I ended up watching the wrong movie by mistake. That’s because there is a 1993 horror movie that shares the same title as this documentary, which tells the story of a serial killer’s soul being trapped inside a computer. I had to watch this movie before finding out that it wasn’t the movie that I intended to watch. I did find Ghost in the Machine by Valerie Veatch eventually though.

This was an ordinary documentary in its own right. The usual talking heads and historical footage. Experts giving their take on things. However, there were certain elements within the documentary that caught my eye in particular.

The first one, and definitely the one that got to me the most, was on IQ tests. The documentary traces the history of the statistical revolution, the idea of quantifiable intelligence, and finally, the IQ test itself. None of those things were created objectively by scientists; rather, they were created by people who thought one race was better than another, and all of these concepts were intended to be used as proof of their superiority. The questions used in early IQ tests were literally selected based on their ability to rank people based on race. I had to stop the video when that became clear. I am a product of a society that has viewed IQ as fact, as something that can be measured in your mind. To learn that the whole process was created by eugenicists to further their agenda was utterly shocking to say the least.

Secondly, Tay. Tay was the Microsoft chatbot that emerged in 2016, and this movie illustrates how she evolved from a pleasant conversational AI to one that denied the existence of the Holocaust and promoted racism within less than twenty-four hours. This was due to a straightforward reason. Tay acquired knowledge based on the users engaging in conversations with her. She took in the average environment around her. The movie refers to this phenomenon as the hive mind. The more she heard people around her say, the more she started echoing those statements. It shattered something in my brain since I have been using AI technologies daily, and they seemed to be independent of the humans who created them. They are not. They reflect whatever they were fed, good or bad.

The third point was less impressive but it stuck. In the movie, the viewer learns that the notion of “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy back in 1955, not because the technology itself was novel or innovative, but simply because they wanted a name that would sound sophisticated enough to get investment funding. It was marketing. The underlying technology remained the same; it simply received an identity that would sell well. It took me a moment to absorb this concept. Whenever I pick up the newspaper and read yet another story on “breakthroughs in AI,” some portion of the piece is simply a 70-year-old marketing strategy working its magic.

The connection to our class is everywhere, but the one I keep coming back to is when we read articles about the environmental cost of AI. I specifically read one about the water cost, and although I do not really remember the exact number, I remember how shocking it was. Most of all I remember thinking that I had been totally unaware of it. But I also came to the realization that it would not really change the way I use AI. The matter of fact is that a lot of people will not care about anything and will not change the way they do anything until it actually affects them personally. That is something I still firmly believe in. It is not applicable to every situation in life, but it goes for most.

Honestly, I do not think I will make some big dramatic change to how I use AI after watching this. I am going to keep using these tools. They are part of my daily routine and they have a lot of technical uses that are very helpful to me. What I will do differently is pay more attention to the marketing language around them. When a company tells me their AI is “intelligent” or “objective” or “neutral,” I will remember that none of those words have ever been true for these systems. They have always been built by specific people, with specific data, for specific reasons. Awareness is not as satisfying as a clean break, but it is more honest.

Honestly, when I think about what I would add to the course, I am not sure I can point to a real gap. The class is pretty well-rounded and the topics we covered already hit most of what the film talks about. But if I had to suggest something, maybe a part where we as students think about how we would build an AI if we got the chance to. After spending a whole semester learning everything that has gone wrong with these systems, it would be interesting to flip it around. What would we do differently. What would we leave out. What would we refuse to build. I think most of my friends have never been asked that question, and it would force us to actually take ownership of the technology instead of just receiving it.

The film does not tell you to stop using AI. It tells you to look at what you are actually using, and where it came from, and who it serves. That is a question we should keep asking.