>Out of all the celebrities, Bourdain would have viscerally despised this.
I would just like to point out the irony in this comment. You're speaking on behalf of a dead person in objection to someone else speaking on behalf of that person.
We can debate the ethics of this whole thing without trying to lay claim to what Bourdain would have thought.
After reading his books, I would agree and was hoping someone had posted this. If anyone would vehemently oppose such manipulation, it would be Anthony Bourdain. Is there a disclaimer before this scene is shown? I'll choose not to watch such a documentary created by those with skewed ethics.
There does not seem to be any disclaimer regarding the manipulation, and the OP article questions whether the director would even have mentioned it had it not come up tangentially in the course of this interview.
As I understand it (I read this on Twitter so massive grain of salt etc.) the family concented to this explicitly. Would you feel better if it was a voice actor who could read Bourdain’s email in a perfect mimic? What about historical recreations, would you object to computers being involved in, say, recreating Abraham Lincoln’s voice? Does the age of the subject matter?
I think the squeamishness about AI as it becomes more and more capable will be interesting to define why we are feeling it. The machine is going to be capable of (and consequently used to do) these things whether you like it or not.
Any of those are fine - with disclosure. It seems pretty clear that in this case, they were less than transparent.
> “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
...or we can have it sooner, on Twitter, and you'll get excoriated, and rightly so. I don't care if they train an AI to imitate Bourdain rapping the third verse from Modern Major General, it's a free country, but you have to be honest about it. You can't call yourself a documentarian and get cutesy about the authenticity of the material.
I don’t think my family should have the ability to make decisions regarding my likeness. My likeness is one of those things which is just totally 100% mine. I married my wife and had kids with her and would want her to have all of my money if I died but wouldn’t want her to be able to license my voice and face to promote Wheaties cereal or something. It shouldn’t be allowed unless the person explicitly grants those rights while alive.
That was the Sicily episode- Bourdain wanted to show the ugly, scammy underbelly of Sicily I think. This kind of thing is there in a lot of the Mediterranean, but it unfairly makes all of Sicily look bad. I had a bad impression of the whole island until I learned more about it years later. Sicily is mostly nice with a few pockets of unsavoriness like anywhere, not a mafia island. In my opinion too many episodes are like that- projection of a certain fantasy about a place while ostensibly engaging with the real authentic experience.
Ofter you see what you want to see in the world. As much as I adore Bourdain, I have to admit he was undoubtably jaded and there were trips where that colored everything. For many, depression comes in waves and lasts for periods of time. He showed a lot of the good and bad in these places, but everywhere has a bit of both.
Just quick context on the squid bit: it wasn’t Tony’s crew (zero point zero productions), it was the combination of local fixers/boat folks who wanted to make it look like they caught fish.
Funny enough, him describing the ploy while sort of mocking it as it happened led to an enjoyable moment in that episode (imo). It showcased his humility, and ability to make the most out of a situation while not taking himself too seriously.
I enjoyed the running gag (based on many episodes) of Bourdain going on a local fishing/hunting trip and failing to catch anything, and then having to scramble to some other local place and make up for the lack of a catch which some times were some of the highlights of the episode. And then on rare occasions when they did catch their prey, it made for a nice juxtaposition.
Refusing to disclose which dialogue the AI generated serves no one but the documentary maker himself. He’s not protecting a source or doing anything commendable. It doesn’t make the documentary better on any way.
This is not axiomatic truth. I reviewed Laurie Woolever's first posthumous book about/with Bourdain, check out how the 'bone luge' was invented for one of his shows: https://niklasblog.com/?p=24870 Also, as is clearly attested by many of Bourdain's friends in Woolever's coming oral-history book on Bourdain, he lied about things, as most people do. He claimed to be human and not perfect.
Important to point out it wasn’t the crew faking the scene. The guy that took him fishing had a friend throwing squid in, unashamedly. They showed the guy on camera. There was no attempt at trickery from the people producing the show.
As a viewer of the documentary, I will love that effect instead of a bland voice-over.
But a note should be added on the screen that the voice is AI-generated. Like when they say a war video is a reenactment.
Why would it have to be a bland voice-over? It's an email he sent to a friend. Have the friend read it. I imagine the friend would become emotional. That's far more riveting than a computer recreation, no?
Agreed, this whole issue could be solved with a message before the film runs about how the voiceover is created, and then a "recreation" label during that scene.
I don't think so. There are still other ethical considerations. Bourdain likely would not have liked this, as others in the thread point out. So it is weird to honor someone with a documentary but not honor their wishes
I have a machine with two GPUs and a frozen OS with a tensorflow python app that clones voices, and I'd say the quality passes if you run it through a phone bandpass filter.
I've had an idea to use propellerhead recycle to chop the output cloned voice into syllables, and then "play" the chopped parts in rhythm, through autotune.
