The gen AI Kool-Aid tastes like eugenics

Like many people, director Valerie Veatch was intrigued when OpenAI first released its Sora text-to-video generative AI model to the public in 2024. Though she didn’t fully understand the technology, she was curious about what it could do, and she saw that other artists were building online communities to share their new AI creations. The hope of connecting with people drew Veatch into the AI space, but once she was there, she was shocked to see how often the technology would generate images dripping with racism and sexism.

Veatch was even more unsettled by the way her new AI-enthusiast peers did not seem to care that the machine they rallied around spewed out hateful, bigoted garbage without being explicitly prompted to do so. The bizarre situation drove Veatch away from her early experimentation with gen AI. But it also inspired her to make Ghost in the Machine, a new documentary about the technologies and schools of thought that laid the groundwork for gen AI’s existence.

Instead of focusing on the potential (if highly improbable) benefits to society that gen...