On July 16, Roadrunner: A film about Anthony Bourdain will open in US theaters. Like many documentaries, pieces of films together archive recordings, including interviews and show attacks, to try to tell their own subject stories. This also includes Bourdain’s words never talked to the camera before his death by suicide in 2018, but you will hear his voice say them.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Director of the film, Morgan Neville, said there were three quotes he wanted BOURABAT to tell where there was no record, and therefore he created it with software. “I made the AI ​​model,” he told the magazine.

It seems that it is also an easy achievement. In a separate interview with GQ, Neville said he contacted four different companies about this project before deciding the best. The company feeds around a dozen hours of audio to the AI ​​model. Many work involved deciding the voice tone of Bourdain’s Voice Neville wanted software to replicate because of the way the author and the hosts of the trip told the writing on TV.

Compared to several other ways we have seen AI and Deepfake used to deceive people, this is not the worst example, but the ethics are still questionable. Film, as far as we know, does not include disclosure that AI is used to replicate Bourdain’s voice. “If you watch the film, apart from the line you mentioned, you might not know what is spoken through AI, and you won’t know,” Neville told New York residents. “We can have a documentary ethical panel about it later.” In his interview with GQ, he said the Bourdain family told him, “Tony will be cool with it,” added, “I just tried to make [quotes] be alive,”