GoKawiilAI on the Lot, the tech conference focused entirely on AI and filmmaking, took place at Amazon MGM Studios in Culver City last week. I was there for part of the sold-out event among nearly 2,500 people, who were all milling about from soundstages to theaters to get educated on everything artificial intelligence can do for Hollywood.
Human creativity, intent, identity and impact were not front and center in the panel conversations I attended. I made it a point to make these topics a focal point of my sidebar chats with various AI representatives. The most eye-opening of these interviews was with Luke Arrigoni, CEO of Loti AI -- a company that scours the internet for deepfakes of people (celebrities and otherwise) and takes them down.
Do you want to protect your likeness online? Luke is the guy to call.
A deepfake is basically a digital forgery of someone's likeness, whether it's the use of their face, voice or the whole package, to make content, like pictures, videos and audio recordings.
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the performers' union of which I'm a member, went on strike in 2024. The threat of generative AI using a performer's likeness without consent or compensation was -- and still is, if I'm being honest -- an existential concern.
Deepfakes don't just affect performers and celebrities, though. AI tools on social media are fertile ground for such, whether it's for spreading misinformation on TikTok or for the nonconsensual nudifying of images of people, as happened earlier this year with Elon Musk's Grok AI tool.
Arrigoni (who was featured in Forbes's Next 1000 list in 2021) met me outside the Culver Theater. Sporting a crisp blazer and casual button-down, he had a welcoming yet no-nonsense demeanor that made me hopeful our conversation would disrupt the monotony of the event's AI worship. It did.
I think probably in the next year or two, it'll be impossible to distinguish what is fake or not. Luke Arrigoni, CEO of Loti AI
We ducked away from the conference hustle and bustle to talk about everything from the boilerplate details of his company to the fear surrounding AI and the guardrails needed to keep it from destroying humanity -- his words, not mine. During a convention filled with techno-optimism about a technology many fear and refuse to understand, Arrigoni cut through the noise to get to what really matters.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
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