Each day seems to bring fresh warnings about AI – chatbots going rogue, the potential for artificial intelligence to trigger Armageddon, “bad actors” looking to leverage AI to generate bioweapons.
Even if the worst scenarios don’t materialize, the inherent bias and ideology behind AI must be acknowledged and confronted, according to the documentary Ghost in the Machine. The film directed by Valerie Veatch screened Tuesday night as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs (FTLOD) virtual series, with the filmmaker and two experts from the film – Dr. Emily Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna — taking part in a panel discussion afterwards.
Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are selling artificial intelligence “as this kind of unbiased objective type of system because it’s ‘math’ or it’s the computer and it speaks with this seemingly objective first-person voice,” Veatch noted. But that’s deeply misleading, she argues. Because AI scrapes existing information and searches for patterns in material created within a cultural context, it inevitably reflects biased attitudes underpinning that “data.”
“Associations that we see [drawn by AI] or next-word predictions are going to be rather closely tied to racist, sexist and all other sorts of biases,” commented Dr. Hanna. “One of the points the film makes really well is that it’s not just about the training data, it’s not just about biases, it’s that the systems of human sorting, of human classification were born to make these distinctions between racial groups… So, now we have the case in which these systems are really scaling that up to a huge degree and then making them on demand.”
The film traces the origins of AI to eugenics, the discredited pseudoscience that purported to show humanity would be improved by promoting the white, European gene pool (the Nazis embraced the idea). That’s not the only disturbing worldview embedded in artificial intelligence; Ghost in the Machine contends that AI is fundamentally anti-human.
“When you try to collapse what it is to be human into sort of measurable outputs, you are missing the point. And I think that’s the nihilism that I see,” Dr. Bender observed. “Both the production and also the narrative around so-called artificial intelligence is intensely dehumanizing. The play here with large language models that are set up to extrude plausible looking text is we can replace anything a person does with this machine that outputs words that look like what they might have said. And that’s basically saying you are just the words you emit. And what a sort of awful way to look at people. It hides all of the experiences of being human and also all of the relationships involved in being human.”
The film also highlights the exploitation of workers, particularly in African countries, who are paid a pittance to ingest data to “train” AI systems. And it points out the enormous resources – water and power chief among them – required to run AI “data centers.” In recent months, there has been a growing political backlash against data center projects.
Director Valerie Veatch attends the ‘Ghost In The Machine’ premiere during the Sundance Film Festival at on January 26, 2026 in Park City, Utah.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
“What’s been very exciting,” Veatch said, “since the film premiered [at Sundance] in January… there has been this massive global, visible groundswell of resistance against the very visceral, very kind of aggressive encroachment of the infrastructure around these systems. And the resistance against the data centers and the anti-data center movement is, to me, the most heartening, beautiful thing I’ve seen.”
The tech overlords want to make the body politic feel AI is taking over, like it or not. It’s “presented as inevitable,” Dr. Bender said. But she insists it doesn’t have to be. “That’s actually one of the big points of the film is that we can refuse and resist and organize against this.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
For The Love of Docs is produced with the long-time support of National Geographic Documentary Films. The series continues with weekly screenings, followed by conversations with filmmakers through December 1. Join us next week for Everybody to Kenmure Street, directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra, the story of an extraordinary incident in Scotland, where people in a Glasgow neighborhood united to stop the deportation of two immigrants, a To RSVP for the screening, click here.
