Show Notes
What if the story we have been told about AI is a false narrative?
In episode six of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with filmmaker Valerie Veatch, whose Sundance documentary 'Ghost in the Machine' traces the buried history of artificial intelligence and the structures of power that shaped it.
Ghost in the Machine navigates the torrential rapids of artificial intelligence with a mind-expanding investigative essay documentary that excavates the philosophical, cultural and political forces driving the global AI boom. The film follows a line from the history of eugenics and ideas about intelligence through the development of computing and into the systems being built today. It asks who gets to define intelligence, whose labour becomes invisible, who benefits from the systems being built, and what happens when the values of the people who build technology become embedded in the technology itself.
There is a reason we do not find Godmothers in AI, Valerie says. Because if we did, it probably would not be called AI and would work much better.
IN THIS EPISODE The buried history of artificial intelligence and the structures of power that shaped it from the beginning. What Valerie found when she joined an OpenAI artist group, what happened when she reported the racism in their outputs to the company, and how that experience became a film. Why the term artificial intelligence was invented as a marketing term in 1955, what John McCarthy actually believed about women and mathematics The historic connections between AI, eugenics and white supremacy, traced through primary sources across a century of archive. Why automating and erasing female labour has always been, in Valerie's words, the project of compute. Why the promises of superintelligence evaporate into pseudoscience the moment you push on them, and what the inevitability narrative is actually designed to accomplish. The NOT AI motif in the film, why she labelled every single frame, and how she frames it in the tradition of feminist video art that used the aesthetic of the patriarchy to critique the patriarchy. Where to locate maternal patterns of compute, what mycelium has to do with it, and why centring care might be the place to start. Valerie's Godmother: Gwen Mansfield, high school speech and drama teacher in Seattle, who modelled what it looks like to lead with gentle clarity and unapologetic integrity
WATCH GHOST IN THE MACHINE Ghost in the Machine is Valerie Veatch's documentary exploring the history, politics and power structures behind artificial intelligence. notaidoc.com
FURTHER VIEWING Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya Poet of Code, the documentary about Joy Buolamwini
FURTHER READING Meredith Whittaker, Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control, Logic Magazine: logicmag.io Emily M. Bender et al., On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI AI Snake Oil Kara Swisher on technology and proximity to power John McCarthy and the origins of artificial intelligence - Stanford Press
The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building. Across the series, we connect women from the past, present and future, tracing the ideas and patterns that link them across time. Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see. www.godmothers.ai
This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio. Producer Gianluca Allaria. Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot.
Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai Instagram: @godmothers.ai LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website) www.godmothers.ai
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