One of the most compelling aspects of “Roadrunner,” director Morgan Neville’s documentary about Anthony Bourdain, is Neville’s use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain’s voice.
Looking back, Neville told Wired that he thought this was a “fun” way to “keep (Bourdain’s) voice in the movie.” But his approach has drawn fierce criticism. While the synthetic Bourdain only read words that the real Bourdain actually wrote, Neville said many viewers thought, “Oh, they just made up the (expletive).”
“A lot of people said there were other documentary projects doing the same thing and they were all responding. They either changed what they were doing or put huge disclaimers about everything,” he said.
Afterwards, the director ‘toughly avoided’ AI. Neville also carefully distanced himself from his new documentary “Piece by Piece,” which dramatizes musician Pharrell’s life with Lego.
“In (Piece by Piece), Carl Sagan said ‘Pharrell’ and I made it clear to everyone, with his widow’s permission, that we were going to make him say ‘Pharrell’ without using AI,” Neville said. “We actually experimented with building words out of syllables (he actually spoke).”
