{"id":615360,"date":"2026-06-01T14:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T14:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/615360\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T14:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T14:25:09","slug":"ghost-in-the-machine-review-entertaining-ai-polemic-dives-into-its-dark-history-in-race-politics-and-eugenics-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/615360\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost in the Machine review \u2013 entertaining AI polemic dives into its dark history in race politics and eugenics | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Director Valerie Veatch made her name with documentaries such as Love Child<\/a> (about an online gaming-addicted couple whose child died of malnutrition) and Me at the Zoo<\/a> (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).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s recent courtroom brawl, but that doesn\u2019t detract from the thrust of Veatch and her interviewees\u2019 arguments.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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\u2019t really elucidate how their work is adversely affecting them.<\/p>\n

The most amusing device is to have capitalised, Helvetica-font text in the upper-right corner throughout, letting the viewer know whether what we\u2019re seeing is AI or NOT AI, because, Veatch says<\/a>, so many people can\u2019t tell the difference any more.<\/p>\n

Ghost in the Machine in UK cinemas from 5 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Director Valerie Veatch made her name with documentaries such as Love Child (about an online gaming-addicted couple whose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-615360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}