'Ghost in the Machine' explores AI's roots in eugenics

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Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman. On this episode of KPBS Midday Edition, a new documentary from PBS Independent Lens traces the origins of artificial intelligence to eugenics. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing all about fears around AI and its potential dangers for humanity. But some experts say that talking about a hypothetical AI doomsday is really a distraction from real harms we're seeing today. A new documentary from PBS Independent Lens traces the origins of artificial intelligence and its eugenics roots. The film is called Ghost in the Machine.

Standard deviation, correlation, the logit model, logistic regression, emerged specifically out of eugenics.

We started to define human cognition in machinic terms.

A man's brain might work as a machine. Our descendant will not be the child of the loin, but the child of the brains, the thing we call the computer.

I'm joined now by the film's director, Valerie Veach. Welcome to Midday Edition, Valerie. Thank you for having me. So glad to have you here. Let's start with the origin story for this film. What inspired it?

So probably about a year and a half ago now, one of my good friends from university signed me up for this invitation-only artist's working group for a secret AI company, and this was going to transform filmmaking. And It was Sora, OpenAI Sora, before they had launched the product. And in interacting with this generative AI technology, so-called, you know, I kind of was stunned by how the reality of this tech was a, you know, producing highly racist, highly sexist images, which is no secret. But I was very astonished that this didn't seem to bother the company. And I couldn't really get any answers like, why is it doing this? And why is this a product that you can ship? And so I started to do some research. And out of that research came this film. I was really fortunate that so many wonderful experts across many fields took the time to chat with me. And out of those conversations came this film.

Wow. Well, this documentary, I mean, it takes us back to the beginning to explore who built AI and why. And we quickly learn that AI is rooted in eugenics, the racist pursuit of selective breeding that emerged in the 1880s. Can you connect the dots for us between eugenics and the origins of AI?

There are two threads here. One is the use of statistical algorithms in machine learning. And a lot of these algorithms, as we heard in that clip that you played, come directly from the eugenic project. And I think one of the interesting elements there is that the act of of producing a data point than to find similar data points is a very political act and a very loaded act. And I think sometimes we look at machine learning as this neutral set of algorithms, but that's just simply not the case. And then the other track that's quite interesting is we