The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice

The documentary "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain," which opened in theatres on Friday, is an angry, elegant, often overwhelmingly emotional chronicle of the late television star's life and his impact on the people close to him. Directed by Morgan Neville, the film portrays Bourdain as intense, self-loathing, relentlessly driven, preternaturally charismatic, and--in his life and in his death, by suicide, in 2018--a man who both focussed and disturbed the lives of those around him. To craft the film's narrative, Neville drew on tens of thousands of hours of video footage and audio archives--and, for three particular lines heard in the film, Neville commissioned a software company to make an A.I.-generated version of Bourdain's voice. News of the synthetic audio, which Neville discussed this past week in interviews with me and with Brett Martin, at GQ, provoked a striking degree of anger and unease among Bourdain's fans: "Well, this is ghoulish"; "This is awful"; "WTF?!" people said on Twitter, where the fake Bourdain voice became a trending topic. The critic Sean Burns, who had reviewed the documentary negatively, tweeted, "I feel like this tells you all you need to know about the ethics of the people behind this project." When I first spoke with Neville, I was surprised to learn about his use of synthetic audio and equally taken aback that he'd chosen not to disclose its presence in his film.