Ghost in the Machine’s Valerie Veatch isn’t drinking the AI Kool-Aid

Like many people, director Valerie Veatch was intrigued when OpenAI first released its text-to-video generative AI model Sora to the public in 2024. Although she didn’t fully understand the technology, she was curious about what it could do, and she saw that other artists were creating online communities to share their new AI creations. The hope of connecting with people drew Veatch to the AI ​​space, but once there, she was shocked to see how often the technology generated images dripping with racism and sexism.

Veatch was even more disturbed by the way her new AI-enthusiast peers didn’t seem to care that the machine they were gathering around was spewing hateful, bigoted garbage without being explicitly prompted. This bizarre situation took Veatch away from his early experiments with the AI ​​generation. But it also inspired her to do Ghost in the machinea new documentary about the technologies and schools of thought that laid the foundation for the existence of the AI ​​generation.

Instead of focusing on the potential (although highly unlikely) benefits to society that AI generation accelerators say are imminent, Ghost in the machine explores the history of technology 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 tell the genesis of the AI ​​generation to give people a clear view of the very intense industry hype cycle we are currently experiencing. However, she first had to overcome the deliberate obfuscation of the whole concept by AI companies.

“To use the phrase ‘artificial intelligence,’ we need to know what that phrase means,” Veatch told me over a video call. “The truth is that it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a marketing term and always has been. It’s a completely misleading and stupid expression that has taken on its own cultural meaning, and I think it’s essential to be very clear about the words we use and what they mean.”

As Ghost in the machine The repeatedly points out that “artificial intelligence” was originally invented in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy when he was trying to get more funding for his projects. But the documentary presents the term’s creation as one of several important points in a timeline that actually begins in Victorian England with the birth of eugenics. In addition to being Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton is 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 succeeded a few useful contributions to academia, in our interview Veatch explained that it is important not to downplay the fact that his deeply rooted beliefs in white supremacy informed the social sciences of the time. Galton and fellow eugenicist/protege Karl Pearson were not directly involved in the development of early computing machines. But Galton’s seminal work on multidimensional modeling – a technique he used to measure the attractiveness of African and European women – shaped Pearson’s thinking as he developed statistical tools like logical regression, which is one of the fundamental components of modern machine learning.

Galton Pearson helped normalize the idea that people of different races were fundamentally different in quantifiable ways. This type of racist thinking is what led Galton and his peers to believe that human intelligence could be measured and that human brains functioned like machines. This leap, Veatch says, played a major role in selling the fantastic idea of ​​artificial intelligence to the public.

“What really surprised me when I first dove into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or a journalist, it doesn’t take long before you bump your forehead into the low-end of race science because it’s rooted in this technology,” Veatch said, explaining that these concepts are “steeped” in eugenics thinking.

Rather than trying to disprove the idea that generational AI models produce hateful ideology because they were trained on it (a concept commonly referred to as “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out), Ghost in the machine uses his historical analysis to explain why the companies developing this technology seem so disinterested in solving today’s problems. This historical context helped Veatch make sense of some of her own troubling experiences with Generation AI, back when she was playing with an early version of Sora in an artist Slack. Veatch remembers the group as a friendly, welcoming place until another member — a woman of color — began expressing concerns about how the model was whitewashing her every time she tricked him into generating images based on photos of herself.

“It kept her braids and her fashion, but it inspired her to go into an art gallery, which the program understood as ‘white space,'” Veatch explained. “My reaction was ‘what the fuck’ and I tried to explain to the group how this was really a problem with the software itself.” No one else in the group reacted to his post. “It was a Slack where normally there were always dozens of screaming koala emoji reactions on every message. But this time there was nothing.”

Veatch took it upon herself to contact OpenAI directly to alert the company about “how racist, sexist and misogynistic the results are.” [she] what I was seeing were releases where women started getting extra boobs and twerking after about two rounds of generating a scene. Veatch believed that OpenAI would see this as a critical bug worth fixing before encouraging more people to adopt Sora into their lives; instead, the company put its concerns aside.

“The feedback I received was basically, ‘It’s very embarrassing to talk about; there’s nothing we can do to change it,'” Veatch recalls.

This lit a fire in Veatch to understand why so many different forms of generative intelligence consistently behave in such ugly and troublesome ways. At first, she didn’t really think that Zoom calls with the authors of technology white papers could be turned into a compelling documentary, but that changed when she began to see a clear line between Galton’s eugenics statistical work and modern generational AI outfits.

The voices featured in Ghost in the machine – a mix of AI researchers, historians, and critical theorists – convincingly demonstrates that virtually every facet of the AI ​​space has been deeply influenced by its historical ties to scientific fields constructed to support discriminatory worldviews. When I asked Veatch if she ever wanted to speak directly with business leaders Ghost in the machine puts herself to the test,” she said, laughing. To gain that kind of access, she said, she would have to engage in all sorts of ideological gymnastics and compromises that would make her film complicit in the evils of the AI ​​generation.

“There’s the idea, you know, that these people aren’t going to trust just anyone,” Veatch said. “Yeah, no shit, and I sure hope they don’t trust me. I don’t want them in the movie and they already talk to the media enough. Am I going to hug Sam Altman on camera? Is this a truthful movie about this technology? It’s propaganda.”

Ghost in the machine will be available to stream via Kinema March 26-28 before airing on PBS this fall.