A Filmmaker Made a Sam Altman Deepfake—and Obtained Unexpectedly Connected

Director Adam Bhala Lough didn’t set out to make a documentary a couple of digital simulacrum of Sam Altman.

However after about 100 days of texting and emailing the OpenAI CEO for an interview—with no response, he claims, and with financiers hounding him to make good on his authentic pitch—Lough was at his wit’s finish.

He’d exhausted nearly each angle. “As soon as I reached that time, I gave up and I pivoted to gate-crashing OpenAI,” he says. Although he’d employed an identical tactic in his Emmy-nominated 2023 documentary Telemarketers—a chronicle of industry-wide corruption in the telemarketing enterprise—it wasn’t a filmmaking fashion he felt all that snug with. “It was a fortress. I used to be in a position to slip by means of the gate, and instantly safety grabbed me and bodily eliminated me from the premises.”

So begins Deepfaking Sam Altman, Lough’s portrait of how AI is reshaping society and his quest to speak to the man behind it. When his authentic plan fell by means of he drew inspiration from Altman himself. “The Scarlett Johansson controversy erupted,” he says. In 2024, the actress publicly called out OpenAI for seeming to copy her voice for its new AI voice assistant Sky. “It was at that time the place I bought the concept to do the deepfake.” (In a Might 2024 statement, Altman apologized to Johansson and mentioned Sky’s voice was “by no means supposed to resemble” hers.)

What initially begins out as a easy voice clone balloons right into a full deepfake of Altman known as Sam Bot, which Lough travels to India to have created. This being a Lough movie, although, nothing goes in accordance to plan. With out spoiling an excessive amount of, Sam Bot finally turns into its personal entity, and the movie takes a fair stranger—and revelatory—dive from there. “There’s parallels between this film and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, however there’s none of the violence,” he says. Lough grew up throughout what he calls the “AI 1.0 period.” His obsession with James Cameron’s Terminator 2 was a serious affect on his craft.

Deepfaking Sam Altman, which is based mostly partially on the New York Magazine story casting Sam Altman as the Oppenheimer of our age, options commentary from former OpenAI security engineer Heidy Khlaaf, who tells Lough, “We’re beginning to see OpenAI dip its toes in army makes use of, and I can not think about one thing like Dall-E and ChatGPT getting used for army assists. That basically scares me, given how inaccurate these techniques are.”