“My main mission now is to warn people how dangerous AI could be,” says Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Laureate who is called the godfather of Artificial Intelligence, in this documentary being shown at the Tribeca Festival about what Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, calls “the most important technology in human history.” Hinton and Hassabis are two of the film’s central characters, many of whom express similar alarm at what they’ve wrought.
So why is the film entitled “AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About”? At the very last moment in the film, we see that the title was the AI response to filmmaker Nick Holt’s inquiry: “Need catchy title for documentary about AI – story of how it began, and concerns people have about it/you.”
It’s ironic, maybe clever, but baffling: Was the AI chatbot being deliberately misleading, since there is plenty to worry about; was this its act of self-dealing? (And does this mean it has a “self”?) If the AI’s motivation is debatable, the filmmaker’s is explicit; he wants to be catchy. And catchy he often is in this film, although it comes at a cost. Billed as a “gripping primer,” it’s too arty and ambitious to offer a clear guide through an ever-complicating and increasingly overwhelming topic.
The two-hour documentary begins almost leisurely with profiles (including extensive interviews and lots of old clips) of Hinton – whom we first see puttering around his island home, picking up insects (his father was a famous entomologist) — and Hassabis – whom we first see as a nine-year-old chess prodigy in an old interview, in which he explains the appeal of the game: “I like winning.”
The story eventually speeds up and expands (much like AI itself) to include the major figures, some better known than others, and headline-grabbing stories – Elon Musk (who we see in an old clip telling an interviewer “With Artificial Intelligence, we are summoning the demon”), and his alliance with then battle with Sam Altman and OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever and his battle as a member of the OpenAI board with Sam Altman, Amanda Askell and Anthropic’s Claude. Twenty minutes before the end, it slows down again to linger on a woman named Megan Garcia, who is given time to unfold the story of her 14-year-old son Sewell, who committed suicide – after which, the police told her, after looking through his phone, that he had had “a romantic connection” to a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, created by the company Character.AI. He chatted with the bot right before he shot himself; we see the exchange of dialogue; his mother reads some of it aloud.
“We’re at a funny point in history where we’re now creating beings,” Hinton says, while picking insects off his window. “And we have no idea what a being is — what makes a being a being.”
AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About will have one more showing at the Tribeca Festival on Thursday June 11 – 8:15 PM at Village East by Angelika.
