Documentary celebrating the work of the Highlander Folk School, a progressive adult education center founded in 1932 in the mountain community of Monteagle, Tennessee. People of the Cumberland demonstrates how education and the labor movement can transform an impoverished mining region and bring hope to its people. Made by activist filmmakers, the movie ends with…
The post PEOPLE OF THE CUMBERLAND appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
Kenny Aranoff sits down with host Drew Dempsey to talk about the behind the scenes story of his 17 years drumming for John Mellencamp.
The post Drumming for John Mellencamp appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
Documentary celebrating the work of the Highlander Folk School, a progressive adult education center founded in 1932 in the mountain community of Monteagle, Tennessee. People of the Cumberland demonstrates how education and the labor movement can transform an impoverished mining region and bring hope to its people. Made by activist filmmakers, the movie ends with…
The post PEOPLE OF THE CUMBERLAND appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
Kenny Aranoff sits down with host Drew Dempsey to talk about the behind the scenes story of his 17 years drumming for John Mellencamp.
The post Drumming for John Mellencamp appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
TOWARD THE END of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, now out in theaters, codirector and chief interviewer Daniel Roher is talking to one of his guests when he drops the word “apocaloptimist.” A portmanteau of “apocalyptic” and “optimist,” the term handily sums up the schizophrenic nature of the documentary, veering as it does between terror and hope.
But the documentary is only schizoid because our age is schizoid: We exist on the knife’s edge of great change, a future of infinite promise and infinite peril beckoning in the middle distance.1 Will self-replicating machine intelligence offer us the tools to solve all of the world’s problems, ushering in an age of post-scarcity human excellence in which mankind focuses not on farming or food delivery or home construction but crafting perfect sonnets and great novels? Or does creating amoral intelligent machines empower immoral state actors, businessmen, and terror groups to unleash new horrors as yet unimagined by even our greatest poets and novelists?
As a longtime apocaloptimist myself, the answer I’ve settled on is, almost certainly, “yes.”
Roher’s journey begins as a filmmaker and an artist watching as artificial intelligence becomes able to create art (or, well, art-like designs) and write scripts (or, you know, script-like mutterings). Is he now obsolete? What does the future hold for him and his fellows? Will he join the masses of the unemployed and useless in our brave new world? Thus the first third of the film veers toward the apocalyptic: The AI skeptics air their concerns, their fears, their visions of doom. The problem with AI is that we only kinda-sorta know how it works: We understand the methods of weighting and how it jokes with us on ChatGPT. But it’s a black box in a very real way. We understand very few of the individual “decisions” these programs make. And they may well have “desires” that are so utterly alien to us they don’t even register to us as “desires.”
Freaking out atop his mountain of anxiety—an animated hill that calls to mind Richard Dreyfuss’s living room recreation of Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another totem of incomprehensible, alien doom—Roher calls in the optimists. Artificial intelligence, they say, will be like a rising tide that lifts all boats: The smarter we get and the more intelligence we have access to, the more problems we can solve. You know how you have Claude running the background helping you with your vibe coding to better sort your emails? What if we can do that to solve cold fusion and cure cancer? Good news: We can! We are! It’s all happening. We’ll all be happier and richer and freer than ever. The sonnets and novels, they’re coming. Our best selves are right around the corner.
It’s a pleasing vision of the future. But it’s one that relies on a big supposition: that people, broadly speaking, have any interest in finding their best selves. That their best selves are even findable.
I am . . . skeptical. Because I’m a person and I’ve seen people and I’ve lived among them. We are, well—just look at the world, man! Our biggest problem isn’t AI.
It’s people.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Netflix) is not a film about artificial intelligence. At least, it’s not about artificial intelligence in the sense that The AI Doc is about artificial intelligence. But it is about artifice and a sort of emotional intelligence that allows a new generation of hyperaggressive, amoral, self-replicating man-children to influence the lost and the weak-willed into believing they are owed everything the world has to offer. Money, women, fame, success, adoration: It’s all there for the taking.
You just have to be good at sales.
