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.”
