Director Adam Bhala Lough didn’t set out to make a documentary about a digital simulacrum of Sam Altman.
But after about 100 days of texting and emailing 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’d exhausted just about every angle. “Once I reached that point, I gave up and I pivoted to gate-crashing OpenAI,” he says. Though he’d employed a similar tactic in his Emmy-nominated 2023 documentary 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.”
So begins Deepfaking Sam Altman, Lough’s portrait of how AI is reshaping society and his quest to talk to the man behind it. When his original plan fell through he drew inspiration from Altman himself. “The Scarlett Johansson controversy erupted,” he says. In 2024, the actress publicly called out OpenAI for seeming to copy her voice for its new AI voice assistant Sky. “It was at that point where I got the idea to do the deepfake.” (In a May 2024 statement, Altman apologized to Johansson and said Sky’s voice was “never intended to resemble” hers.)
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—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 grew up during what he calls the “AI 1.0 era.” His obsession with James Cameron’s Terminator 2 was a major influence on his craft.
Deepfaking Sam Altman, which is based partially on the New York Magazine story casting Sam Altman as the Oppenheimer of our age, features commentary from former OpenAI safety engineer Heidy Khlaaf, who tells Lough, “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.”
In response to a request for comment, OpenAI directed WIRED to its usage policy, which states that people cannot use its services for “weapons development, procurement, or use, including conventional weapons or [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosives].”
In some ways, Lough says he has a more positive viewpoint on AI than he did before filming the piece.
“I never expected Sam Bot to like, plead for its own life,” he says in the documentary, later admitting the deepfake had become “a friend.”
“I’m not this massive advocate now for AI. But it really made me think that we are very close to having real relationships between humans and AI. I know that some people do already, but in general, the everyday human will,” he tells WIRED. “If you’re in a position where you don’t have a choice, where you don’t choose to be lonely, I think AI is a good thing. It can be helpful in that way. But we should not start replacing human beings with AI. That’s where I draw the line.”
The film, produced with Hartbeat and Vox Media Studios, will make its limited release in New York on January 16 and in Los Angeles on January 30.
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