But after nearly 100 days of messaging and emailing the OpenAI CEO for an interview — with no response, he claims, and after financiers pestering him to make good on his original pitch — Lough was at his wit’s end.
He was exhausted from almost every angle. “Once I got to that point, I gave up and I turned to gate-crashing OpenAI,” he says. Although he employed a similar strategy in his Emmy-nominated 2023 documentary ones– a history of industry-wide corruption in the telemarketing business – was not a filmmaking style he felt so comfortable with. “It was a fortress. I was able to slip through the gate, and immediately security caught me and physically escorted me off the premises.”
so it begins Deepfaking Sam AltmanLough’s portrait of how AI is reshaping society and his quest to talk to the man behind it. When his original plan failed he took inspiration from Altman himself. “Scarlett Johansson sparked controversy,” he says. In 2024, the actress publicly called out OpenAI for copying her voice for its new AI voice assistant Sky. “That’s when I got the idea of doing deepfakes.” (In a May 2024 statement, Altman apologized to Johansson and said that Sky’s voice “never resembled her voice”.)
What originally starts out as a simple voice clone turns into a full deepfake of Altman called Sam Bot, which Lough traveled to India to create. However, this being a laugh film, nothing goes according to plan. Without spoiling too much, Sam the bot eventually becomes his own entity, and the film dives even stranger – and revelatory – from there. “There are similarities between this film and Terminator 2: Judgment DayBut there is no violence,” he says. Lough grew up during what he calls the “AI 1.0 era.” His obsession with James Cameron terminator 2 Had a major influence on his craft.
Deepfaking Sam AltmanWhich is partly based on a New York Magazine story casting Sam Altman as the Oppenheimer of our era, includes commentary from former OpenAI security engineer Heidi Khalaf, who tells Lauff, “We’re starting to see OpenAI dipping its toes into military use, and I can’t imagine Dell-E and ChatGPT being used to support the military. It really scares me, it Given how wrong those systems are.”
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