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Valerie Veatch’s documentary asks tough questions about artificial intelligence, such as “Is the technology rooted in eugenics?”
Her nonfiction essay film “Ghost in the Machine” is the latest feature from the director of “Me @ the Zoo” and “Love Child,” two other films that explored the intersection between technology and human behavior. Her new Sundance premiere features new talking-head interviews with an array of philosophers and scientists, plus archival footage of controversial AI figures such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, to create a cautionary tale about the potential misuses of AI and its devastating impact on the environment, culture, and society.
Veatch’s film begins with a frightening notion: that the ideological foundation of artificial intelligence as an outcome-based set of systems that identify and produce patterns is, in fact, rooted in concepts out of scientific racism and eugenics.
“This was something I discovered along the way. And when the first person [told me this], that machine learning and AI are actually rooted in eugenics, I was like, ‘OK, sure,’ and ended the Zoom call. And then I started researching it,” Veatch said at IndieWire’s Sundance Studio. “And shockingly, it’s true…. When we look at how this technology is productized in the current environment and … [like] what we see with Grok on X, for example, it’s sort of not surprising that these systems produce this kind of harm because if you look at where the mathematics inside machine learning and also where even the concept that machines can think comes from, it’s rooted in a place of eugenics and race science.”
She added, “The whole journey for me in this project started because my friend signed me up for this artist program for one of the large AI company video generators and I was playing around with the technology, and the outputs that it was producing were so horrific and racist and [with] overly sexualized images of women.”
As for the process of putting the doc together from archival and free-use footage, she said, “Every day I was like, ‘Am I making something crazy or is this making sense?’ And I think that I was just driven by this urge to share this perspective. All of the experts in the film are so amazing, and their work is so incredible that it kind of pushed me through the creative anxieties of like, ‘I am literally making this out of web footage,’ and like, ‘Is this a film? Does it feel great?’ And I love editing. It’s like my joy. And so in that way, I just kind of pushed through and just kept working on it. I have two kids, and I literally made this on my vanity table in between school runs. There’s a sort of urgency. Somebody called the film like a punk screed, which I sort of love.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
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