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The Bourdain AI furore shouldn’t overshadow an effective, complicated film - The Guardian

The Bourdain AI furore shouldn’t overshadow an effective, complicated film - The Guardian

Jul 21, 2021 2 mins, 0 secs

Despite anger over a decision to deepfake the voice of the much-loved star in a new documentary it’s a haunting and difficult film that deserves to be seen.

Given the intense connection to the chef turned TV personality felt by his fans, and the shock of his death, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain, a bracing, graceful new documentary on Bourdain that features his inner circle, was going to be met sensitively.

In interviews with the New Yorker and GQ, the film’s director, Morgan Neville, revealed that he fed 10 hours of Bourdain’s voiceovers into an AI model for narration of emails Bourdain wrote, totaling about 45 seconds.

Some outright dismissed the film, which grapples with Bourdain’s less palatable qualities – his obsessiveness, his flakiness, his gnawing impostor syndrome.

“When I wrote my review I was not aware that the film-makers had used an AI to deepfake Bourdain’s voice,” tweeted Sean Burns, a film critic from Boston’s WBUR who reviewed the film negatively.

Neville did not exactly help matters with his comment to the New Yorker that “We can have a documentary ethics panel about it later,” which felt more flippant than considered.

(In response to Neville’s claim in GQ that he checked with Bourdain’s widow and literary executor “just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, Tony would have been cool with that,” Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Busia tweeted: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”) If you know which lines to look for, you can hear how the AI voice is a touch stiffer, and a twitch higher, than the real one.

As Sam Gregory, a film-maker turned non-profit director on ethical applications of video and technology, pointed out in an interview with Helen Rosner in the New Yorker on the ethics of the AI voice, no one blinks an eye when a narrator in a documentary reads a letter written in the civil war.

The AI model of Bourdain’s voice, for three lines, is a questionable artistic choice, for sure.

It’s also clear that including Argento’s interviews, if she agreed, would have dragged the film into a litigation of Bourdain’s death rather than an exploration of his life.

Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain is out in US cinemas now and in the UK later this year

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