Hollywood Just Packaged AI Anxiety and Is Bringing It to Theaters: Enter the Apocaloptimists

The calculus is simple: believers far outnumber skeptics. The rest is just filmmaking.

They did it again! The AI fear-monger machine has a shiny new resource: coming to theaters on March 27, 2026, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

Here is the official trailer:

There is so much to unpack here. But before that, I need to talk about nuclear bombs.

A Few Facts on Nuclear Bombs

A study from 2022 on the consequences of a nuclear war presents some alarming data. This is one of the most comprehensive studies on nuclear events and their impact on humanity ever conducted. While presents some staggaring facts, inadvertently, it also provides some deeply inconvenient data for the AI doom crowd.

Long story short, a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia (the two nations that together control more than 90% of all nuclear weapons on Earth) would kill approximately 360 million people directly through blasts, radiation, and immediate fallout. This is a total disaster, I know. To put things into perspctive, it represents more than the entire population of the United States.

However, the most devastating effect of such event is the soot injected into the stratosphere. That would block sunlight for so long that would collapse global agriculture, which would trigger a “nuclear winter” and hunger that the study estimates would kill more than 5 billion people. Now we are talking about two thirds of humanity.

A full-scale US-Russia war would lead 40 to 50 percent of animal species to extinction.

I know, these are all horrible numbers, horrible consequences.

At the same time…

Althought the reality of any nuclear event is absolutely devastating, there is a part that rarely gets mentioned: even in the worst-case scenario ever modeled, that is, every available warhead in the world, every major city targeted, maximum soot injection, global famine, and more, the study reveals that there is no probable scenario that leads to human extinction. None. Our species, in all its resilience, survives.

We have over 12,000 nuclear warheads available for use on this planet right now. They are spread, loaded onto submarines, waiting. This is something we, humans, built. And this is something we actively maintain. We have entire government departments dedicated to this end. And according to the best science available, even if every single one of them were detonated over major targets simultaneously, humanity would not be erased from the Earth.

Why am I mentioning all of this? You will know very soon.

Cunning as a Science

As much as we would like to think otherwise, humans are not primarily rational beings. Decades of cognitive science and behavioral economics have completely dismantled this idea piece by piece. We hate to hear it but we are actually quite predictiable. And predictability is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong people.

Researchers have catalogued the specific mechanisms through which this exploitation occurs and we are going to review a few of them next.

The Specificity Heuristic

Decades of behavioral research, from Kahneman and Tversky to Dan Ariely, have documented something uncomfortable: people assign dramatically higher credibility to specific information than to vague information, regardless of whether the specificity is in any way meaningful. Tell someone a product is “very effective” and they couldn't care less. Instead, tell them it’s “73.4% more effective” and you turn heads, even if that number came from nowhere. You can read more about this in Show Me the Numbers: Precision as a Cue to Others’ Confidence by Jerez-Fernandez et al.

Our brain interprets numerical precision as evidence of rigorous testing, careful measurement, and honest reporting. It feels like truth because truth, in our experience, tends to come with details.

That's why it is so important to look at the source! Always!

When I was a kid, water filters were in high demand. I remember a salesman telling my parents that the filter could handle up to five two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. But not six. Only up to five (he was making sure we got that part right). He was not sharing a technical specification. All of that was just performance disguised as expertise.

Strategic Concession and Prolepsis

Aristotle identified prolepsis over two thousand years ago. It is the rhetorical technique of anticipating an objection and addressing it before your audience raises it. If you are a salesperson, you know this way too well. In ancient Greece it was considered a mark of intellectual honesty.

The mechanism works because conceding a limitation (very often fake) signals that you have nothing to hide. So when someone volunteers a weakness, we tend to relax. This is enough for us to stop looking.

Impression Management

There is a third technique, subtler and more insidious than the others. Robert Cialdini, whose 1984 book Influence remains the most precise scientific autopsy of persuasion ever written, documented how we instinctively grant authority to those who appear to have seen things we haven’t. Expertise then becomes about affect. An expert who has been frightened by what they know carries more weight than one who is merely confident.

I have seen this upclose so many times: the car salesman leans across the desk and says, very seriously, “between you and me, this engine… man, oh man, sometimes it scares me how powerful it is.” He is not expressing genuine fear. This is just him borrowing the credibility that genuine fear would carry, without the inconvenience of actually feeling it.

Erving Goffman called this impression management. More plainly: it is a flex disguised as honesty.

The AI Doc

On March 27, 2026, The AI Doc arrives in theaters. This is not “yet another small production.” We are talking about Academy Award-winning pedigree. Sundance premiere. A word in the title was invented specifically for this film: Apocaloptimist. Sure! Nothing subtle is happening here and I mean that literally.

The Emotional Hook

Imagine a documentary based on assessing the latest data about AI. This is not the case here. Instead, it opens with a pregnant wife (well played). Director Daniel Roher is expecting a child and wondering whether the world is safe enough to bring a new life into.

Is now a terrible time to have a kid?

Notice the fatalism from the get go.

