advent of growing prominence and possessed by growing concerns for the future, filmmaker Daniel Roher (Tuner; Navalny) and co-director Charlie Tyrell (My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes) investigate whether AI is something to be feared and fought against, something to be welcomed with open arms, or a third, less intense, or perceptible thing. Having had a spin on the festival circuit and a brief theatrical release, Roher and Tyrell’s The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist comes available on home video, asking big questions of some of the world’s leading experts in AI in a quest to determine whether or not folks should stop worrying and learn to love AI.
Production still from directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST, a Focus Features release. Photo courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
With the rapid shift from supportive artificial intelligence (AI) assistants to generative programs, Roher began to wonder what it all means in relationship to the average human, given his own propensity for artistry. Already feeling anxious, things shift further as Roher and wife/filmmaker Caroline Lindy (Your Monster) learn that they have a baby on the way and the negative perspective of AI starts to weight ever further. Through a series of sit-down interviews juxtaposed with recorded presentations, news broadcast, and more, The AI Doc is as much an opportunity for Roher to answer the questions that loom in the background of his mind as a citizen of Earth as it is to determine what kind of world his generation is about to leave for the next.
The following home release review is based on a Blu-ray retail copy provided by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment via Allied Vaughn Entertainment.
There’re a few things that need to be addressed before delving into the film proper. While the individuals within the film struggle a bit to define what AI is, it’s, essentially, the perception of innate intelligence within computation systems through the processing of data. After you enter a question or prompt to Claude, ChatGPT, or any other generative AI, it generates an answer based on the available information within its dataset. It’s “Ask Jeeves” on steroids, except where one crawls the internet for sites to direct you toward, the AI is pulling from all the data it’s been fed (typically by crawling the internet and learning, or scraping, from it without attribution of any kind to the authors/creators) to produce an answer relative to the framework of the question or prompt. From generative AI, we move toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is where AI is smarter than humans and doesn’t require human intervention to learn or make choices. In every case, and it’s something that both the supporters and decriers of AI keep leaving out, it’s all a regurgitation machine. It takes everything it gleans from the datasets to make something, but that’s not the same as human creation or divine inspiration, it’s placing a round slot in a round hole and then getting applauded for it when it does as prompted. While this might seem like a strange perspective, one of the examples that Roher puts up for audiences is a news report covering how ChatGPT-4 passed the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), but what the reports (amid all the jokes) don’t seem to acknowledge is that this isn’t so much an astounding shift for a Large Language Model (LLM), but the outcome of an advantage machine that can pull from a dataset that incorporates all known legal reference material. If you possessed the ability to retain all of that information, you’d be able to pass the bar, too. This isn’t some marvel of technology; it’s a tool that doesn’t cross the barrier from *having* information into *understanding* information. For example, as of this writing, a Google search for the lyrics to “Thriller” by Michael Jackson is actually pulling the lyrics to “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. At the very least, it’s not a total hallucination/fabrication.
Production still from directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST, a Focus Features release. Photo courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The film itself is best described as split into five parts: a prologue, a chat with the dissenters, a chat with the supporters, a chat with the AI CEOs, and an epilogue. This structure allows the audience to get to know Roher, who drives the entire narrative, as both primary subject (we are examining AI through his lens) and active presence in each interview before diving into the voices in vocal opposition or support of AI. Throughout each, the interviews are cut and intermixed with the aforementioned news reports and presentation footage, which do several things at once. The footage not only demonstrates the sheer volume of coverage and questions the general public has, it frequently provides evidence of why the people Roher and Tyrell place before us are people we should be listening to. Between the news reports and general knowledge, audiences are most likely already familiar with Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Elon Musk (xAI), but others may not be as versed with Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google), or Dario Amodei (Anthropic), who recently got into a tiff with the current White House Administration. They may not versed at all with the people who see AI as an existential crisis or a turning point for a new era of humanity. Impressively, like Roher states for themselves, the end of each section brings about a new perspective and viewpoint on AI, which is particularly interesting even for someone who may be more read on the topic than others. But for all of the things it does well in challenging and prodding both sides of the argument regarding AI, it never really gets into aspects that are critical, such as the devouring of environmental resources (though this is touched on outside of the conversation with Altman), the consumption of your private information for their profit, or the very fact that anything created with AI, especially generative AI, is done so by stealing from others. In a topic as complex as this, to see these last two aspects skipped over frustrates because these are the things that the corporations need to be pushed on.
A fascinating off-set to all the technobabble through the documentary is the frequent use of more handmade materials or the sense of something being handmade. In the prologue, Roher is shown to always carry around a notebook to draw in and that notebook (or one like it) makes an appearance throughout. Amusingly, the most visually interesting moments come from the portions of conversations between Roher and Lindy in which two notebooks appear, one with his likeness and one with her’s, each page cut into three distinct strips which is then animated into a conversation. Entirely simple, it’s incredibly dynamic and distinctly human, using art to depict a conversation between spouses who exist as artists in their own right. Compared to the artistic rendering of AI as an all-grey Rubik’s Cube-like block with electric blue eyes and mouth, the use of the notebooks seems antiquated, yet far more emotional and real. It taps into something creative and intuitive versus something memorized and repeated. Roher and Tyrell even incorporate other artistic motifs, as if to provide an argument or off-set for the larger technological ideas being discussed. Intentionally or not, these affectations create a sense within The AI Doc of opposition between human creativity and technological reproduction that present a sensation of two sides of coin, even if the information provided by the subjects doesn’t warrant such a description.
Co-director Daniel Roher (along with Charlie Tyrell) during the production of THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST, a Focus Features release. Photo courtesy of Focus Features © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
What’s particularly frustrating about the home edition is the absence of supplemental materials. Not just because it made a big splash at Sundance 2026 or was included in the SXSW 2026 slate, but because there’s a great deal of materials that intentionally appear homemade included in the film that deserve exploring. The integration of Roher’s art, the model mountain, using a text font for titles that looks hand-written, the artistic method of depicting conversation between Roher and Caroline Lindy — each of these things signify what humanity can do that AI trained on data can only replicate. It’s a specific choice and one that is worth learning more about.
Without question, AI is transforming our world. Data was already the frontier that businesses were growing on through cookies, caches, and other tracking measures to know what you are buying and when, but the shift into AI is a different beast entirely. Companies formed from whole cloth by stealing information (copyrighted and not) and have said that they must be allowed to do this if they are going to survive. They know that the data they gather holds value, but they refuse to pay those whose information they’ve stolen and it’s being upheld. What does it say when the individual creator is less important than the corporate-designed AI merely because the companies believe that it’s a sacrifice we should make to ensure an AGI is born that can solve problems across industries? Then there’s the environmental cost. A data center in Georgia used 30 million gallons of water (without paying for any of it, either), while another seeks to be built on conservation land in Georgia and is seeking to forcibly remove citizens from their own land. This doesn’t even touch the rare earth minerals, legal ramifications, or philosophical problems that the forced release of AI onto the general public causes. Though you might hear from some that it’s all our fault, not theirs.
This is what happens when the Humanities are pushed aside or left out of science studies, folks. You want to create AI. Fine. Give us one that’s ethical sourced, environmentally friendly, and designed to ensure that accuracy is paramount over profit. Even as Roher declares himself an apocaloptimist who encourages individual action to affect change, the government is pointing at businesses to self-govern, and businesses are already demonstrating that their interest is growth over ethics, leaving one concluding the documentary to be left less comforted than he.
No bonus features included with this home release.
Available on VOD and digital April 14th, 2026.
Available on Blu-ray May 19th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official Focus Features The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Video, Reviews, streaming
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