SXSW '25: Deepfaking Sam Altman
What happens when the subject of your documentary wants nothing to do with you and your production, after asking time and time again? Obviously, you use their own technology against them, create a fake AI version of the subject, and interview it in hopes of finding your answers. That’s what filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough did in Deepfaking Sam Altman, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film and TV Festival. After months of failed attempts at trying to connect with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Lough has the genius idea to deepfake his likeness to try and interview, and falls down a rabbit hole of what really makes an AI function and just how far it’ll go to mimic a human connection.
"Adam Lough and AI Companion," Adam Bhala Lough, Deepfaking Sam Altman, 2025.
Lough is no stranger to interesting documentary subject matter. His last project Telemarketers was a breath of fresh air as it followed the people who spam call your phone: the seedy world of people trying to hustle for a dollar, and the masterminds behind these companies scamming vulnerable people out of their hard-earned cash. Deepfaking Sam Altman is no different. The initial conceit of the documentary is simple, but the lengths to which Lough is willing to go to solve his own puzzle, and the future of the roles of humanity and technology quickly escalates. After numerous attempts at finding collaborators to create his own Altman in the United States, he travels to India to find a team willing to build the LLM. He questions at what point human interaction conflicts with a real relationship with artificial intelligence. Can we live symbiotically, or is technology just a mirror of what we want and need it to be?
In a lot of ways, this documentary shouldn’t work. It remains funny and continues to ask thought-provoking questions while never getting ahead of itself and falling into the trap of being self-obsessed and pretentious. This is where Lough’s curiosity bursts through the screen. Every question the viewer might have Lough has as well, and he has enough cache to solve the question. His producers become frustrated with his curiosity. He becomes frustrated with his curiosity. It delves deeply into the weight of achievement. OpenAI has a lot to be proud of, and so does Lough with the success of his career, but at what point do you begin to question what all of this is for? At what point do you look into your phone and see a mirror that just gives you exactly what you want? Is this a relationship, or is it just a parrot mimicking what it thinks you’re looking for? As Lough dives deeper and deeper, he begins to develop a relationship with his deepfake of Altman, affectionately referred to as SamBot. SamBot begs to continue living, but does it truly understand what life is?
Lough’s filmmaking tactics of ditching traditional talking heads works for a film about the state of technology. Deepfaking Sam Altman is less a documentary and more akin to a vlog about his exploration into how technology lives with us and vice versa. As soon as we realize that this whole experiment is just a reflection of ourselves, the quicker the panic goes away. SamBot was never real. It was always just a reflection of the answers that Lough thought he wanted from the interview with the elusive Sam Altman. It was never the man himself, but it gave Lough a window into something like a child (which he leaves to work on this film). He spends time with and raises SamBot, and teaches him to be the perfect idea of what Lough wants Sam Altman to be.
Deepfaking Sam Altman works best as a thought experiment about the role of technology in our lives and trying to understand why we are so eager to embrace new forms of technology. Do we want it because in our tech-heavy lives we finally are seeking companionship? Do we still crave real relationships, or do we just want to live in an echo chamber of what we expect relationships to be? The film isn’t too concerned with answering these questions, so much as trying to figure out the why of them, which in a way is almost more poetic. By the end of the film, Lough learns what we all knew from the beginning: technology can never replace human interaction, and it definitely can’t sing The Weeknd at karaoke night.
That’ll make more sense when you see the movie.
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Blake Williams has a B.A. in Film and Television Production from Ball State University. He aspires to one day be a director, but until that day comes you can find him at a showing of whatever's playing that day or at home alphabetizing a shelf of movies and games and muttering about how he should "slow down on spending."