A new documentary uses A.I. to recreate Anthony Bourdain’s voice. The ethics are complicated.
One of the machine-generated quotes in “Roadrunner” is from an email Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018, wrote to a friend: “You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”
“Roadrunner,” a new documentary about Anthony Bourdain, uses 45 seconds of an AI-generated voice that sounds like him. “You are successful, and I am successful,” the voice says, reading from an email he sent to a friend, “and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”
The director of the new Anthony Bourdain doc who used A.I. to recreate his voice told @hels, “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.” I suppose it is “later” — the documentarians are weighing in.