If there’s a throughline in Theroux’s interviews with the coterie of well-muscled internet personalities, it’s that: sell, sell, sell. Always, Be, Closing as lifestyle. Harrison Sullivan (aka HS) says as much: If you can sell folks on something, you’ll never go hungry. One imagines that HS and Justin Waller see Wolf of Wall Streetprotagonist Jordan Belfort as a deliverer of life lessons rather than a cautionary tale. Sell sad young men lifestyle tip sheets, get them to pony up for the Tate Brothers’ education system, have them invest in the nonsense funds that do nothing but lose: As long as you can sell these saps on your own lifestyle, you’ll never run out of marks.
Again: Artifice, sold intelligently.
Believe it or not, this is the bright side of the manosphere. As Theroux digs deeper into the world inhabited by real creeps like streamers Myron Gaines and Sneako, we see a world of truly noxious misogyny and antisemitism being capitalized on, quite literally: commenters paying to get the most noxious comments read out loud, Gaines ritually humiliating the female “influencers” stupid enough to appear on his show. The modern Colosseum isn’t mixed martial arts or other human cockfights: It’s the stream, the endless river of torment and nastiness indulged in by millions for a few laughs.
And this is why the apocalypticist inside of me has been edging out the optimist when it comes to our AI future. I don’t know how anyone can see the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes fooling person after person and think we’re headed toward anything good, particularly when we can see who and what so many people choose to follow now.
Set aside the nightmare scenarios of bioterrorism or state-sponsored election interference or an AI that reduces humanity to gray goo to power an endless supply of super-Nvidia chips. The much more banal nightmare is the one we’re already living in. Where the techno-optimists fail is in their assumptions about human nature. Most people are not interested in human flourishing. Given their druthers, I can’t help but believe that many—maybe most—people in a post-scarcity society will revert to passive consumption, and revert further to the basest form of that consumption. Think of the fat slobs in Wall-E, or better yet, think of Dax Shepard on his toilet-chair in Idiocracy spending most of his time laughing at “Ow, My Balls” when he isn’t ’batin’. You can dismiss Idiocracy as meanspirited eugenics, if you like, but you can’t ignore the modern world in which so many have immersed themselves, the endless streams of petty cruelties and ugliness in which they indulge.
Maybe they’ll be anesthetized enough by their screens and their streams that they won’t realize they’re empty husks. But I am skeptical that the human urge to find meaning through production will be so easily sublimated. And I’d guess that more of these people will turn to Sneako and his heirs than to Shakespeare to find meaning.
A third option—that all the talk of AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the approach of the singularity (that moment when man and computer merge into a sort of eternal super-being), is pseudoreligious faff—is occasionally hinted at, though not much discussed.
My recent chats with Marcie Hume and Matt Wolf, plus this piece I wrote about Mistress Dispeller for Criterion (go watch it!), reminded me that the practice of documentary, at its best, can be an act of love, faith and devotion to the objects we love — the people, the stories, the ideas, the audience, the textures of the fabric of reality itself.
Documentary, at its best, makes us our best selves.
We artists collect all of this material — sometimes against all common sense, urged on by something inside of us that tells us to keep going — and we organize it. We try it this way and that way until we’ve reached an arrangement that feels like we are getting the right feeling matched the right idea at the right time. Until we’ve reached something that feels true, and is true (or true enough).
And all of this is achieved through play. How wonderful! What a gift!!!
Let’s never forget that love, and play, are at the heart of what we do.
The problems come when we have so much fun playing that we forget what’s actually at stake: real people in the real world living with the consequences of our artistic choices.
I learned this the hard way, on a film I eventually had to pull from distribution.
My recent chats with Marcie Hume and Matt Wolf, plus this piece I wrote about Mistress Dispeller for Criterion (go watch it!), reminded me that the practice of documentary, at its best, can be an act of love, faith and devotion to the objects we love — the people, the stories, the ideas, the audience, the textures of the fabric of reality itself.
Documentary, at its best, makes us our best selves.
We artists collect all of this material — sometimes against all common sense, urged on by something inside of us that tells us to keep going — and we organize it. We try it this way and that way until we’ve reached an arrangement that feels like we are getting the right feeling matched the right idea at the right time. Until we’ve reached something that feels true, and is true (or true enough).
And all of this is achieved through play. How wonderful! What a gift!!!
Let’s never forget that love, and play, are at the heart of what we do.
