Exploring AI's Roots in Rightwing Ideology
Director Valerie Veatch, known for documentaries such as My So-Called Selfish Life (about an online gaming-addicted couple whose child died of malnutrition) and Me at the Zoo (about American vlogger Cara Cunningham), continues to investigate the intersection of real-world subcultures and internet communities. Her latest film broadens this focus to address a more urgent and universally relevant topic: the pursuit of artificial intelligence, its troubling history linked to eugenics, and its contentious value today amid a stock-market bubble inflating the worth of several AI companies to extraordinary levels.
The film primarily functions as a polemic, steering viewers toward AI skepticism through a series of compelling soundbites. However, it also acts as a clear and informative primer on the history of AI, highlighting a wide range of colorful and often eccentric figures. These include Victorian British eugenicist Francis Galton, Silicon Valley pioneer and overt racist William Shockley, and contemporary billionaire Elon Musk. Although the documentary does not cover the recent legal dispute between Musk and former ally Sam Altman, this omission does not weaken the core arguments presented by Veatch and her interviewees.
An Eclectic Group of Interviewees
The interviewees represent a diverse group, from philosophers like Johnathan Flowers, who succinctly questions the necessity of AI, to linguist Emily M Bender, who traces the origins of the term "artificial intelligence" itself. Among them, Silicon Valley historian Becca Lewis stands out by condensing complex background information into a few minutes of well-illustrated narration. Despite the richness of content, the film occasionally becomes dense, resembling a university lecture supplemented with quirky archival footage instead of PowerPoint slides. Some segments might have been better suited to long-form written journalism to provide more detail in critical areas. For instance, interviews with employees at a Nairobi-based large language model (LLM) company do not fully clarify how their work negatively impacts them.
Innovative Visual Elements
One of the film's most entertaining features is the use of capitalized Helvetica-font text in the upper-right corner throughout the documentary, indicating whether the viewer is seeing "AI" or "NOT AI." This device underscores the growing confusion many people experience in distinguishing between artificial intelligence and other content.
