Sundance Film Festival 2026 – Writer/director Valerie Veatch‘s Ghost in the Machine is a messy and ambitious look at AI and the foundations of its mapping patterns. It also addresses the rise of Silicon Valley and its insidious roots. The documentary doesn’t provide any easy answers or assuage concerns about the rapid advancement of AI, but it’s still eye-opening regardless.
Veatch’s film begins by showcasing the tragically funny case of Tay, an AI-powered chatbot that Microsoft launched back in 2016. They propped Tay up on Twitter, and anyone could tweet at her. Well, it didn’t take very long for Tay to start repeating antisemitic drivel. Shortly after Tay launched, Microsoft pulled the plug. The film cuts to a White House meeting from 2025 between Trump and tech bros, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just as Trump promises unlimited government funding for the expansion of AI.
Through interviews with cultural critics, theorists, computer scientists, and various academics, Veatch gives a comprehensive, if not overly ambitious deep dive, into the theories and concepts that formed the basis of AI, specifically its mapping and pattern-making coding and programing. More specifically, Veatch points out that a lot of it is based upon eugenics theories. Because some of the concepts are difficult to explain and while Veatch’s claims may seem like a stretch, it will make more sense to those who watch the film.
Simply put, the writer/director unpacks a heck of a lot of history, even addressing sweeping pro-eugenics laws in the U.S. that were then copied by the Nazis. The film examines William Shockley’s influence. He was a physicist and professor at Stanford who later pushed eugenics theories. He’s featured because some of his followers later became founders of Silicon Valley. In fact, the information about Silicon Valley probably could have been its own documentary.
There’s a lot of archival footage of theorists and scientists shown throughout the nearly two-hour runtime, and some of them will make viewers ponder where exactly AI is going. The movie doesn’t provide any answers, and instead, it’s more concerned with unpacking the unsavory roots of AI’s language and coding patterns and even the birth of Silicon Valley. There’s even old footage of a 20-something Elon Musk, before more recent footage of him railing against “the woke mind virus” is shown. Veatch certainly confronts the obsession with male power that exists within Silicon Valley, and again, that maybe could have been its own documentary.
Ghost in the Machine is broad in its scope, told in eight chapters. This is quite a big project that covers nearly 100 years, jumping from one theory to the next, unpacking some of AI’s roots. Veatch makes some wild claims here, but through interviews and archival footage, there’s enough evidence to validate them. If you already dislike AI, this documentary will give you plenty of other reasons to distrust it.
