Veatch's 'Ghost in the Machine' ties AI to eugenics history

Valerie Veatch's Ghost in the Machine, which premiered at Sundance on January 26, 2026, spends 110 minutes arguing that current AI is less a break with the past than a continuation of a specific ideological lineage. The film traces that lineage back to the eugenicist mathematical models of Karl Pearson.

The case is carried by nearly 40 interviewees, including Adam Becker, Emily M. Bender, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Alix Dunn, and Tiera Tanksley. Machine learning, Dixon-Román says in the film, "emerged specifically out of eugenics." The documentary also treats "artificial intelligence" itself as a pitch, crediting John McCarthy with coining the term in the 20th century as marketing language for investors. Its opening set piece is Microsoft's 2016 Tay chatbot, which the film uses to show how quickly a system trained on the open internet absorbs its worst content.

Reception has been mixed but engaged: Rotten Tomatoes lists a 78% positive score from 18 critics per the Wikipedia entry), and TheWrap's Chase Hutchinson called it "a radical, necessary Molotov cocktail of a documentary."

Veatch, who says she began the project after being invited to test an AI filmmaking tool, told the Sundance Institute the film is "an urgent piece, and it is from the heart." Two researchers on our Who's Who radar had already surfaced the YouTube cut inside our directory. Tanksley, one of the interviewees, offers the counter many reviewers pick up on: "One of the myths is that our future has already been determined, and we are helpless in it."