Channel 4 sent Grayson Perry to San Francisco for Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, a documentary about artificial intelligence built from familiar ingredients. Perry meets a woman romantically attached to an AI avatar, speaks with Microsoft's head of AI, interviews a prepper preparing for collapse, encounters an author warning that advanced AI could kill everyone, and gives his own reflections from the back of driverless cars. James Delingpole, reviewing the program in The Spectator World, found the format thinner than the subject.

The useful tension is between the television machinery and the material it tries to hold. AI appears through scheduled interviews, comic stunts, scenic anxiety, and a presenter asked to make the future digestible. Perry's sharper moments come when he asks direct questions, especially around the woman and her synthetic partner, where intimacy has become an app with a voice and a compliant face. The documentary works best when it leaves Perry reacting to what is in front of him. The screen can show the avatar, the executive, the bunker plan, and the driverless cab. It has less room for the unease moving between them.