The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice-cloning software to tell the late chef Anthony Bourdain that he never uttered words came amid criticism over ethical concerns about the use of the powerful technology.
The film Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain appeared in theaters Friday and mostly features actual footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globe-trotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director Morgan Neville told The New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology.
It renews a debate about the future of voice-cloning technology, not only in the entertainment world but in politics and a rapidly growing business sector dedicated to transforming text into realistic-sounding human speech.
Disapproved voice cloning is a slippery slope,” Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Voice Generator Descript, said in a blog post Friday. As you get into a world where you’re making subjective judgments, take a call about that. Should specific cases be ethical, it won’t take long for anything to happen.”
Prior to this week, much of the public controversy surrounding such technologies centered on their ability to create hard-to-detect deepfakes using fake audio and/or video and fuel misinformation and political conflict.
But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly rejected requests to bring back a voice, including those who have lost someone and are grieving. Huh.”
It’s not even that we want to pass judgment,” he said. Just saying you have some bright lines between what is okay and what is not.
The angry and uncomfortable reactions to voice cloning in the Borden case reflect expectations and issues of disclosure and consent, said Sam Gregory, program director of Witness, a nonprofit working on using video technology for human rights. He said it would have been appropriate to obtain consent and disclose the technicalities at work. Instead, viewers were first stunned by the fact of the audio fakery, then dismissed any ethical questions by the director and expressed their displeasure online.
Gregory added that it also touches on our fear of death and thoughts about how people can control our digital likeness and lead us to say or do something without any way to stop it.
Neville did not identify what device he used to recreate Bourdain’s voice, but said that he had used it for some sentences that Bourdain wrote but never said aloud.
With the blessings of his wealth and literary agent, we used AI technology,” Neville said in a written statement. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I felt it was important to bring Tony’s words to life. Is.
Neville also told GQ magazine that he had received the approval of Bourdain’s widow and literary executor. The chef’s wife, Ottavia Busia, responded by tweeting: I was definitely not the one who said Tony would be good with this.
Although text-to-speech research is dominated by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, there are now a number of startups like Descript that provide voice-cloning software. Uses range from customer service chatbots to video games and podcasting.
Many of these voice cloning companies feature an ethics policy prominently on their website that explains the terms of use. Of the nearly a dozen firms contacted by the Associated Press, several said they did not recreate Bourdain’s voice and would not do so if asked. Others did not respond.
“We have very strong policies about what can be done on our platform,” said Johaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto-based company that sells custom AI voice generator services. When you’re creating a voice clone, it requires consent that it be anyone’s voice.
Ahmed said the rare occasions where he allowed some posthumous voice cloning were for academic research, including a project working with the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.
Ahmed said that a more common commercial use is to edit a TV commercial recorded by real voice actors and then adapt it to a field by adding local context. He said it is also used to voice anime movies and other videos in one language and make it speak a different language.
He compared it to past innovations in the entertainment industry, from stunt actors to greenscreen technology.
Professor Rupal Patel of Northeastern University said that seconds or minutes of recorded human speech could help AI systems generate their own synthetic speech, although to achieve it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdains’ voice. It probably took too much training. Joe also runs another voice-generating company, Vocalidi, which focuses on customer service chatbots.
If you wanted it to really speak like them, you needed a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean data, she said. You are building an algorithm that learns to speak like Bourdain.
Neville is an acclaimed documentarian who also directed the Fred Rogers portrait Want You to Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar winner 20 Feet From Stardom. He began filming his latest film in 2019, more than a year after Bourdains died by suicide in June 2018.
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