Director Valerie Veatch made her name with documentaries such as Love Child (about an online gaming-addicted couple whose child died of malnutrition) and Me at the Zoo (about American vlogger Cara Cunningham), films that explore the intersection of real-world subcultures and internet communities. Her latest continues in this vein, although its self-set remit is a bit broader, more urgent and germane to everyone right now: the pursuit of artificial intelligence, its dark history in eugenics and highly debatable utility today (despite the stock-market bubble pushing the value of a half-dozen companies towards the stratosphere).
The thrust of the film is largely polemic, guiding the viewer towards AI-sceptical conclusions one persuasive soundbite at a time. Nevertheless, it also serves as a very useful, straightforward primer on AI history, touching on a dazzling array of colourful, often crazed figures, including Victorian British eugenicist Francis Galton, Silicon Valley founding father and overt racist William Shockley and current-day jillionaire jerk Elon Musk. Sadly, the film is not so up-to-date that it covers Musk and former friend-turned-foe Sam Altman’s recent courtroom brawl, but that doesn’t detract from the thrust of Veatch and her interviewees’ arguments.
As a cohort, the interviewees are an eclectic bunch, ranging from philosophers such as Johnathan Flowers, who succinctly questions whether we need AI at all, to linguist Emily M Bender, who recounts the origins of the term AI itself, to (my favourite) Silicon Valley historian Becca Lewis, who distils some immensely complex background into a few minutes of well-illustrated narration. That said, sometimes this all gets a little too dense, like a university lecture with goofy archive clips instead of PowerPoint slides, and at times might have worked better in long-form written journalism, with more detail in crucial areas. For example, the interviews with Nairobi-based LLM company employees don’t really elucidate how their work is adversely affecting them.
The most amusing device is to have capitalised, Helvetica-font text in the upper-right corner throughout, letting the viewer know whether what we’re seeing is AI or NOT AI, because, Veatch says, so many people can’t tell the difference any more.
• Ghost in the Machine in UK cinemas from 5 June.