The emotional trigger is designed to bypass rational evaluation before you can engage with it. It also makes you feel like a monster if you dare to apply critical thinking on this matter. From that point on, anything you say is no longer an evaluation of the documentary but an statement of whether you care or not about babies.

The Doom Parade

The documentary introduces a series of “doomers” (funny… this is the actual word they used) who describe AI-driven extinction with the calm confidence of people who have said these things so many times they have stopped noticing they have no evidence for them. They get to the point of saying that some of their children will not “make it to high school.” And of course… Roher’s reaction is full terror. I hope it is unequivocally evident that this is not journalism.

Don't believe me? Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic, wrote the following on Screen Daily:

Roher's willingness to blindly accept any and all of his speakers' pronouncements leaves The AI Doc feeling toothless.

and

…such provocative probing is in short supply in The AI Doc… in the name of so-called fairness, the documentary lacks any real perspective or inquisitiveness.

The Question No One Should Ask

Roher (intentionally) behaves like a scared five years old boy fighting for his life (well played). So what is his idea? “I have to find these CEOs and get them in the movie.”

Roher then sits across from Sam Altman (of all the people) and asks whether he can guarantee that AI will not destroy humanity. Altman says he cannot. “It is impossible.”

The result: shock! But in reality, asking this question is nothing but part of the theater.

Can a mathematician guarantee that mathematics will never cause any harm? Can a biologist? Can a physicist… can you realize how absurd this question is? We built over 12,000 nuclear warheads and we are not launching a documentary in 2026 asking a physicist to guarantee our safety.

No serious person can guarantee the future. The question is not designed to obtain any meaningful or even truthful information. This is all about producing a sense of uncertainty, to be cut into a trailer as evidence of something sinister.

As Lethal as Nuclear Bombs?

Remember the 2022 study: every warhead detonated and 360 million dead on impact. 5 billion dead from its consequences over the years alongside half of all animal species extinct. In such a horrible, catastrophic event, humanity still survives.

The projected horror show of the documentary presents an “expert” suggesting we should be at least as afraid of AI as we are of a nuclear war.

We should all imediatly discredit anyone who is not ashamed of so irresponsibly say something like that.

The Relief

Remember the science of cunning. First, they push the audience to the edge of despair. Then, the film pivots to “optimism.” How convenient! The same source that promotes danger offers hope. And Roher, of course, so wholeheartdly feels like salvation is within reach.

An audience that has been frightened for several minutes will now hear some different perspectives that is designed to promote some sort of relief. The damage is already done, though. The optimists don’t even need to be more persuasive than the doomers. They simply need to speak last.

Fear is constructed first so that hope can be sold second. The audience leaves shaken, confused, lost, but somehow, grateful. This is the exact emotional signature of someone who will recommend the film to everyone they know.

Hats off! Honestly. From a marketing perspective, this documentary, as an entretaining production, is undeniably a masterpiece. From every other perspective (and I mean it), this is a complete disservice to society.

They Know

Who are “they”? The people behind the AI anxiety machine. They are not confused, dumb, or uneducated. They are not victims of the fear they produce and surely not well-meaning intellectuals who looked into the abyss and emerged genuinely shaken.

They know that predicting human extinction by software is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. They know they don’t have it. They know “my kids won’t live to see middle age” is nothing but performance. They know asking a CEO to guarantee the safety of a technology is shameless theater.

And they do it anyway. Why do you think that is?

The calculation is simple. Some people will see through it and they will be annoyed, write rebuttals, call it what it is. Ok, fine. Just an acceptable loss. The believers, on the other hand, are a market. As long as the ratio stays favorable, the machine is profitable.

The people producing AI anxiety content are intelligent, educated, and fully capable of distinguishing a claim from a fact. They have access to the same data we do. And somehow they always land exactly where the incentives point.

Draw your own conclusions.

The Danger Exists. It is Very Real, and It is Not AI

It is not that the danger does not exist. It does, and it is a real threat. But it is not AI in any way.

The real danger is the people behind the narrative that AI is dangerous and could eliminate humans. Fear is insanely lucrative. It fabricates urgency, reduces bureaucracy, unlocks unvetted and rushed deployment of public resources, and quickly makes billions if not trillions of dollars flow like magic. Do you really think that ethical and moral concerns will stop these people?

Watch any interview from AI engineers that left OpenAI. They are not afraid of AI. They are afraid of the people in charge and they are very vocal about this.

The Fear-Monger Machine Must Hurry Up. Their Enemy is Coming Fast

There is something far more powerful than the AI hype, AI doom, and AI fear.

It is an utterly unstoppable and supernatural power that, once it arrives, can annihilate all the work done by the hype, doom, and fear in a matter of a few days. And once it is done, there is no way to reverse it.

This incredible force has a name: the AI fatigue. An entire society can be fooled, but not for too long. Empty and deceitful estimates and claims about AI can be disseminated without consequences, but only until a certain point.

History shows that, eventually, humans will get to a defining moment of saying “enough is enough.” After that point, for whatever they are done with it, it is game over.

Therefore, in the short-term, we should see desperate attempts to promote fear and confusion like never before. They are running out of time. In the meantime, education is paramount and skepticism towards all things AI is more needed than never.