How to Survive AI
Hyperallergic reviews two feature documentaries about artificial intelligence that screened amid AI-focused programming at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, described as the festival’s last year in Park City. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine (2026) uses archival material and Zoom interviews with more than 30 journalists, researchers, and scholars to argue that “artificial intelligence” functions as a marketing term and to trace AI research to eugenicist and racist traditions of intelligence measurement. The film includes a quotation from mid-century scientist Robert Jastrow about creating “not the child of the loin but the child of the brain,” and it links early Silicon Valley figures such as William Shockley to eugenics discourse. The review also references the film’s claim that, in 2025, tech leaders aligned themselves with an increasingly racist and authoritarian Trump administration, and notes the documentary’s emphasis on historical connections between American eugenicists and Nazi Germany.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Museums Unearthed, Biennales in the Crosshairs