Valerie Veatch didn’t set out to make a film about eugenics. She started by experimenting with OpenAI‘s Sora text-to-video model after its public release in 2024, drawn by online communities of artists sharing AI-generated work.
What she found repelled her. The tool routinely produced images saturated with racism and sexism — without explicit prompting. Her new peers in AI-enthusiast circles didn’t seem bothered.
That experience became Ghost in the Machine, a documentary that traces the intellectual lineage of generative AI not forward to its supposed benefits, but backward to its origins — and those origins, according to the film, run directly through Victorian eugenics.
A Marketing Term With a Dark Family Tree
Veatch’s argument starts with language. “In order to use the phrase ‘artificial intelligence,’ we have to know what the fuck that phrase means,” she said in a video interview. “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.”
According to the documentary, the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy — specifically to secure funding for his projects.
But the film pushes the timeline back much further. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, founded eugenics in Victorian England — the since-discredited belief that humanity could be improved by systematically eliminating races deemed inferior. Galton’s foundational work with multidimensional modeling, a technique he used while measuring and comparing the physical attributes of African and European women, directly shaped the thinking of his protégé Karl Pearson.
Pearson developed statistical tools including logistic regression — now a fundamental component of modern machine learning — building on methods rooted in Galton’s racist framework. Neither man was involved in building early computers. Their influence arrived through the mathematics they normalized and the assumptions baked into it: that human traits, including intelligence, are quantifiable, and that human brains operate like machines. That leap, Veatch argues, is what made the public receptive to the concept of artificial intelligence in the first place.
What the Hype Obscures
Galton and Pearson helped establish the idea that racial difference was measurable and real. That framework didn’t disappear — it migrated into the statistical foundations that machine learning now runs on.
Veatch says she made the film to cut through what she describes as deliberate obfuscation by AI companies. The goal wasn’t to produce something flattering to the industry. “Am I going to hug Sam Altman on camera? Is that a truthful film about this technology? That’s propaganda,” she said, according to the report.
Ghost in the Machine doesn’t position itself as a takedown of any single company. It frames the current cycle of AI hype as a pattern — one with a documented, repeating history that the industry has little incentive to surface.
Photo by Alesia Kozik on Pexels
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