Fans celebrated when it was announced that a new documentary about legendary chef Anthony
Bourdain was in the works. And for the most part, "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain"
has been well received since its release, receiving 96% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer.
The Wall Street Journal called the film, quote, "a stirring account of an astonishing life."
Some critics might demand an opportunity to rewrite their reviews after learning that
in some cases, when they were hearing Bourdain speaking in voiceover, they weren't really
hearing Bourdain's voice.
When a writer for The New Yorker wondered how director Morgan Neville could have found
audio of Bourdain reading his own email during a certain scene in "Roadrunner," Neville admitted
that he hadn't. Neville told The New Yorker,
"There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of."
This included a highly personal email Bourdain had sent to his friend Dave Choe. Choe begins
to read the email in the documentary, and the voice transitions to Bourdain's — or,
to be honest, a computer-generated likeness of Bourdain's voice. Neville said,
"I created an AI model of his voice."
He told GQ that Bourdain's widow was okay with that. But his second wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain,
took to Twitter to say she most definitely wasn't okay with it.
In interviews about his documentary "Roadrunner," Morgan Neville made it clear he wasn't using
artificial intelligence to make Anthony Bourdain say things he had never thought. The three
moments where an AI version of Bourdain's voice is used to narrate the film all came
from something Bourdain had written, Neville told GQ. He said,
"I checked, you know, with his [Bourdain's] widow and his literary executor, just to make
sure people were cool with that. 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."
Responding to the director's quote on Twitter, Ottavia didn't say Neville never consulted
her about the use of AI, but she questioned how he described her feelings about it. Ottavia
tweeted,
"I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that."
Movie critic Sean Burns wasn't cool with it either. He didn't love the movie to begin
with, calling it, quote, "icky and exploitative" in his review for WBUR. On Twitter, Burns
suggested that the AI simulations of Bourdain's voice only increased the ick factor for him.
He tweeted,
"When I wrote my review I was not aware that the filmmakers had used an AI to deepfake
Bourdain's voice for portions of the narration. I feel like this tells you all you need to
know about the ethics of the people behind this project."
For his part, director Morgan Neville didn't appear too troubled over the AI in his documentary
"Roadrunner." After confessing to The New Yorker that the narrated Anthony Bourdain
email was in fact a computer simulation of his voice, he said,
"[...] you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and
you're not going to know."
He added,
"We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later."
Given the responses by prominent people in media and the food industry, someone might
convene that ethics panel fairly soon.
British TV cook Nigella Lawson replied to Ottavia's tweet, saying,
"This is despicable. I'm so sorry you and A have this to deal with on top of everything
else."
("A" is an apparent reference to Tony and Ottavia's daughter Ariane.)
Another documentary filmmaker, Lindsay Beyerstein, suggested on Twitter that the makers of "Roadrunner"
might have done better if they had disclosed in the film that Bourdain's voice was simulated
in some cases. A Bourdain fan, responding to Beyerstein, thought that sort of disclosure
would not have appeased the famous cook who was known for stripping as much artifice as
possible from his own TV productions. The response said,
"Regardless, I'm pretty sure that would make Anthony Bourdain puke."
You might wonder how the makers of "Roadrunner" were able to make a computer sound like Anthony
Bourdain. Many of us are already familiar with a tiny piece of this technology. The
iPhone's voice-activated assistant is programmed to recognize that it's you whenever you say,
"Hey, Siri". Forbes recently told the story of cybercriminals who figured out how to get
a computer to mimic the voice of someone's boss and convince them to wire a large sum
of money. The quality of deepfake voices is improving daily, Forbes said.
The producers of the new Anthony Bourdain documentary had a big advantage trying to
develop a fake version of their subject's voice: hours and hours of recordings of Bourdain
speaking. Director Morgan Neville told GQ,
"We fed more than 10 hours of Tony's voice into an AI model. The bigger the quantity,
the better the result. We worked with four companies before settling on the best."
This doesn't rise to the level of crime that Forbes described, but some social media users
thought maybe the move was a crime against art, or against Bourdain's memory. As one
Twitter user put it,
"I feel like using AI to make Anthony Bourdain's voice appear to say something that he never
actually said is not ONLY wildly unethical but also something that Anthony Bourdain would
absof----lutely hate on account of it being ghoulish and awful."
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