While I’m genuinely interested in how AI as a technology might empower us as a civilization, the term itself has been so thoroughly co-opted that it’s become an unavoidable buzzword — a catchall marketing label slapped onto anything that might benefit from its selling power. That passing curiosity is what got me in the door for Ghost in the Shell at Sundance, a documentary on artificial intelligence that I expected to be mildly interesting, maybe even refreshing in an indie way. What I actually experienced was one of the most shocking and thought-provoking documentaries in recent memory.
The film opens by chronicling how, in 2016, Microsoft’s AI chatbot Tay took just 16 hours to devolve from a friendly digital assistant into an alt-right, hate-speech-spewing PR disaster before being shut down. After drawing clear parallels to other similarly radicalized AI systems, the documentary traces backward to the origins of the algorithms and formulas underpinning modern models — because if you know anything about AI, you know a system is only as good as the data it’s built on. From there, the film asks its central questions: What is artificial intelligence? Who built it? And why? And because it isn’t tied to a subscription service or corporate brand pitch, the film isn’t afraid to present some hard truths.
The documentary’s thesis is that these systems skew so rapidly toward far-right ideology because their creators — and machine learning itself — have roots in eugenics. This belief system sought to “improve” humanity’s genetic stock by preventing reproduction among those deemed “inferior,” and was often bundled with the idea that certain races were inherently more intelligent than others. Even more chilling, the film points out that long before Nazi Germany adopted and weaponized these ideas, they were already being practiced in the United States, where forced sterilization laws existed as early as 1907.
That revelation alone sent chills through me, and the way the film structures and delivers its arguments makes its conclusions difficult to dismiss.
From there, the documentary seamlessly connects how this movement not only informed but directly inspired Nazi ideology — and how, after the horrors of the Holocaust, those same ideas were simply renamed in the U.S. to distance them from the genocide they fueled. The film then follows that thread forward, showing how these ideologies, much like large language models themselves, mutated into the techno-fascism we’re grappling with today. All the while, it exposes the brutal human toll on the workers training these systems and maintaining the data centers driving the human race toward the so-called singularity.
Writer, director, and producer Valerie Veatch takes a subject that feels completely mined of fresh insight and reveals the terrifying ideology at its core. In doing so, she exposes how the biases baked into AI systems aren’t bugs, but features — hardwired by their architects to reinforce their worldview. It becomes even more disturbing when the film examines reports of AI playing a major role in ICE raids, powered by mathematical models designed less to unite us than to fracture us through apathy. Ghost in the Machine is a terrifying look into the soul of these algorithms and our future, that one you see is hard to forget.
