Adam Bhala Lough did not set out to create a film about a digital simulation of Sam Altman.
After about 100 emails and texts, the OpenAI CEO for an interview—with no response, he claims, and with financiers hounding him to make good on his original pitch—Lough was at his wit’s end.
He had explored every possible angle. “Once I reached that point, I gave up and I pivoted to gate-crashing OpenAI,” He says. He had used a similar strategy in the Emmy nominated documentary 2023 Telemarketers—a chronicle of industry-wide corruption in the telemarketing business—it wasn’t a filmmaking style he felt all that comfortable with. “It was a fortress. I was able to slip through the gate, and immediately security grabbed me and physically removed me from the premises.”
The journey begins Sam Altman: Deepfaking the real Sam AltmanLough’s portrait of how AI is reshaping society Altman himself, and his desire to find out who he was. Altman inspired him when his plan went awry. “The Scarlett Johansson controversy erupted,” “He says.” He says that in 2024 the actress publicly called out OpenAI Sky, the AI assistant that Sky has created to replace her with. “It was at that point where I got the idea to do the deepfake.” In a year 2024 statementAltman said Sky Johansson’s voice was a mistake and apologized. “never intended to resemble” hers.)
Lough’s initial voice-clone becomes a complete deepfake, Sam Bot. He travels to India for the creation of this fake. As this is a Lough movie, however, things don’t go according to plan. Without spoiling too much, Sam Bot eventually becomes its own entity, and the film takes an even stranger—and revelatory—dive from there. “There’s parallels between this movie and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but there’s none of the violence,” He says. Lough was born during the turbulent times he describes. “AI 1.0 era.” James Cameron is his obsession Terminator 2 It was an important influence in his work.
Sam Altman: Deepfaking the real Sam AltmanThe. New York Magazine story Heidy Klaaf tells Lough how former OpenAI Safety Engineer Heidy Khalaaf describes Sam Altman’s role as Oppenheimer for our time. “We’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.”
