vHopeful Conversations Podcast
vHopeful Conversations Podcast

Ghost in the Machine: "I think the bravery and boldness to think outside the box, to create outside the box, and to trust that you’ll find your audience...that is what resonates right now."

03 July 2026 42:25 Vanessa Hope

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About this episode

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with filmmaker Valerie Veatch about her Sundance 2026 documentary Ghost in the Machine. We dive into the dirty wiring behind today’s AI boom—its roots in eugenics and race science, its extraction‑driven infrastructures, and the white male techno‑fantasies shaping it. Veatch unpacks how a “secret” artist program around OpenAI’s Sora jolted her from curiosity to resistance, why she chose a scrappy, Zoom‑based, self‑funded film over platform‑friendly series formats, and how archival discoveries (from Norbert Wiener to Claude Shannon) reveal an unbroken line between so‑called neutral data and explicitly racist projects. She connects Kenyan data‑labeling sweatshops, water‑hungry data centers, and venture‑funded rationalists in Silicon Valley into a single story about power, misogyny, and the abandonment of the earth. Above all, she makes a bracing case for refusal—arguing that saying no to AI in our workflows, schools, and cultural institutions is not Luddite panic but a necessary act of care, clarity, and democratic self‑defense.



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