The world has gotten smaller as the internet age has given people greater access to each other than ever before. As various food cultures started to get more exposure within the United States, one of the country’s best cultural ambassadors was the late Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain’s punk-rock/no-nonsense take on the travel show led him to become one of the most recognizable and authentic people on American television. His self-deprecating humor and willingness to do almost anything to embed himself into the cultures he was exploring always made for compelling television, including stumbling upon dangerous situations on more than one occasion.
A new documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?“) is making the rounds and hopes to highlight the journeyman’s life traveling the world, giving a glimpse of places that many of us will never be able to experience first-hand.
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The filmmaker has revealed something unsettling that potentially crosses ethical lines while speaking with GQ, as Neville states they used A.I. to resurrect Bourdain’s voice, who tragically died by suicide in 2018.
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“We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an A.I. model. The bigger the quantity, the better the result. We worked with four companies before settling on the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: His speaking voice versus his ‘narrator’ voice, which itself changed dramatically over the years,” Morgan Neville told GQ.
He continued to point out that he got approval to do this, “I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. 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.” Worth noting, the words Neville used were Bourdain’s own.
Distributor Focus Features is clearly feeling uneasy and sent this statement to Entertainment Weekly about the use of A.I. in the doc.
“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.”
Despite getting approval from the estate, does it make it right to use someone’s voice/likeness by artificial means without their consent? This could always become a slippery slope and used for more nefarious reasons as people get more comfortable using A.I. constructs, and it starts to become more of an ethical issue because not everyone will use this for good.
It’s a complicated moral quandary as it invokes the ghoulish advertisements that use resurrected celebrities to sell vacuum cleaners and candy. A recent example is recreating the iconic Bruce Lee (who didn’t drink) digitally for a Johnnie Walker ad.