Hot Docs 2026: Ghost in the Machine Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has birthed eras of innovations and trends that continue to drive the main focus of the doctrine, generate profits. Over the past few decades, such inventions as television, the internet, and advancements in machinery were areas heavily invested in by oligarchs looking for a quick return while exploiting the lower classes. Recently, after the failed attempt of the Metaverse, corporations have leaned towards artificial intelligence. Despite what many might think, it is not a new technology, but rather, one rebranded to attract the infinite number of resources available via venture capital funds. In Ghost in the Machine, director Valerie Veatch organizes a chronology of AI and its evil ideology.

In its poster’s logline, the film sells itself as the AI origin story. In the film, Veatch goes from its inception, and how it intertwines with some of the most ancient tools of repression. Dividing into chapters, she starts by associating AI with eugenics, the science developed in the 1800s that defended the superiority of races over others. The central connection is Karl Pearson, one of the most prominent faces of the eugenics, and the inventor of multiple conceptualizations of statistics. The British mathematician laid the basis of the ability to calculate the probabilities of events. It begins from the desire to understand the probability of enhancing the human intelligence, and calculating the genetic advantages in breeding women from different continents.

Consequently, the film mixes interviews with researchers from multiple fields and a range of archives, which provide a complex look at the topic under discussion. Inherently, the filmmaker’s anti-AI position is clear throughout, as the differentiation in the top right corner of the screen, stating whether the content that appears is either AI or not. In these moments, Veatch clarifies the differences between the artificially generated visual elements, and the conversations with specialists. When she utilizes interview archives, it is a counterargument to some of the statements of the philosophers, AI specialists, and computer scientists. Veatch addresses the corporate men as enemies, which she argues satisfactorily throughout the history of fascism and the hidden background of the Silicon Valley.

Ghost in the Machine has its virtues in attempting to trace the history of the AI and how it is has been a gimmick since its beginning. Its creator admits the name was a marketing tool to attract investors’ money. Yet, despite the density of the information presented, the documentary is a direct transmission of events that may tire audiences with its thick content. Arguably, it is a well-founded work that creates room for discussion with the archive. It is well researched and edited. Still, it is a film that introduces too many ideas through a structure that seems too thin towards its ending.

Nonetheless, Ghost in the Machine is director Valerie Veatch’s dissertation on the history of artificial intelligence and an utterly frontal opposition to the waste of time and resources invested in such a destructive field. Even in its excesses, she leaves audiences enough room to reflect on the sole purpose of the AI hype train: profit and the maintenance of a capitalist system.

still courtesy of Hot Docs

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Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.