‘John Wick’ star Keanu Reeves expressed serious concerns over advancement in deepfake technology in a recent interview with ‘Wired.’
Reeves had added a clause to his contract that demands the star’s approval before manipulating any of his scenes, ages ago.
“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. [He won’t say which.] They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, I don’t even have to be here.” The star said.
“That is scary”
Keanu further talked about deepfakes, describing them as ‘Scary’. He said, “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 behaviours now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work.”
The actor also talked about artificial intelligence. “I was trying to explain the plot of ‘The Matrix’ to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really fighting for what was real. And this young person was just like, ‘Who cares if it’s real?’ 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.”
“Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the nonvalue. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?” he added.
‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ arrives in theaters on March 24, 2023.