Veatch's Ghost in the Machine links AI roots to eugenics
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- Valerie Veatch's documentary 'Ghost in the Machine' traces generative AI's intellectual origins to Francis Galton's eugenic work in Victorian England, showing how Galton and Karl Pearson's statistical tools — including logistic regression — became foundational to modern machine learning.
- OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model, released to the public in 2024, repeatedly produced overtly racist and sexist imagery without being explicitly prompted, according to Veatch, who documented the experience in an artists' Slack community.
- When Veatch contacted OpenAI directly to report the hateful outputs — including women 'growing extra tits and twerking' after two rounds of generation — the company dismissed her concerns as 'very cringe to be bringing up' and said there was nothing it could change.
- Ghost in the Machine argues the term 'artificial intelligence' was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956 purely to secure funding, and remains a 'marketing term' that has taken on cultural meaning it doesn't technically deserve.
- In the Sora Slack, Veatch watched a woman of color raise concerns that the model 'whitewashed' her while preserving her braids and fashion — a post that received zero reactions in a channel that normally lit up with 'dozens of screaming koala emoji' on every message.
- Veatch deliberately excluded tech CEOs from the film, saying sitting down with someone like Sam Altman would require 'ideological gymnastics' that would amount to 'propaganda' rather than a truthful examination of the technology.
- Ghost in the Machine will stream on Kinema from March 26 to March 28 before airing on PBS later this fall.
Why it matters: The documentary lands at a moment when generative AI is being woven into everyday life and its makers are aggressively promoting its inevitability. By tracing modern machine learning back to Galton's eugenic measurements of African and European women, Veatch reframes the industry's origin story from one of neutral technical progress to one steeped in discredited race science — a challenge that, given OpenAI's documented dismissal of her complaints, the companies building this technology show little interest in engaging.
