GoKawiilis a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
Like many people, director Valerie Veatch was intrigued when OpenAI first released its Sora text-to-video generative AI model to the public in 2024. Though she didn’t fully understand the technology, she was curious about what it could do, and she saw that other artists were building online communities to share their new AI creations. The hope of connecting with people drew Veatch into the AI space, but once she was there, she was shocked to see how often the technology would generate images dripping with racism and sexism.
Veatch was even more unsettled by the way her new AI-enthusiast peers did not seem to care that the machine they rallied around spewed out hateful, bigoted garbage without being explicitly prompted to do so. The bizarre situation drove Veatch away from her early experimentation with gen AI. But it also inspired her to make Ghost in the Machine, a new documentary about the technologies and schools of thought that laid the groundwork for gen AI’s existence.
Instead of focusing on the potential (if highly improbable) benefits to society that gen AI accelerationists swear are just around the corner, Ghost in the Machine explores the technology’s history to explain why it works the way it does now. When I recently spoke with Veatch about the film, she told me that she wanted to chronicle gen AI’s genesis to give people a clear view of the very intense cycle of industry hype we’re currently living through. First, however, she had to cut through AI firms’ purposeful obfuscation of the entire concept.
“In order to use the phrase ‘artificial intelligence,’ we have to know what the fuck that phrase means,” Veatch told me over a video call. “The truth is, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a marketing term and always has been. It’s a completely misleading, stupid phrase that has taken on its own cultural meaning, and I think being really clear about the words we use and the meaning of those words is essential.”
As Ghost in the Machine repeatedly stresses, “artificial intelligence” was originally coined in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy when he was trying to secure more funding for his projects. But the documentary presents the term’s coinage as just one of many important points on a timeline that actually begins in Victorian-era England with the birth of eugenics. In addition to being Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton was the originator of eugenics — the racist and discredited belief that humanity can be improved through the systemic elimination of “inferior” (read: non-white) races.
While Galton definitely made some useful contributions to academia, in our interview, Veatch explained that it is important to not minimize the fact that his deeply held white supremacist beliefs informed the era’s social sciences. Galton and his fellow eugenicist / protegee Karl Pearson were not directly involved in the development of early computational machines. But Galton’s foundational work with multidimensional modeling — a technique he used while measuring the attractiveness of African and European women — shaped Pearson’s thinking as he developed statistical tools like logistic regression, which is one of the fundamental components of modern machine learning.
“Am I going to hug Sam Altman on camera? Is that a truthful film about this technology? That’s propaganda.”
Galton Pearson helped normalize the idea that people of various races were fundamentally different in quantifiable ways. This kind of racist thinking is what led to Galton and his peers believing that human intelligence could be measured, and that human brains function very much like machines. That jump, Veatch says, played a major role in selling the public on the fantastical idea of artificial intelligence.
“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science because it’s baked into this technology,” Veatch said, explaining that these concepts are “soaked” in eugenic thinking.
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