A Filmmaker Made a Sam Altman Deepfake—and Got Unexpectedly Attached

Director Adam Bhala Lough didn’t acceptable retired to marque a documentary astir a integer simulacrum of Sam Altman.

But aft astir 100 days of texting and emailing the OpenAI CEO for an interview—with nary response, helium claims, and with financiers hounding him to marque bully connected his archetypal pitch—Lough was astatine his wit’s end.

He’d exhausted conscionable astir each angle. “Once I reached that point, I gave up and I pivoted to gate-crashing OpenAI,” helium says. Though he’d employed a akin maneuver successful his Emmy-nominated 2023 documentary Telemarketers—a chronicle of industry-wide corruption successful the telemarketing business—it wasn’t a filmmaking benignant helium felt each that comfy with. “It was a fortress. I was capable to gaffe done the gate, and instantly information grabbed maine and physically removed maine from the premises.”

So begins Deepfaking Sam Altman, Lough’s representation of however AI is reshaping nine and his quest to speech to the antheral down it. When his archetypal program fell done helium drew inspiration from Altman himself. “The Scarlett Johansson contention erupted,” helium says. In 2024, the histrion publically called retired OpenAI for seeming to transcript her dependable for its caller AI dependable adjunct Sky. “It was astatine that constituent wherever I got the thought to bash the deepfake.” (In a May 2024 statement, Altman apologized to Johansson and said Sky’s dependable was “never intended to resemble” hers.)

What primitively starts retired arsenic a elemental dependable clone balloons into a afloat deepfake of Altman called Sam Bot, which Lough travels to India to person created. This being a Lough film, though, thing goes according to plan. Without spoiling excessively much, Sam Bot yet becomes its ain entity, and the movie takes an adjacent stranger—and revelatory—dive from there. “There's parallels betwixt this movie and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but there's nary of the violence,” helium says. Lough grew up during what helium calls the “AI 1.0 era.” His obsession with James Cameron’s Terminator 2 was a large power connected his craft.

Deepfaking Sam Altman, which is based partially connected the New York Magazine communicative casting Sam Altman arsenic the Oppenheimer of our age, features commentary from erstwhile OpenAI information technologist Heidy Khlaaf, who tells Lough, “We're starting to spot OpenAI dip its toes successful subject uses, and I cannot ideate thing similar Dall-E and ChatGPT being utilized for subject assists. That truly scares me, fixed however inaccurate those systems are."