BTS - AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About

Feature doc, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, examines the origins and the dangers, of artificial intelligence. Here, the film’s director, Nick Holt, explains how the 72 Films and Windfall Films production came into being.

In 2024 Channel 4 asked us to explore ‘AI’. The term was constantly in the news cycle but without much context or explanation. Understanding AI’s origins seemed a good way to see where it might be heading. With no scientific backgrounds whatsoever, we approached the subject as complete outsiders. Terms like LLM, frontier models and recursive self-improvement meant nothing.

An early decision was to keep anything technical out entirely. Others could do this better and developments were moving so fast, it would be foolish to keep up. Our focus would be on character and trying to find the human story for a wider audience to connect with.

Step forward Professor Geoffrey Hinton, now referred to as the ‘Godfather of AI’. No one on the planet was more responsible for AI development and fortunately for us, Geoff had just left Googe to speak freely safety concerns. We caught him at just the right moment.

We flew to Toronto and were immediately charmed by Geoff’s modesty and dry sense of humour. He was at a point in his life where he wanted to warn of AI harms, something he ‘needed’ to do. In his view, we stood at an inflection point and raising awareness was a public duty.

Geoff had always been fascinated by how the human brain worked and decided building one was the best way to understand it. He was ridiculed for decades for trying to build a computer that could ‘think’ and working with him at the University of Toronto was considered career suicide. Roll forward to 2024 and we see Geoff accepting the Nobel Prize for creating ‘computers that can learn for themselves’. His digital neural networks now underpin the AI revolution.

It’s not every day you film someone who credibly claims to have created a new species, but Geoff sees these systems as grown rather than developed. This proved to be a powerful visual coda for us. Geoff’s father discovered an important stage of metamorphosis, and he’d grown up surrounded by insects. He was enthralled and deeply inspired by the natural world, and it was an important theme for us to land in the film.

With editor, Ben Brown, we drew together vast amounts of unseen archive to chart how Geoff had been mocked over the years. One of our researchers finding footage of Geoff laughed out of a TV studio in the late 80’s for believing computers might one day think. Those laughs feel chilling now.

The material soon revealed a deeply compelling story of power, ambition and greed. If Geoff had created the jewel of intelligence, others were desperate to embrace it for their own purposes. From the extraordinary UK chess prodigy, Demis Hassabis, who went on to create Google DeepMind, to Silicon Valley’s very own Sam Altman. We even found unseens rushes from the creation of OpenAI. These were not household names in 2024, but each recognised something in the technology they could coax and build upon. There was something parental in their creation of AI, willing it into being. It offered up the chapters we use to guide the audience through the technology’s conception, intuition and into early adolescence.

In many ways the history can be split into pre and post the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. We’re now in an arms race for AI dominance, with Vladimir Putin noting ‘…whoever controls AI, will control the world’. It could easily be a Bond plot line and we were delighted Barabara Broccoli saw an early cut but and agreed to come onboard as an executive producer.

It was also important to find examples of real harms being done today. In a space that might feel theoretical we could show the consequences of race dynamics. We filmed with Megan Garcia, who’s son, Sewell, sadly took his life after a prolonged relationships with a chatbot. It’s a chilling example of rushing a product to market without sufficient guardrails in place.

AI can feel overwhelming, but I think we’ve captured one of the most important moments in our history. The world is changing fast, but here is the story of who’s behind it and why.