"A radical, necessary Molotov cocktail of a documentary that's being thrown right into the heart of our nonsense, nightmarish world of overinflated AI hype” - Chase Hutchinson
TICKETS £14.50 (inc booking fee)
What do we mean when we talk about intelligence? Is it something that can be measured, ranked or reduced to a number? If we cannot even agree on what intelligence is, what exactly do we mean by artificial intelligence? Before we can debate AI's promises or dangers, we first have to examine the assumptions hidden inside the language itself, and ask who defined those assumptions, and to what end.
Ghost in the Machine is a provocative and urgent investigative documentary that challenges the dominant story of artificial intelligence. Rather than treating AI as an inevitable technological revolution, director Valerie Veatch traces its intellectual and political origins, arguing that many of the ideas underpinning AI were shaped by histories of eugenics, scientific racism and the pursuit of quantifying human worth. The film contends that today's AI systems inherit more than technical innovations, they also inherit the values and ideologies embedded in their creation.
Drawing on interviews with historians, philosophers, computer scientists and journalists, Veatch follows these threads from nineteenth-century efforts to measure intelligence and classify human beings through to Silicon Valley's contemporary visionaries. Along the way, she connects the legacies of figures such as Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and William Shockley to today's AI boom, asking difficult questions about who builds these systems, whose interests they serve, and how power is encoded in the technologies increasingly shaping everyday life—from algorithmic decision-making to chatbots like Grok.
Passionate, persuasive and unapologetically polemical, Ghost in the Machine is as much an invitation to question the language of AI as it is a history of the technology itself. While public debate often centres on speculative futures of super-intelligence and sentient machines, Veatch insists that the most pressing issues are already here: exploited labour, environmental costs, embedded bias and the concentration of technological power. Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, this is a timely and compelling challenge to the myths surrounding one of the defining technologies of our age.
valerie veatch
Valerie is an acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker.
She has written, directed, and produced three Sundance Film Festival premiering documentaries, Ghost in the Machine, Me @ The Zoo, and Love Child .
Veatch is a graduate of the New School for Social Research with a degree in Culture and Media Studies. Her award-winning work interrogates Tech.
This event will take place at Wagner Hall, Brighton. There is a licensed bar and wheelchair access available at this venue.
DOORS OPEN : 18:30
SCREENING : 19:00 (Running time: 110mins)
LIVE Q&A : 20:50