Documentaries

Documentary films that examine artificial intelligence, its risks, and the people working on AI safety and alignment.

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Transcendent Man

Robert Barry Ptolemy

A portrait of futurist Ray Kurzweil and his prediction of the Singularity, the point at which machine intelligence outpaces and merges with human intelligence, with critics weighing in on whether the vision is salvation or hazard.

Beginner2009

Plug & Pray

Jens Schanze

Roboticists racing to build human-equal machines are set against AI pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum's late-life skepticism, an early and still-relevant debate about whether we should build the minds we are capable of building.

Beginner2010

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Werner Herzog

Herzog's wide-ranging meditation on the connected world turns to artificial intelligence and autonomous machines, with figures like Elon Musk weighing what it means to build minds we may not be able to control.

Beginner2016

AlphaGo

Greg Kohs

DeepMind's Go-playing system defeats world champion Lee Sedol, a landmark demonstration of how reinforcement learning can surpass human mastery and a vivid case study in superhuman, sometimes inscrutable, machine strategy.

Beginner2017

Do You Trust This Computer?

Chris Paine

Researchers and industry figures including Elon Musk and Stuart Russell map the promise and peril of increasingly autonomous AI, framing alignment, control, and existential risk for a general audience.

Beginner2018

The Truth About Killer Robots

Maxim Pozdorovkin

Narrated by an android, this HBO documentary examines deaths caused by machines and the creeping automation of work and warfare, asking who is accountable when autonomous systems harm people.

Beginner2018

More Human Than Human

Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting

A filmmaker tries to build an AI capable of replacing him as director, using the experiment to survey how far machine intelligence has come and what human qualities still resist automation.

Beginner2018

The Joy of AI

Jim Al-Khalili

Physicist Jim Al-Khalili offers an accessible BBC explainer on how machine learning actually works, charting the field from its origins to modern neural networks and the questions raised by ever more capable systems.

Beginner2018

iHuman

Tonje Hessen Schei

A look inside the AI industry that follows researchers and critics through questions of autonomous weapons, surveillance, and concentrated power, asking who steers the technology reshaping society.

Beginner2019

In the Age of AI

FRONTLINE (PBS)

FRONTLINE traces the rise of machine learning, automation, and the global AI arms race between the US and China, examining the economic disruption and surveillance implications of a technology advancing faster than its governance.

Beginner2019

The Age of A.I.

Robert Downey Jr. (host)

An eight-part series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. surveying how machine learning and neural networks are reshaping medicine, work, art, and daily life, an accessible on-ramp to the technology behind the safety debate.

Beginner2019

Hi, A.I.

Isa Willinger

An observational look at people forming emotional bonds with humanoid and companion robots, probing what it means to build machines designed to be loved and what that reveals about human attachment.

Beginner2019

Autonomy

Alex Horwitz

Produced with Malcolm Gladwell, this film traces the rise of self-driving cars and weighs the promise of autonomous machines against the question of how much life-and-death control we should hand to AI.

Beginner2019

The Social Dilemma

Jeff Orlowski

Former tech insiders expose how recommendation algorithms optimize relentlessly for engagement, a real-world illustration of misaligned objectives and reward hacking operating at civilizational scale.

Beginner2020

Coded Bias

Shalini Kantayya

MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini's discovery of racial and gender bias in facial recognition drives an examination of algorithmic fairness, accountability, and the societal stakes of deploying flawed AI systems.

Beginner2020

We Need to Talk About A.I.

Leanne Pooley

Experts including Sam Harris and James Cameron weigh the trajectory of artificial intelligence, from self-improving systems to existential risk, making the case that we must decide now what kind of AI future we want.

Beginner2020

A.rtificial I.mmortality

Ann Shin

An exploration of AI avatars, mind clones, and digital afterlives that asks whether a machine recreation of a person counts as continuity of self, and what we owe to the artificial minds we build in our own image.

Beginner2021

The Rise of A.I.

Henrik Boman

A documentary series charting the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the debate over how increasingly capable, super-powered systems should be governed before they outpace human oversight.

Beginner2022

Unknown: Killer Robots

Jesse Sweet

This Netflix documentary follows the soldiers and scientists racing to build AI-powered autonomous weapons, and the activists warning that machines making their own life-or-death decisions on the battlefield is a line we should not cross.

Beginner2023

The Thinking Game

Greg Kohs

An inside account of DeepMind and Demis Hassabis's pursuit of artificial general intelligence, from AlphaGo to AlphaFold, capturing both the scientific ambition and the safety stakes of building ever more capable systems.

Beginner2024

Eternal You

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Startups use AI to resurrect the dead as chatbots and avatars, raising unsettling questions about consent, grief, and the consequences of deploying generative systems on the most vulnerable human moments.

Beginner2024

Deepfaking Sam Altman

Adam Bhala Lough

Unable to land an interview with the OpenAI CEO, the director builds an AI deepfake of him instead, turning the stunt into a meta-investigation of generative AI, consent, authenticity, and where the technology is taking us.

Beginner2025

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell

Filmmaker Daniel Roher, about to become a father, interviews leading figures including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to weigh the existential threats and promises of AI, landing on a wary 'apocaloptimism' about the world his child will inherit.

Beginner2026