Neo does not want to live in a simulation.
Keanu Reeves weighed in on the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, sharing that a jarring film edit prompted him to put a clause in his contracts that prohibit performance manipulation without his consent.
“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 recalled in an interview with Wired published Tuesday. “They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, ‘I don’t even have to be here.'”
Reeves didn’t specify which performance was altered, but said that he finds deepfakes — a form of AI in which a person or existing image is replaced with another person’s likeness — “scary.”
“What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency,” the Matrix star 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.”
Did The Matrix foretell the here and now? Reeves certainly hopes not.
“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,” he said. “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.”
He continued, “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?”
Don’t expect deepfakes in John Wick: Chapter 4, which sees Reeves reprise his role as the titular hitman in the franchise sequel directed once again by Chad Stahelski, Reeves’ Matrix stuntman. Out March 24, the film will follow Reeves’ hitman as he uncovers a path to defeating the High Table, the council of crime lords who govern the underworld’s most powerful criminal entities.
However, Wick must first face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe.
“We went to five different countries, we went all over the world, and hopefully it’s a nice culmination of the first three movies in the franchise, bringing it all to a pinnacle,” Stahelski told EW of the film last year. “I think we’ve done some fresh new ideas in it, and I think we’ve driven the story to a place that will be satisfying and I think subversive to what people are used to.”
