A filmmaker deepfaked Sam Altman for his movie about AI. Then things got personal

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.

At the time, Altman was at the center of a media storm. In 2023, he’d been spectacularly fired and rehired from the company, and just a few months later had become embroiled in a legal fight with Scarlett Johansson over the use of a voice for OpenAI’s ChatGPT that sounded very similar to the actress–something that pushed Lough to create his fake version of the CEO.

“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 profession...