Review: Ghost in the Machine by Valerie Veatch

Editors

The film *Ghost in the Machine* (2026) unearths a surprising history of artificial general intelligence, commonly known as AGI. In a dense, wide-ranging series of interviews with activists and academics, the filmmakers trace the long history of AI hype.

The fantasy of AGI and ASI, artificial super intelligence, is at the core of the sales pitch behind AI development. Data center construction, according to the hype, brings us closer to “the singularity"—the moment when computers don't just outperform humans on thing like programming or mathematics, but become as smart, or smarter, than humans "in general." But what is "general intelligence"?

The film reveals that the ‘G’ in AGI derives directly from the "g factor," a concept invented in the early 1900s by the eugenics movement. Eugenics (etymologically, "good genetics") is a white supremacist movement created by upper-class British and Anglo-Americans to "measure intelligence" in order to justify and strengthen their pre-existing belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority.

The film traces the Holocaust, the systematic sorting and selective elimination of the German population, back to the Nazis’ original inspiration: the American eugenics movement. This movement’s enduring legacy is visible today through IQ, standardized testing, the concept of general intelligence, and its modern iteration, AGI.

The academic voices driving the film offer a range of historical and contemporary critiques of AI technology. And while this is perhaps more of an issue with academia than the filmmakers, at times the contributions feel abstract and out-of-touch. Backgrounded by dramatic music, the film closes by encouraging viewers to simply limit their personal AI use—an oddly disempowering conclusion in an era of mass data center resistance.

Regardless, Ghost in the Machine is a valuable contribution to the movement. As people from across the political spectrum find themselves organizing alongside people they wouldn't normally discuss politics with, opportunities are arising for interesting new conversations. And by connecting AI and race with historical precision, the film offers a useful antidote to Americans’ frequently blurry approach to anti-racism.

AGI's undisputably eugenicist origins contextualize issues at the fault lines of the data center movement's fragile post-culture-war consensus. How will the rising mass critique of surveillance intersect with ICE’s use of AI to target immigrants—or with the legal system’s obsession with mentally ill, socially deviant, and non-white populations, in the long-standing eugenicist tradition?

The strange new coalitions of the data center movement offer the possibility for new conversations. What will we make of that potential? Only time will tell. For our part, we have found Ghost in the Machine to be an invaluable tool for sparking critical dialogues in our respective organizing communities, and we invite you to contact the filmmakers at ghostinthemachine2026@gmail.com to coordinate screenings of your own!