Two documentaries released in early 2026 reveal a troubling pattern: films that claim to critically examine artificial intelligence risks may actually reinforce the industry's own preferred narrative about AI as either utopia or apocalypse. The difference between them exposes a deeper problem in how we discuss AI safety and who gets to shape that conversation.

What Is "Criti-Hype" and Why Should You Care?

The term "criti-hype" describes a specific genre of technology criticism that mirrors the language of tech boosters while focusing on negative problems and risks instead. The problem is that by accepting the industry's framing of what AI is and what it can do, these critical works end up reinforcing the very narratives they claim to challenge.

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist," directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, exemplifies this trap. The film centers on Roher's personal anxiety about fatherhood in an age of potential AI apocalypse, and it features unprecedented access to the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. Yet despite this access, the filmmakers rarely push back on the industry's core claims. When Roher asks Connor Leahy, co-founder of AI research lab EleutherAI, whether "superintelligence sounds like sci-fi bullshit," Leahy responds that intelligence is "just computation." Roher accepts this extraordinary claim without exploring what it actually means or whether it's scientifically grounded.

How Does "The AI Doc" Mirror Industry Talking Points?

The film's structure reveals its underlying problem. It conflates different types of AI systems, image models, predictive algorithms, language models, and reinforcement learning into a single ambiguous bucket labeled "AI." The term "intelligence" itself is never seriously examined. By the film's climax, when Roher sits down with the CEOs, the conversation feels less like a serious interview with powerful figures and more like friendly banter on an industry podcast.

The most telling moment comes when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reassures Roher that it's a great time to have a child. Roher responds with "mazel tov" and says it's "good to hear coming from the guy." This exchange becomes the emotional resolution to the entire film. Roher's anxiety deflates, and he transforms into what he calls an "apocaloptimist." What gets glossed over is a minor detail: Altman mentions that "from the raw IQ perspective, our kids will never be smarter than AI." Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin used a surrogate to conceive their child and have invested in reproductive technology companies focused on genetic selection, including Preventive and Genomic Prediction. These companies offer embryo selection techniques increasingly applied to traits like IQ, a practice some scholars have critiqued as eugenic.

What's the Alternative Approach to AI Documentary?

"Ghost in the Machine," directed by Valerie Veatch, takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than accepting the industry's framing of AI as a monolithic technology that could either save or destroy humanity, the film places artificial intelligence within a longer historical context entangled with eugenics, statistics, racism, and computation. The documentary recruits historians, critical theorists, social scientists, and crucially, the data workers who perform much of the concealed labor that enables AI systems to function.

This alternative framing raises questions that "The AI Doc" never asks. By examining the genealogy of concepts like "intelligence" and "human capability" as mobilized by the tech industry today, "Ghost in the Machine" suggests that AI is not really a particular technological artifact but rather a process that serves the economic interests of a select few.

Key Differences Between the Two Documentary Approaches

• Framing of Intelligence: "The AI Doc" accepts industry claims that intelligence is reducible to computation without questioning the scientific basis, while "Ghost in the Machine" examines the historical and social construction of intelligence concepts themselves.
• Access and Influence: "The AI Doc" features unprecedented CEO access but uses it to reinforce industry narratives, whereas "Ghost in the Machine" deliberately centers voices typically excluded from tech conversations, including data workers and historians.
• Scope of Analysis: "The AI Doc" treats all AI systems as a single undifferentiated category, while "Ghost in the Machine" contextualizes AI within longer histories of eugenics, racism, and economic power.
• Critical Distance: "The AI Doc" was shaped by the Center for Humane Technology, which has ties to industry figures, while "Ghost in the Machine" maintains independence from industry influence.

The rise of criti-hype as a genre matters because it shapes public understanding of AI risk at a critical moment. When documentaries with critical intentions end up amplifying industry narratives, they may actually narrow the range of questions we ask about AI safety and governance. The contrast between these two films suggests that how we tell stories about AI risk is itself a form of power, one that determines whose concerns get heard and whose get sidelined.