It will be intriguing to observe how humans navigate these technologies.” Keanu Reeves expressed his thoughts on the ascent of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, revealing that an unsettling film edit prompted him to include a clause in his contracts preventing 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 recounted 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.'”

While Reeves didn’t specify which performance was altered, he conveyed his apprehension toward deepfakes—a type of AI that replaces a person or existing image with another person’s likeness—as “scary.”

“What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency,” expressed the Matrix star. “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.”

Reflecting on The Matrix, Reeves hopes it didn’t foretell the present day. “I was trying to explain the plot of The Matrix to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really figҺting 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.”

Continuing, he remarked, “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?”

Reeves assured that John Wick: Chapter 4, set to release on March 24, won’t incorporate deepfakes. The film, directed by Chad Stahelski, Reeves’ Matrix stuntman, follows the titular hitman as he unravels a path to defeat the High Table, a council of crime lords governing powerful criminal entities. However, Wick must confront a new formidable enemy with global alliances. Stahelski anticipates the film to be a culmination of the franchise’s first three movies, introducing fresh ideas and steering the story to a satisfying and sᴜbversive conclusion.