A documentary filmmaker is drawing criticism after using artificial intelligence to manufacture audio from the deceased subject of his film – former chef and television host Anthony Bourdain.
Morgan Neville used A.I. in a way known as “deepfaking,” feeding it hours of clips of Bourdain speaking, then letting the computer algorithms recreate his voice to read words Bourdain wrote but was never recorded speaking before he committed suicide in 2018.
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The audio is used in Neville’s film “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.”
The technique came to light because of a question from the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, who observed that the film seemed to have audio of Bourdain reading aloud an e-mail sent by him to his friend David Choe. Rosner asked how Neville came to possess a clip of Bourdain reading this e-mail. Neville revealed the clip was generated by deepfaking Bourdain’s voice, a decision that has raised ethical concerns.
“I created an A.I. model of his voice,” Neville told Rosner. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and you’re not going to know.”
When asked after the backlash about why he chose to recreate Bourdain’s voice with technology, Neville told Variety magazine that he was given approval to use the technique.
“There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud. With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used A.I. technology. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”
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He reiterated to GQ magazine that he got permission, getting even more specific.
“I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that,” Neville said. “And they were like, ‘Tony would have been cool with that.’ I wasn’t putting words into his mouth. I was just trying to make them come alive.”
But Bourdain’s widow sent a tweet that contradicts Neville’s claim.
“Roadrunner” opened in theaters Friday, bringing in $1.9 million at the box office and ranking 8th for the weekend.
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