For Roadrunner, Morgan Neville’s new documentary on the life of the late chef Anthony Bourdain, he poured over hundreds of hours of footage. But when he wanted to get Bourdain’s voice over an email Bourdain had written, he couldn’t find any audio recordings. So he used artificial intelligence to make it up. “I created an A.I. model of his voice,” Neville told The New Yorker. He said he stitched an audio telling of the email using different clips of Bourdain’s narration. But when he couldn’t find enough to form a string of three quotes, he contacted a software company to build the model. “If you watch the film... you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” he said. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
The move sparked a flurry of conversation on social media, with some debating the ethics of recreating someone’s voice after their death for a non-fiction film. The article also touched upon Bourdain’s relationship with Asia Argento, depicting her as an object of Bourdain’s obsession.
Read it at The New Yorker
