Deep fakes and AI have grown leaps and bounds over the past several years. The technology has grown mature enough to the point that mainstream media such as films and TV shows regularly use them during post-production.
While deep fake and AI technology are now readily available, some actors prefer to do things the traditional way. Keanu Reeves, best known for his role in Matrix and John Wick film series, prefers to keep his distance from digitally altered performances.
The actor recently expressed his intention to keep his performances away from using such technologies. In an interview with Wired, Reeves shared that he added a clause in his contract that disallows digital manipulations of 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 said. "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 actor added, "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."