DDirector Valery Veitch made his name with documentaries love child (about an online gaming addicted couple whose child died of malnutrition) and I am in the zoo (about American vlogger Kara Cunningham), films that explore the intersection of real-world subcultures and Internet communities. His latest continues in this vein, though its self-defined scope is a little broader, more urgent, and relevant to everyone at the moment: the discovery of artificial intelligence, its dark history in eugenics and highly controversial utility today (pushing the valuations of half a dozen companies stratospheric, despite the stock market bubble).
The thrust of the film is largely polemical, directing the audience toward AI-skeptical conclusions one persuasive soundbite at a time. Still, it also serves as a very useful, straightforward primer on AI history, touching on a dazzling array of colorful, often crazy figures, including Victorian British eugenicist Francis Galton, Silicon Valley founding father and openly racist William Shockley, and current billionaire Elon Musk. Sadly, the film isn’t modern enough to include the recent court dispute between Musk and former friend-turned-foe Sam Altman, but that doesn’t diminish the thrust of Wecht and his interviewees’ arguments.
As a group, the interviewees are an eclectic bunch, ranging from philosophers like Jonathan Flowers, who briefly questions whether we need AI at all, to linguist Emily M. Bender, who explains the origins of the term AI, to (my favorite) Silicon Valley historian Becca Lewis, who turns some extremely complex background into a few minutes of illustrated narration. That said, sometimes it all gets a little too dense, like a university lecture with silly archive clips instead of PowerPoint slides, and sometimes things can be better served in longer written journalism with more detail in important areas. For example, interviews with employees of a Nairobi-based LLM company do not really explain how their work is adversely affecting them.
The most amusing device is to write Helvetica-font text in capital letters in the upper right corner, letting the viewer know whether what we are seeing is an AI or not an AI, because, vetch saysSo many people can no longer tell the difference.
