Sundance Institute's Story Forum: Exploring Art and Innovation is a space to learn, collaborate, and join the conversation; inviting thoughtful dialogue about the artist-first tools and technologies supporting visual storytelling today.


Director Valerie Veatch returns with her third film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in competition with her new documentary, Ghost in the Machine. The provocative feature exposes the buried history of artificial intelligence and entrenched structures of power that have shaped the technology.


In the second of two Story Forum sessions on the film, Veatch presents a deep-dive into the making of her documentary as well as the technology’s implications with regards to international labor issues. During this session, Veatch leads a panel discussion with four participants from the documentary: Richard Mathenge, Mophat Okiny, Krystal Kauffman, and Dr. Milagros Miceli. This conversation offers insight into finding and shaping your story with your documentary participants, and proves essential for those interested in the systems surrounding the development of AI.


Explore Sundance Institute's Story Forum: On Demand Collection

Krystal Kauffman
Data Worker and Researcher, Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute
Krystal is a data worker and research fellow with DAIR, focused on the human labor that underpins AI systems and the ethical questions that surround them. Her work examines the often-invisible individuals who power the AI supply chain - data annotators, content moderators, and other platform-based workers - and the broader systems that shape their working conditions. more...
Richard Mathenge
Co-founder, Techworker Community Africa; Co-founder, African Content Moderators’ Union
Richard Mathenge is a former team lead in one of the well known AI organizations in Kenya. He is credited in fighting for the rights and better working conditions for Tech workers and content moderators through better regulations, workable mechanisms and policy framework. more...
Milagros Miceli
Research Lead, Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute; Founder, Data Workers' Inquiry
Dr. Milagros Miceli is a leading researcher and critical voice in the field of artificial intelligence. She currently serves as Research Lead at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, Director of the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics research group at the Weizenbaum Institute, and lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin. Her research focuses on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of AI, with particular attention to the invisible labor and power asymmetries embedded in the creation of machine learning datasets. more...
Mophat Okinyi
Co-founder and CEO, Techworker Community Africa
Mophat Okinyi is an AI and human rights activist, labor organizer, and former content moderator based in Kenya. He is the Founder and CEO of Techworker Community Africa and a leading voice organizing data and platform workers across the Global South. Mophat is one of the Kenyan workers who helped train large language models, including ChatGPT, to reduce harmful and toxic content, giving him firsthand insight into the hidden human labor behind AI. more...
Valerie Veatch
Moderator | Director, GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Hailing from London by way of New York by way of Seattle, Valere Veatch is an acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker. Veatch is a writer, director, and producer of documentaries "Me @ The Zoo" (HBO), "Love Child" (HBO). Veatch is a graduate of the New School for Social Research with a degree in Culture and Media Studies. Her award-winning work deals with the intersection of technology and society. more...
Tags:Activism & Social Impact Equity & InclusionEmerging Media

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