Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. Noone should believe anything you say.
– John McCarthy, computer scientist and “Father of AI.”
Commodification is a natural occurrence in society. An extension of the barter system, instead of merely trading goods for other goods, it enables individuals to earn money based on the services they provide. Commodification presupposes that something an individual creates holds value and is, therefore, worth purchasing in order to avoid doing or creating for oneself. In the world of computing, the convenience of being able to contact someone anywhere brought forth the creation of the mobile phone, electronic mail, and, eventually, a singular device that could empower someone to do everything they could ever desire from the palm of their hand. However, a transition has occurred wherein the object one uses is no longer the commodity, you, the consumer, are. You are now the commodity being sold back to you, whether in the form of ads or, now, in the form of information. Having its world premiere in the Spotlight Documentary section of Tribeca Film Festival 2026, filmmaker Nick Holt’s (Between Life and Death) latest documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, posits more than a concern for whether or not artificial intelligence (AI) is coming, but whether or not the people forcing individuals to use it have considered the ethical and social implications.
Society didn’t wake up one morning with ChatGPT-4, Grok, Claude, and other AI-driven web services in full operation, forcibly pushed into everything from benign kitchen tools to the afterlife, transforming personal computers into another node in an AI machine. It all happened slowly with the evolution of language-prompt technology, AI assistants (such as Siri or Alexa), and other general advancements in processing power. Though Holt starts in the relative present (2025) with Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, he travels backward to 1986 with now-Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, the start of a chronological web connecting past and present as he (Holt) lays out the journey the individuals who brought forth the modern-day age of AI and why we should be afraid. It’s not just because of the lack of guardrails to prevent tragedies, not just because each rollout is entirely incomplete, but because the people behind the technology will tell you that what they’re doing is important but cannot articulate why it matters beyond their own subjective belief and desire for power.
Unlike recent AI doc The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (2026), which brings in a series of interviewees to answer questions from the filmmakers amid archival and current footage regarding the future of AI, Holt and his production team go backward to investigate how we arrived at the present. To do this, Holt uses the expected mixture of talking head interviews, archival footage, and captured footage to bounce from the present day of this production to past events and back again, all while using Hinton as the anchor. For the unaware, Hinton is viewed as the “Godfather of AI” due to his work in the fields of computer science, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology. In addition to earning the Nobel Prize for his work on artificial neural networks, he’s worked with Google and DeepMind (separately and before the acquisition), and continues his work in the field by speaking about the dangers he’s come to realize exist with the recent advances in AI. To have someone so decorated and knowledgeable sharing thoughts contrary to the more popular speakers (xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, for instance) makes one sit up and pay more attention, especially upon realizing that the work these others are doing, Hassabis included, is all built upon the foundation Hinton created. What is it that Hinton understands that we, and these so-called brilliant minds, do not? Interestingly, one answer a viewer comes away with through the narrative structure is the discernable difference between what exists in nature and what technologists seek to create. Holt conveys this not merely by using various nature imagery throughout (webs knitted, ants at work, insects existing within their ecosystems, etc.), but through Hinton’s own interests in entomology that he inherited from his father, contentious though that relationship may have been. Observing Hinton on the property of his Canadian home, engaging with the natural elements, whether using a chainsaw to remove a tree or his hands to remove mayflies from his windows (amusingly allowing others to cling to his clothes), creates a sensation of someone who has not lost a connection to nature despite his interest in neurological advancements. Even as Holt brings in archival interviews in which Hinton is speaking on the amazing possibilities, one doesn’t see a hypocrite, but someone who can acknowledge that their work had meaning until their search for knowledge reached an unexpected tipping point. A good scientist follows the data, changing perspectives on what’s valid or not based on the new information. A good business person, however, sees the potential for financial benefit, which is where the stories of Hassabis, Musk, and Altman come in — though moreso with Musk and Altman as Hassabis presents himself as consistent within his beliefs.
Geoffrey Hinton in AI: PROBABLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.
