AI as we know it has been used for everything from making full-length feature films to solving nearly impossible math problems. But today AI is also, relatively speaking, just a child.
That said, AI is a child that has learned languages, how to play games, how to blackmail people, how to power robots and, in some cases, has allegedly driven people to their deaths. It’s that dynamic that director Nick Holt tries to showcase in “AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About,” a two-hour documentary tracing AI’s origins premiering at the Tribeca Festival on Saturday. The film is a co-production between 72 Films and Windfall Films, and its producers include former James Bond steward Barbara Broccoli.
The doc is anchored in interviews with Geoffrey Hinton, the widely credited “godfather of AI,” along with DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI, and Megan Garcia, the mother of a teen who was allegedly driven to suicide by an AI chatbot. In the film, Holt tries to showcase the evolution of AI from Hinton’s fascination with replicating the human brain to the present-day arms race to build general superintelligence (aka Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI). The doc is structured in the vein of a child’s developmental saga, tracking as AI agents learn how to do things such as playing Atari games and recognizing animals — to bypassing human commands and powering robots.
