Keanu Reeves is worried about deepfaking. No stranger to the perils of the digital world — he made four whole movies about the terrors of sentient machines — the Matrix actor is especially concerned about how deepfake technology, increasingly common in Hollywood, threatens to chip away from the agency of screen actors. In an interview with Wired ahead of the release of John Wick: Chapter 4, Reeves put the tech to the sword, even revealing that he has built contractual measures against his performances being digitally altered.
“Yeah, digitally. I don't mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit,” Reeves said. “But early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the ‘90s, I had a performance changed. They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ’Huh?!' It was like, I don't even have to be there.”
Reeves' deepest concern is that an actor can't control what happens to them in post-production. “What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency,” the 58-year-old continued. “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," Reeves said. A recent conversation with a 15-year-old about The Matrix made Reeves realise just how normalised these technologies are becoming. Explaining to the teenager that his character, Neo, is fighting for what's real, the teen responded: “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,” Reeves said. “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 non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?”
He finished on quite the profound observation. “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation,” Reeves continued. “We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.” That philosopher's beard isn't just for looks.
