{"id":151218,"date":"2025-11-21T02:47:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T02:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151218\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T02:47:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T02:47:12","slug":"a-new-film-that-deepfaked-sam-altman-is-coming-to-theaters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151218\/","title":{"rendered":"A new film that deepfaked Sam Altman is coming to theaters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf a well-trained AI<\/a> can capture the essence of a subject, as Sam Altman<\/a> has argued, then an LLM trained on Altman should basically be him, right?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the turn-the-tables premise of Deepfaking Sam Altman, a new documentary produced and financed by Kevin Hart<\/a>\u2019s Hartbeat shingle based on a well-received New York Magazine story<\/a> about the OpenAI leader. (\u201cSam Altman Is The Oppenheimer Of Our Age,\u201d was the 2023 piece\u2019s headline.)<\/p>\n

\n\tRiding a buzzy screening<\/a> at sxsw in March, Deepfaking Sam Altman will now get an imminent release from Abramorama, the boutique theatrical distributor that has worked on acclaimed docs like The Last Class, Senna, Anvil! and Exit Through the Gift Shop, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The movie will open in New York on January 16 with a national rollout to follow. Abramorama CEO Karol Martesko-Fenster said in a statement that the film is \u201cexactly the kind of bold, culturally relevant documentary that deserves a theatrical experience.\u201d Vox Media Studios, sister company to New York Magazine, also produced.<\/p>\n

\n\tDirected and produced by Adam Bhala Lough, who was behind HBO\u2019s well-reviewed<\/a> docuseries Telemarketers in 2023, Deepfaking began when Lough optioned the magazine piece, then sought an interview with Sam Altman. Hearing crickets, he showed up, Michael Moore-ishly, to the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to try to get him there only to be promptly removed.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo Lough decided on a different path: he would train an LLM on everything Altman ever said or wrote, create a deepfake of the entrepreneur; then graft the image onto an actor and interview him. If Altman was right, this should be Altman.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis Andy Kaufman-esque plan ran aground, however, when no U.S. company would deepfake his subject. \u201cI think people are really afraid of Sam Altman,\u201d Lough said in an interview Wednesday. \u201cEvery time I\u2019d bring up his name in Los Angeles or San Francisco, people would get scared.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Punjabi-American director decided to go to India, where he has family, and found a company to do it there, where there is presumably less Altman trepidation. The result is the film, which in creating a conversation with AI Altman (he calls him \u201cSam Bot\u201d) seeks to interrogate the quickly vanishing difference between human and machine intelligence, not to mention the fungible nature of identity when machines will represent us. Lough\u2019s interview with Sam Bot showed the ways AI can capture at least the externalities of our personality if not more.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaybe even more instructive, Lough says, is the ways he learned that we need to be careful around it. \u201cMy biggest takeaway is that we need to think about AI as if we were raising a toddler,\u201d the director told THR. \u201cAs any parent knows you need to be very careful what you say around a toddler because it\u2019s soaking up everything you\u2019re saying. AI is not a adult and it\u2019s not going to take over the world but that doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t extremely powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHart is fascinated with AI himself, and executives at his company initiated contact with Lough not longer after the star watched Telemarketers, which in satirically uncovering scandal at a telemarketing sweatshop dabbles in its own themes of techno-dislocation. (Hartbeat this fall also partnered with Hollywood AI company Luma <\/a>for a \u201cLive AI Battle\u201d to create a machine-driven film in real time). In a statement, Luke Kelly-Clyne, who heads the studio at Hartbeat, said Lough\u2019s movie \u201ccaptures the curiosity we\u2019re all feeling about AI and what it means for us, but does so by turning it into a smart, funny, and surprisingly human story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to Amazon MGM\u2019s upcoming film <\/a>about Altman (Luca Guadagnino\u2019s Artificial stars Andrew Garfield in the lead role), Hollywood is reckoning with Generative AI more broadly. Studios by turns are suing AI companies<\/a> and looking to bring the tech<\/a> onto their platforms; some creators are lustily embracing it<\/a> and others declaring in-show<\/a> they won\u2019t use it.<\/p>\n

\n\tLough says that he was not trying to issue a broadside against the tech. \u201cI\u2019ve already had some people ask why I didn\u2019t slap it down more. I get this is a polarizing issue, but I also don\u2019t think it\u2019s so black and white.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSo far, at least, Lough has not heard from Altman or his lawyers. If he does, one can imagine a ChatGPT response. OpenAI\u2019s LLMs have some pretty good legal training.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If a well-trained AI can capture the essence of a subject, as Sam Altman has argued, then an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,44511,7689,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-151218","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-kevin-hart","14":"tag-sam-altman","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}