The ‘Not AI’ motif comes through robustly in the urgent tone of the punk aesthetic approach that propels Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in the Machine. Previously, her Sundance-premiering films Me @ The Zoo (HBO) and Love Child 사이버 사랑 (HBO) examined how new technologies reshape our conceptions and perceptions identity, power and culture. In her third Sundance premiere, she vigorously explores the history of how notions of artificial intelligence arose via the lens of racism, misogyny, eugenics and entrenched structures of power.
Simultaneously witty, serious and judiciously tempered, Veatch’s film offers the viewers a well-researched and accessible conversation starter for any generation — whether they are in their twenties, forties or sixties — who feels frustrated by AI’s presence or convinced that the Big Tech powers are lying in the hopes of duping the public to let the scientists handle the questions of regulation and accountability.
Veatch gathered more than 100 hours of conversations with 35 AI experts, historians, philosophers, sociologists, journalists and thinkers as the basis for the film. The title comes from a phrase coined by Oxford Professor Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book Theory of Mind as a critique of Cartesian Dualism, setting the stage for the fantasy of a thinking machine. Ryle published Alan Turing’s essay The Thinking Machine, as the editor of the Oxford Journal of Mind, where Turing pondered the question about whether or not machines can think.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Veatch talked about the provenance for Ghost In the Machine and what she envisions for her next film, which will dig into robotics and the themes surrounding transhumanism.
“This film is really a reaction to an experience I had of being asked to experiment with one of the early versions of video generators from the big AI companies when I encountered the sort of grotesque outputs and the huge racial biases,” Veatch explained, adding that she realized these companies don’t care. When she set out in January, 2025 to begin work on the project, she reached out to potential partners who demurred, explaining that they didn’t want to compromise and ongoing AI initiatives in which they were involved.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
“So I just grabbed my webcam, started reading white papers and calling and emailing people,” she said. “I was so lucky that all of these folks spent time talking to me about their work.”
As she proceeded, she became even more curious about AI’s historical origins as well as the connections between Gen X and AI, and how so many people are talking about it. The title became one of the numerous epiphanies for Veatch that have worked their way into the film. “I didn’t know about Gilbert Ryle and his connection to Alan Turing and I don’t think anyone had made that connection in any sort of published material.” After being interviewed by Veatch, Milagros Miceli, a scientist who has researched and critiqued AI’s pioneers and their utopian and transcendental claims, contacted the director, letting her know that Ryle and Turing, both confirmed bachelors, had served together during World War II. “It makes so much sense now,” Veatch explained. “The idea that machines can think is not that machines can actually think. It’s that we shifted how we represent thinking to something that is more machinic, more output based, more measurable and ultimately more like something a computer could do.”
As these ideas of super intelligence and that machines can think spread into society, then people tend to capitulate to the technology, which then opens the door that no third parties will regulate it. “We let the tech overlords do what they do and I think that’s why this film is important because it pushes back on this narrative of super intelligence and when you do that it evaporates into a fantasy and pseudoscience,” Veatch said.
Presently, a common AI chatbot is being used by individuals looking for a dating partner, young people looking discreetly for information about drugs, sex or medications and those with mental health issues and depression seeking some form of psychological support. “There will never be a single set of rules that will provide adequate service, protect the people involved, and address the context-specific risks,” Luiza Jarovsky, co-founder of the AI, Tech & Privacy Academy and one of the world’s leading voices n AI governance, has noted. “When rules are inadequate for a product or service’s risk profile, people remain unprotected, and cases of harm happen more often (as we have observed over the past three years in AI, especially in the context of mental health harm and suicide).”
Veatch agrees that public backlash could be an effective tactic to build the case for regulation. In the U.K., where Veatch resides, she said the official stance of the regulatory guidelines project has been, “We can’t regulate it because the scientists are so smart and that they only know about this technology and so they can regulate it themselves.” Likewise, Jarovsky has explained that”insufficient rules help AI companies avoid accountability for the harms their systems cause. They will argue that it is too difficult or ‘technically unfeasible’ to prevent harm (another argument we have heard multiple times in the past three years).
Veatch said there has been a groundswell of grassroots movements in the U.K. to raise the age of when children can access social media and growing demands to make it illegal to share non consensual generative AI images of any individual. Prior to the opening of Sundance, the UK House of Lords voted 261 to 150 to support an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would ban children under 16 from accessing social media. A provision indicates that social media platforms will have to implement “highly effective” age checks within 12 months. The legislation moves to the House of Commons for consideration.
The Not AI motif also anchors the critique of AI as more a marketing and branding umbrella term than as one precisely defining technology, a point that Meredith Whittaker of the Signal Foundation, made last September in an interview with Wired magazine. In the film, Veatch highlights American scientist John McCarthy, who invented the term AI in 1955 to raise money for his summer study of building a human-level intelligence system that could play chess. Veatch added that a comprehensive biography would be clarifying about McCarthy — whom she described as a “complex and interesting character” — and the contradictory mathematical realities of artificial intelligence that defy trying to define machine and super intelligence.”
Veatch said she has noticed how the frustrations about AI and its lies have spread across the demographics of age, including those who remembered when Facebook promised democratizing access to power or who thought how cool it was for Mark Zuckerberg to hang out with President Obama.
That includes her father, Kevin Veatch, who is credited with the documentary’s sound design and mix. He was most frustrated by the scenes of Kenyan data workers did not know what they were doing and they were not told about the broader picture of the project or the meaning behind it. The fact they were duped into the work they were doing really got to him, the director added.
The film repeatedly reminds viewers that the power of moral agency rests in their hands. She acknowledged that the film “doesn’t have the answers, but it pushes on the problems to the point where you have to walk out of there and stick a ‘Not AI’ pin on and [decide] I am not going to take this anymore, hopefully.” Of course, Veatch noted that there already is the precedent that has allowed moral agency to be abstracted to the corporation and the concern is that now it will be abstracted to a system where it will not be accountable.
Aware of the time constraints to get the file ready in time to submit to Sundance, Veatch made the most of the ‘lean and mean’ to completing Ghost in the Machine. As the mother of two children, four and six years old, she made the film on webcam and edited it between school runs and in the middle of the night, along with any breaks in the summer between family activities. “I didn’t have the luxury of even wondering if the choices I made were correct because I was guided by this mission and obviously this film could be so many different things.”
For her next documentary project, Veatch plans to expand upon exploring the connective philosophical tissue between the ideas at Oxford University (including Daniel Dennett who was Ryle’s last doctoral a student at the school) and the culture of Silicon Valley, especially regarding robotics, and transhumanism and implications for human autonomy in the digital age. Among the sources she has as part of the launching point is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,