The problems come when we have so much fun playing that we forget what’s actually at stake: real people in the real world living with the consequences of our artistic choices.
I learned this the hard way, on a film I eventually had to pull from distribution.
The Netflix film offers insight into the pressures faced by the superstars as they came back from military service to make their new album, Arirang
The Netflix film offers insight into the pressures faced by the superstars as they came back from military service to make their new album, Arirang
When someone in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist says that any examples put in the film are going to seem clumsy by the time it’s released, they’re not kidding. Artificial intelligence is moving so fast that the documentary could’ve easily been dated by the time it premiered at Sundance, let alone three months later. Fortunately, this isn’t really a film about AI. Sure, that’s the subject being discussed, but it’s all just filling. This is actually a documentary about any concerning issue if you read between the lines. It’s an example of how all issue documentaries should play out, but it’s also the issue documentary that drops the mic on all the world’s problems.
Daniel Roher, the Oscar-winning director of Navalny, makes himself the protagonist of this film (co-directed by Charlie Tyrell), as he interviews experts on artificial intelligence in an effort to quell his existential dread about the technology. First, he talks to the people spreading doom. They discuss all the fears about AI, from the jobs it’s making obsolete to the complete and abrupt extinction of mankind. Roher goes from mere cynicism to terror when he and his wife become pregnant with their first child, and he wonders if having children right now is a bad idea. One of the interviewees bluntly predicts that the kids born today won’t even make it to high school before we go the way of the dinosaurs.
Then Roher talks to the people who see the good in AI, how it’s helping to cure disease and solve all the rest of the world’s problems. Sure, computers will take our jobs, but that means we’ll live in a labor-free utopia where we can all be painters and poets. Roher acknowledges his film has swung like a pendulum. Ultimately, he finds the balance, which mostly comes down to humans being the real concern in the AI race, but he also recognizes the uncertainty of its future. I’ve seen so many issue documentaries that only focus on the doom (the other Sundance AI doc, Ghost in the Machine, comes to mind), and I’ve seen so many that stop after swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. This one has the third act they all need, as anticlimactic as it might come across. In fact, its third act almost applies to all the rest.
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The key is to understand and believe the still-hopeful message here, one that tends to come in the form of simple titles at the end of other documentaries: do your part. I don’t know if I trust humanity to be what this film wants of it, though. Most people will be fine with what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says in his interview, that we have no idea where things are going, so just do what you’re going to do anyway. Most people like the dazzling distractions of AI too much to give them a second thought, let alone to give the whole topic a deep consideration or to spring into action in response to its dangers. But just because I remain cynical at the end of this film doesn’t make it bad. Again, it’s Roher’s journey. And how it concludes is how Roher concludes the matter personally (with help from his wife, filmmaker Caroline Lindy).
That Roher makes this such a personal film allows it to be so effective. Very few first-person issue films work as well, though, because they’re more self-centered and self-serving. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is relatable, in part because of the parental anxiety and also because Roher asks such universally and inclusively concerning questions. He really seems to be doing the film for us as much as for himself. He’s also just relatable as a genuine, personable character on screen. The way he constantly cuts back to himself during interviews isn’t out of self-importance or to help out the editors (Daysha Broadway and Davis Coombe). It’s to make him identifiable in his expressive and sometimes profane reactions to what’s being said.
Roher and Tyrell also inject the film with an overdose of visual elements, maintaining an unnecessary but dynamic playfulness that keeps the viewer attentive. The variety of animations showcases Roher’s drawings (familiar to those who follow him on social media) and recalls Tyrell’s amusing 2018 short My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes as well as some of the aesthetic of the similarly AI-focused family film The Mitchells vs. the Machines. You also wouldn’t be surprised after watching the documentary to learn that two of the creative geniuses behind Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) were involved as producers.
Thankfully, those visual elements add to the personality of the film rather than being more dazzling distractions. What might not help with all audiences is the simplicity of the portrayal of the issue at hand. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist spends a long time explaining AI, but never goes that deep into its definition. There is little information or contemplation in the film that will educate or surprise anyone generally interested in the subject, and even its resolution may feel thin. That’s more suitable for the viewers who need to be pulled away from watching AI-generated nostalgia-baiting mashups and other bewitching slop, if only that were so simple.
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