{"id":356259,"date":"2025-12-18T15:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T15:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/356259\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T15:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T15:40:07","slug":"a-filmmaker-made-a-sam-altman-deepfake-and-got-unexpectedly-attached","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/356259\/","title":{"rendered":"A Filmmaker Made a Sam Altman Deepfake\u2014and Got Unexpectedly Attached"},"content":{"rendered":"

Director Adam Bhala Lough didn\u2019t set out to make a documentary about a digital simulacrum of Sam Altman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But after about 100 days of texting and emailing the OpenAI<\/a> CEO for an interview\u2014with no response, he claims, and with financiers hounding him to make good on his original pitch\u2014Lough was at his wit\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d exhausted just about every angle. \u201cOnce I reached that point, I gave up and I pivoted to gate-crashing OpenAI,\u201d he says. Though he\u2019d employed a similar tactic in his Emmy-nominated 2023 documentary Telemarketers\u2014a chronicle of industry-wide corruption in the telemarketing business\u2014it wasn\u2019t a filmmaking style he felt all that comfortable with. \u201cIt was a fortress. I was able to slip through the gate, and immediately security grabbed me and physically removed me from the premises.\u201d<\/p>\n

So begins Deepfaking Sam Altman, Lough\u2019s portrait of how AI is reshaping society<\/a> and his quest to talk to the man behind it. When his original plan fell through he drew inspiration from Altman himself. \u201cThe Scarlett Johansson controversy erupted,\u201d he says. In 2024, the actress publicly called out OpenAI<\/a> for seeming to copy her voice for its new AI voice assistant Sky. \u201cIt was at that point where I got the idea to do the deepfake.\u201d (In a May 2024 statement<\/a>, Altman apologized to Johansson and said Sky\u2019s voice was \u201cnever intended to resemble\u201d hers.)<\/p>\n

What originally starts out as a simple voice clone balloons into a full deepfake of Altman called Sam Bot, which Lough travels to India to have created. This being a Lough film, though, nothing goes according to plan. Without spoiling too much, Sam Bot eventually becomes its own entity, and the film takes an even stranger\u2014and revelatory\u2014dive from there. \u201cThere’s parallels between this movie and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but there’s none of the violence,\u201d he says. Lough grew up during what he calls the \u201cAI 1.0 era.\u201d His obsession with James Cameron\u2019s Terminator 2 was a major influence on his craft.<\/p>\n

Deepfaking Sam Altman, which is based partially on the New York Magazine story<\/a> casting Sam Altman as the Oppenheimer of our age, features commentary from former OpenAI safety engineer Heidy Khlaaf, who tells Lough, \u201cWe’re starting to see OpenAI dip its toes in military uses, and I cannot imagine something like Dall-E and ChatGPT being used for military assists. That really scares me, given how inaccurate those systems are.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Director Adam Bhala Lough didn\u2019t set out to make a documentary about a digital simulacrum of Sam Altman.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[181,236,10167,88,1877,206,1283,2540,7047],"class_list":{"0":"post-356259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-documentaries","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-machine-learning","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-openai","15":"tag-robots","16":"tag-sam-altman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}