What would Anthony Bourdain have made of his voice being deep faked? This is a question that fans have been asking since it was revealed last week that a new documentary called Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain used AI to clone Bourdain’s voice. The documentary is narrated by the late chef himself, a feat that was achieved by stitching together audio clips of Bourdain from various sources, and director Morgan Neville has stated that the only faked bits are three lines from a letter he once wrote to a friend.
This revelation has made many uncomfortable. Some have expressed discomfort over Bourdain’s voice being faked because there’s no way of knowing if he would have consented to being deep faked if he had been alive. That the lines were actually written by Bourdain himself is irrelevant. Others have pointed to the lack of transparency. The use of AI in this context is unsettling because it was stated only after the fact, with the director even joking that a “documentary ethics panel” could be set up later to debate the issue. To be clear, this is not a question of documentary ethics, as cinema — whether fiction or nonfiction — often aims for a truth that is much more than “the truth of accountants”, as German filmmaker Werner Herzog once put it.
