Keanu Reeves Calls Out “Scary” Deepfakes & AI Technology

Armando Tinoco
·2 min read

Keanu Reeves is opening up about what he thinks of DeepFake and AI technologies. The Matrix star is opposed to tech that he even added a clause in his contract so editors don’t manipulate his performance.

“I don’t mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit. But early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the ’90s, I had a performance changed,” Reeves told Wired. “They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, ‘I don’t even have to be here.'”

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Reeves continued, “What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency. When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviors now.”

As technology continues to evolve, and we’ve all seen the viral videos of Reeves’ deep fake, the actor questions the value of the entertainment industry in the future.

“People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art. It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things,” he added. “Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us? It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation. We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.”

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