“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine

Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited racist eugenics movement of a century ago, and shining a light on the all-too-human work force grinding out content-moderation for dismal pay at the bottom of the AI stack, Ghost in the Machine argues that the only proper response to this would-be revolution is radical resistance. Divided into eight hard-hitting chapters with provocative titles (“Chapter 8: Slopoganda”), set to a stirringly dystopian soundtrack, and filled with rapidly moving images that are helpfully labeled “AI” and “NOT AI” (one can’t help wishing some of it was in fact hallucinated), Ghost in the Machine enlists a wide array of speakers—from philosophers to linguists to critical thinkers—to take the air out of the AI hype machine, and sound the alarm about its creators’ objectives. Just prior to the film’s Sundance debut in the NEXT section, Filmmaker interviewed Veatch, the film’s director, writer, producer, and EP, whose HBO docs Me at the Zoo (2012), co-directed with Chris Moukarbel, and Love Child (2014) likewise probed crucial friction points between society and technology.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.