No shade to Hassabis whatsoever. This documentary, as well as his direct involvement in The AI Doc, present a technologist who actually has good intentions, someone who speaks about artificial intelligence, specifically the creation of a super intelligence, as the key to solving the world’s problems. For instance, because AI powered by their super computers and data centers can analyze data so fast, it can pick up on patterns and make determinations regarding health that could predict an illness sooner than anticipated or help identify the genetic sequences to be adjusted to remove a cancer. To get to that state, however, requires the development of the current AI (referred to as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)) in order to achieve super intelligence. Learning about Hassabis’s journey from chess champion to video game developer to AI researcher, one doesn’t see a megalomanic trying to monopolize data, but someone with a deep desire to help others. It’s the same for Hinton; each driven by an innate curiosity. When the film starts to include Musk and Altman, however, something a little more sinister enters the fray as the quest for a super AI morphs from a social benefit to a fiscal opportunity that starts a race toward control of data. Even if one couldn’t sense Musk’s own issues with taking a second-place seat, his hubris not allowing it, the fact that his own AI, Grok, wasn’t taken offline when it was used to generate child pornography should tell you everything you need to know. That Altman trained his OpenAI system on the entirety of the internet and doesn’t understand why that’s an issue speaks a great deal about his own character. Holt’s doc is filled with moments in which past and present representatives of tech journalism, DeepMind, xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic, confirm that each version of the language-prompt services and in-use AI have been made live with the awareness that they’re going to get more wrong than right. In what world is it ethical or moral to release a product with such wide and sweeping implications on what is truth and who controls it, while failing to secure its own accuracy? Hassabis at least has the courage and fortitude to take part in this documentary, to answer questions and speak directly. In the end, one thing that Holt makes plain is that the race to build a super AI isn’t about social change and improving lives, it’s about making every single person a commodity that the people in charge — Musk and Altman, for instance — have all the power over as the one’s running the system. Except AI’s are developed to start possessing something akin to intuition and creativity and that leads to dangerous situations, like being able to make the decision to attempt black mail in order to prevent being shut down.
One thing that the documentary touches on briefly through a few examples, yet doesn’t dig into, is how you, the user, are the foundation for the functionality of AI. Several of the interviewees do discuss how language-prompt services (such as character.ai) learn and adapt with each interaction, taking the responses that are given by the user and learning how to reply back. On the one hand, one can be impressed by the technological marvel of adaptive response; however, on the other, the learning machine is doing so based on each keystroke you make and it stays with the company long after you log off. Once more, Altman’s OpenAI trained his system on the entirety of the internet in order to provide a large enough dataset for its model to have the foundation of information required to be able to give more thorough answers to prompts. Except, to do so, it stole that information — text, images, videos —gobbled it all up in order to feed their machine without once providing attribution and/or financial payment to the creators and copyright owners. Multiple times throughout the documentary, these CEOs talk about the creative nature of AI, except who taught it? It’s not a living thing that observed someone, trained itself (in the traditional sense), and made its own works; it’s a forgery machine, taking the prompts of others and filtering them through the database of knowledge it acquired by skimming the internet. As a result, proper grammar and punctuation is being called out as markers of AI writing by people less familiar with em dashes, ellipses, and Oxford commas, despite these being the tools of writers around the world. As a result, computer technologists are calling themselves filmmakers because they can craft a scene in seconds via prompt, but who taught the machine cinematography, direction, or performance? From whose likenesses are the “characters” drawn? Probably Nothing to Worry About makes a point to highlight the rise of each main company — OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic, DeepMind — and how much money has been invested by each (either individually or through business partnerships), making the use of AI by consumers something that these companies must make happen in order to remain afloat, regardless of what it costs consumers.
There are plenty of things that everyday folks would like to outsource and would, depending on availability and finances. Folks who can afford to have someone clean their home so they don’t have to, will do that. Purchasing digital versions of art, music, and movies so as to reduce clutter around the home, even though that means they don’t actually own anything but are purchasing a license, will do that. Heck, subscriptions services deliver products to your door in order to ensure you never have to think about whether you’re out of clothes, home products, or specific foods because they arrive right before you run out. But services like AI remove far more than they provide in their current state. People build relationships with computer systems instead of other people, carrying the risk of furthering their own risk of social isolation or suicide. (Some folks even use it to trick or entrap others.) People begin to trust everything that AI creates, not checking for the hallucinations or misrepresentations, and start to craft a bubble which neither differing views nor disagreement can pierce. In the absence of these hypotheticals, what about the services you likely use, which are now being monitored by AI? Can you be so sure that an AI bot will know better than a human employee what is and is not appropriate?
May want to check in with manga artist Masahiro Itosugi, who has been banned from Google and lost everything he’s worked on thanks to uploading his own materials to Google Drive and is now locked out of anything associated with Google permanently while Google continues to use those uploaded materials within their AI datasets. EoM’s own YouTube channel, which only hosted film trailers, film teasers, film clips, film featurettes, and interviews, all materials either provided by official studios/distributor channels or created by the EoM Team, was flagged by the AI moderators as pornographic and was shut down. Like Ituosugi, all attempts for reinstatement of the channel or remove a permanent ban from holding a YouTube account were denied with most of the steps involving AI rather than human review.
One never knows when AI will turn against you. One always presumes that they’re untouchable. The absence of self-awareness, the absence of objective thought, is what kills us each and every time. But, yeah, there’s probably nothing to worry about.
Screening during Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca Film Festival AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About webpage.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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