A fast-paced Sundance documentary traces how modern AI’s obsession with “intelligence” and innovation is rooted in the eugenicist, sexist and racial hierarchies that have long shaped Silicon Valley and its technologies.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
Ghost in the Machine, a fast-paced, captivating documentary directed by Valerie Veatch and presented as part of Sundance’s NEXT program, opens with Antonio Gramsci’s famous quote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
It’s an apt beginning for a film that interrogates just how monstrous the tech booms that have marked the last few decades have become—and their troubling origins.
Eugenics itself, with its system of measuring racialized traits to determine things like how to ‘breed’ the ‘best’ humans, relies on a set of algorithms—the same kinds of algorithms behind many philosophies of machine learning.
Ghost offers an impressive array of news clips, archival footage, interviews with experts ranging from anthropologists and historians to computer scientists and philosophers, and plays with its own aesthetics and audio to drive the film’s points home. The film guides viewers through a multi-staged history, culminating in a dizzying revelation that today’s fascination with artificial intelligence is propped up by a sexist and racist vision of the world, in which some people are deserving of wealth and power and others are not.
Although AI has been hailed by some as part of a golden age of technology, Ghost persuasively explains how the idea of “artificial intelligence,” which started out as an empty marketing term, relies on an understanding of “general intelligence,” which is bound up in the eugenics movement. After all, how can intelligence be generalized, or even measured, without metrics for determining who or what demonstrates human-level intelligence, and what that even means?
Eugenics itself, with its system of measuring racialized traits to determine things like how to “breed” the “best” humans, relies on a set of algorithms—the same kinds of algorithms behind many philosophies of machine learning. And IQ tests, which supposedly test a person’s general reasoning and logic, also stem out of eugenics—the same eugenics movement that led some states in the early 20th century to legalize forced sterilization of those deemed “feeble minded” or undesirable members of the popular and also inspired the Nazi programs of extermination in the 1930s and 1940s.
Even though eugenics, rightfully, fell out of favor after World War II, Ghost chronicles the way its logics, as well as underlying misogyny and white supremacy, lurk at the edges of technological innovation in the United States from the founding of Silicon Valley to the newest AI craze.
Silicon Valley spawned a mythology around the (mostly) male “innovators” behind the Internet, Web 2.0, social media and AI. According to Ghost, this worship of so-called genius sustains an environment in which power begets more power, and women and people of color are secondary to the desires of a wealthy white male elite. This mindset leads to predatory practices like data mining, exploitation, surveillance, crypto and digital colonialism: tech companies outsourcing their work to impoverished communities around the globe.
… Today’s fascination with artificial intelligence is propped up by a sexist and racist vision of the world, in which some people are deserving of wealth and power and others are not.
While AI is treated like it’s a miraculous blend of magic and science, it’s actually running off human labor and data—not to mention its environmental, cultural and political costs. It uses a tremendous amount of water, has the concerning power to shape people’s perception of reality, and allows a small group of men to control so much of what we perceive as truth, online and off.
Ghost should be required viewing for anyone who blithely interacts with AI chatbots or asks ChatGPT to write their emails without considering its real-world and very human costs. After all, humans have agency, the film reminds us, and there’s still hope for a future in which we get to use it.
