A Filmmaker Made a Sam Altman Deepfake—and Got Unexpectedly Attached

The director of Deepfaking Sam Altman created a “Sam Bot” when he couldn’t get an interview with the OpenAI CEO. Watch an exclusive trailer for the documentary, which comes out in January.

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 ...