What exactly is artificial intelligence? Where does it come from? And precisely how powerful is (or will) it become? Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in the Machine digs into these answers and finds things both disturbing and unsurprising. This is a fairly brisk, fairly standard documentation of the evolution of artificial intelligence—effective, dispiriting, and disappointingly mundane.
We get a lot of talking heads and a lot of research telling us where the idea of artificial intelligence and its application ultimately comes from: eugenics theory. For those who may not know, eugenics is a series of beliefs and pseudo-scientific ideas that claim to aim to improve the human race, when in fact much of their theories are built around racist assumptions. Veatch separates her film into eight chapters, building a fairly effective crescendo as we approach our present day.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is featured quite a bit in archive clips, specifically one from 2016 in which he states: “I think AI will lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” We also get plenty of Elon Musk, along with a slew of philosophers, physicists, historians, linguists, and many more. In speaking about the rules that A.I. follows, Dr. Dan McQuillan (author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence) says: “You tell it to find a pattern, and it will find a pattern.” Simply put, the prejudices inherent in the systems that design the artificial intelligence will direct it how to think. Objectivity is impossible when prejudicial assumptions are presented as fact.
There are reminders of racist chatbots, as well as the more recent, Nazi-sympathizing Grok updates. There’s the overpromise of A.G.I. (Artificial General Intelligence), which has been walked back by those who once oversold it. Also the idea of effective altruism (how best to spend fortunes to help all people) and its bastardization into some form of techno-fascism. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the essential question: what larger, practical use does A.I. actually serve?
Ghost in the Machine is an uneven piece of work. It’s as if Veatch and her team gathered so much information that they felt compelled to pack every little bit of it into this one film. The result is sometimes effective, at other times overwhelming. The pace is quite relentless, and the focus of the overall project tends to slip. Still, historian Dr. Becca Lewis offers some powerful context throughout and Dr. Sorelle Friedler provides succinct commentary in the final, worrying chapter.
There’s a lot here, and the biggest lesson learned seems to be this: technocrats will not save us. And neither will A.I. They will save themselves, and they will save all the money and water for themselves while they’re at it.
Ghost in the Machine premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.