"When director Adam Bhala Lough decided to make a film about artificial intelligence, he knew who his lead interviewee needed to be: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "I have a premonition that Altman is going to be as big as Steve Jobs at some point in the future," Lough told Fortune. "I'm betting that Sam Altman is going to be in that ilk of people who change the world for better or worse." But despite promising studios the interview and being fresh off an Emmy nomination for his previous docu-series, 'Telemarketers,' Altman wouldn't return Lough's various calls, texts, and emails. So he did the next best thing: He deepfaked him."
"'I'd been thinking about deepfaking him for a while,' Lough says. 'The Scarlett Johansson thing really just gave me license to do it. Like he did this to her, so I'm going to do it to him.' (OpenAI said at the time that the voice was created with a professional voice actor, but ultimately removed the Johansson-like voice from ChatGPT )."
"Lough flew to India to create the deepfake-presumably because no U.S. companies would take on the project-hired an actor to play Altman, and used ChatGPT to generate a script (which Lough called "surprisingly good" and "definitely scary.") Then the pair sat down for an extensive interview, which over weeks of filming turned into a strange friendship and the basis of the new film, Deepfaking Sam Altman."
Director Adam Bhala Lough sought an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman but could not reach him, so he created a deepfake of Altman to conduct an interview. Altman had recently been fired and rehired in 2023 and faced a legal dispute with Scarlett Johansson over a ChatGPT voice that resembled her. Lough traveled to India, hired an actor, and used ChatGPT to generate a surprisingly effective and unsettling script. Filming the fake interview evolved into an unexpected friendship and became the foundation for the film Deepfaking Sam Altman. Lough reported learning little about Altman personally but significant insights about the AI technology involved.
Read at Fortune
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