Anthony Bourdain’s voice reproduction for a new document in question: It’s a ‘slippery slope’

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The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice cloning software to make late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about the use of powerful technology.

“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” appeared in theaters Friday and mostly featured real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and TV presenter before his death in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told The New Yorker that an excerpt of the dialogue was created using technology Artificial intelligence.

This renewed debate over the future of voice reproduction technology, not only in the world of entertainment but in politics and a rapidly growing commercial sector dedicated to translating text to human speech that sounds realistic.

“Uncertified audio reproduction is a slippery slope,” Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Descript audio generator, said in a blog post Friday. “Once you get into a world where you make subjective judgments about whether certain issues can be moral, it won’t be long before anything passes.”

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Prior to this week, most of the public debate around these technologies focused on creating hard-to-detect fake videos using simulated audio and/or video and their potential to fuel misinformation and political conflict.

Anthony Bourdain speaks at an event in Austin, Texas, March 13, 2016 (Associated Press)

But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly refused requests to reinstate audio, including from “people who have lost someone and are grieving.”

“We don’t even want to pass judgment,” he said. “We’re just saying you should have some bright lines on what’s good and what’s not.”

The angry and uncomfortable reactions to the audio reproduction in Bourdain’s case reflect expectations, disclosure and consent issues, said Sam Gregory, director of programs at Witness, a nonprofit organization working on video technology for human rights. He said obtaining approval and disclosing the technology at work was appropriate. Instead, viewers were shocked – first by the fact of audio falsification, then by the director’s apparent refusal to any ethical questions – and expressed their displeasure online.

“It also touches on our fears of death and ideas about how people can control our digital likeness and make us say or do things without any way to stop it,” Gregory said.

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Neville did not specify what instrument he used to recreate Bourdain’s voice, but said he used it for a few sentences Bourdain wrote but did not say it out loud.

“With the blessing of his estate and literary agent, we have used artificial intelligence technology,” Neville said in a written statement. “It was a modern style of storytelling that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come to life.”

Neville also told GQ that he had the approval of Bourdain’s widow and literary outlet. The chef’s wife, Otavia Busia, responded with a tweet: “I certainly wasn’t the one who said Tony would be nice to that.”

Although tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have dominated text-to-speech research, there are now also a number of startups like Descript that offer voice cloning software. Uses range from chatbots for customer service to video games and podcasts.

Many of these audio reproduction companies feature an ethical policy on their website that explains their terms of use. Of the nearly a dozen companies contacted by The Associated Press, many said they had not recreated Bourdain’s voice and would not if asked to do so. Others did not respond.

“We have very strong policies around what can be done on our platform,” said Zaheeb Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto company that sells a custom AI voice generator service. “When you create a voice reproduction, that requires approval from his voice.”

Ahmed said that the rare occasions that some voice reproduction was allowed after his death were for academic research purposes, including a project working on the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Anthony Bourdain attends an event in New York City, July 17, 2017 (Associated Press)

The most common commercial use, Ahmed said, is to edit a recorded TV ad by real voice actors and then customize it to a specific region by adding a local reference. It is also used to dubbing animated films and other videos, he said, by taking a voice in one language and having it speak a different language.

Compare it to previous innovations in the entertainment industry, from funny actors to green screen technology.

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Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own artificial speech, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University, although getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdain’s voice may require more training. who runs another voice-generation company, VocaliD, that focuses on chatbots for customer service.

“If you really wanted to talk like him, you’d need a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean statements,” she said. “You’re building an algorithm that learns to speak as Bourdain spoke.”

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Neville is a famous documentary writer who also directed Fred Rogers’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and the Oscar-winning “20 Feet From Stardom.” He began directing his last film in 2019, more than a year after Bourdain’s death by suicide in June 2018.

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