Anthony Bourdain’s new documentary ‘Roadrunner’ partly relies on deepfaked audio

July 16, Roadrunner: a film about Anthony Bourdain will open in US theaters. Like many documentaries, the film brings together archival footage, including interviews and clips from shows, in an attempt to tell its subject’s story in its own words. It also includes words Bourdain never said on camera before his suicide death in 2018, and yet you will hear his voice speak them.

In an interview with , the film’s director, Morgan Neville, said he wanted Bourdain to tell three quotes where there were no recordings, so he recreated them with software instead. “I created an AI model of his voice,” he told the magazine.

It didn’t seem like an easy task either. In a separate , Neville said he contacted four different companies about the project before choosing the best one. This company provided about a dozen hours of audio to an AI model. Much of the job was deciding on the exact tone of Bourdain’s voice that Neville wanted the software to reproduce since the way the writer and travel animator narrated his handwriting changed so much over the years he was in. on the television.

Compared to some of the other ways we’ve seen AI and deepfakes used to deceive people, this isn’t the worst example, but the ethics of this one are still questionable. The film, to our knowledge, does not include a disclosure that AI was used to reproduce Bourdain’s voice. “If you watch the movie, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what other lines that the AI ​​said, and you won’t,” Neville said. The New Yorker. “We can have a documentary ethics panel on this later.” In his interview with GQ, he said Bourdain’s family told him ‘Tony would have been cool with that’, adding, ‘I was just trying to do [the quotes] relive, “