Anthony Bourdain Doc Recreates His Voice Using Artificial Intelligence and 10-Plus Hours of Audio – IndieWire

Roadrunner, the Anthony Bourdain documentary from 20 Feet from Stardom Oscar winner Morgan Neville, takes a page from documentaries like Alex Gibneys Sinatra: All or Nothing at All in allowing the late chef and television personality to narrate his own story through the use of archival audio. Neville and his team culled through over a dozen hours of audio from Bourdains film, TV, audiobook, radio, and podcast appearances. But there are three instances in Roadrunner where Neville needed Bourdain narration that did not exist, so he turned to an artificial intelligence system that could recreate Bourdains voice.

As reported by The New Yorker in a recent interview with Neville: There is a moment at the end of the films second act when the artist David Choe, a friend of Bourdains, is reading aloud an e-mail Bourdain had sent him: Dude, this is a crazy thing to ask, but Im curious Choe begins reading, and then the voice fades into Bourdains own: . . . and my life is sort of shit now. You are successful, and I am successful, and Im wondering: Are you happy? I asked Neville how on earth hed found an audio recording of Bourdain reading his own e-mail.There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of, Neville explained. So he got in touch with a software company, gave it about a dozen hours of recordings, and, he said, I created an A.I. model of his voice.'

If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably dont know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and youre not going to know, Neville added. We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.

In a separate interview with GQ magazine, Neville confirmed his team fed more than ten hours of Tonys voice into an AI model so that his voice could be recreated. The bigger the quantity, the better the result, the director added. We worked with four companies before settling on the best.

Neville continued, We also had to figure out the best tone of Tonys voice: His speaking voice versus his narrator voice, which itself changed dramatically over the years. The narrator voice got very performative and sing-songy in the No Reservation years. I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, Tony would have been cool with that. I wasnt putting words into his mouth. I was just trying to make them come alive.

The decision to use A.I. to recreate Bourdains speaking voice is already generating backlash on social media ahead of the documentarys release. As film critic Sean Burns posted, When I wrote my review I was not aware that the filmmakers had used an A.I. to deepfake Bourdains 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.

Roadrunner opens in theaters July 16 from Focus Features.

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Anthony Bourdain Doc Recreates His Voice Using Artificial Intelligence and 10-Plus Hours of Audio - IndieWire