The issue is you get Eifel 65 sounding autotune if your base vocals are monotonic or way off key. The only way I can think of fixing this is to use something like audacity's pitch changer that doesn't affect the speed of the sample - rough the lyrical tones in with audacity/recycle, then autotune it where it needs to go.
I'd like to say I'm too busy to get this workflow going, but mostly I'm lazy and someone else will do it first - and better - I can't improve the AI cloning software.
You should watch The Doors movie by Oliver Stone starring Val Kilmer. Much of the music, including vocals, was redone with Val singing. It can be quite unsettling at times
We're running up towards "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." and it is appropriate.
It isn't wrong to replace a human with a machine, I'm not going after calculators, spreadsheets, or farm machinery.
What is to come though is a moral imperative that making machines mimic people is deeply wrong.
Our worldviews, values, and judgements are based on interacting with other humans and to have that set of long-tuned intelligence modeling of minds around us subverted by a computer model will bring out strong objections and eventually violence.
The science fiction writers had it wrong, the first conflict with machines isn't going to happen with an advanced artificial intelligence, it is going to be against naive misbehavior and trickery much like this, especially when the artifice comes into the real world (first iteration: self-driving cars). Semi-religious anti-machine fanatics will be the first wave with terrorist style attacks on machines ... that is if the sane moderates don't do enough to rein in the coming of the artificials first. Wait for a smoking gun event like a car driving itself into a gathering of schoolchildren to get things started.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Frank Herbert (Dune)
This here. Machines can only become the enemy when they gain sentience, form a civilization, and declare independence.
Until then, it's not the machines that are the problem. It's the people behind the machines, people making business decisions about operations and deployment of the machines.
> Wait for a smoking gun event like a car driving itself into a gathering of schoolchildren to get things started.
The actual gun industry has somehow managed to avoid being sunk by this problem by keeping the blame on humans despite a school shooting every few months in the US.
Cars will be explicitly advertised that you can turn the automation on, go to sleep, and arrive at the destination, but if the automation hits anything the sleeping human will remain liable. The misleading advert will not.
It should be covered under "right to publicity" laws [0]. TFA touched on this. These are the laws that prevent people from capitalizing on celebrities' names or likenesses without permission. This is applied even if the person is dead. Impressions of a person's voice generated from actual recordings of the voice is new ground, but it reasonably falls under "likeness."
There are two noteworthy limitations here:
1. The laws require a plaintiff to sue. If Bourdain left control of his public likeness to someone (like a family member or agent), they would have standing. I have no idea if anyone receives them by default if he died without explicitly granting them.
2. You don't need permission for using a person's name or likeness in relevant news or commentary. So this documentary might be protected.
IANAL, so if anyone knows relevant case law, please share.
And, of course, these are just the laws we have now. Whether we need new laws is iffy to me. I can just dislike this documentary using a generated voice because it's deceptive. Bourdain never recorded those words, but people watching the documentary could easily believe otherwise. It's not like TFA's example of a Civil War soldier reading a letter. I know he died before quality voice recording. And many documentaries label readings of modern documents with "Dramatic reading by actor" or similar.
That seems like an impossible thing to do - how would you define "your voice" and how much would it have to be changed to no longer be considered "your voice"?
What would happen between two people that sound similar, or even identical, to our imperfect human senses?
I get why this is newsworthy, but I don't get why it's an ethical problem. How is it any different from hiring a really good Bourdain impersonator to read the email? Lots of celebrities have pitch-perfect impersonators; is this a thing we worried about when it wasn't AI doing the impersonation?
I think the question is about a "documentary" using synthesized voices presented as if they are recordings. You'd have the same issue with impersonation by a human; it is presenting one thing as something it is not.
Getting away from the specifics of this case, cheap impersonation of arbitrary individuals getting easier raises lots of questions... all those TV spy shows "voice print cloning" stuff becoming more real will make a lot of things involving non-face-to-face trust more interesting.
Has it always been considered an ethical violation to have an impersonator read something a celebrity wrote? This can't be the first time that's happened.
I think the concerns are 1, this is passed off without real buy in from next of kin for a person who would be against it if he were alive. And 2, I think the attention and concern is heightened because this shows it can be done at scale to anyone with ease instead of having very talented people individually read off scripts into a mic.
Consider getting a voicemail from your dead grandmother tomorrow. Public figure or not, we need to have a line somewhere where it’s no longer okay to scrape a profit from every little thing we can think of. Can we let dead guys just be dead?
I think this is likely the reason it was done too.
The snide remarks from the documentary maker; “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.” make it seem like he is trying to get a fire burning around this.
My brother and I had a running joke that Tom Araya from Slayer died in the mid 90s, based on his ashen appearance in the Divine Intervention sleeve. Our “theory” was all of his vocals after then were bits of previous recordings reassembled into new songs. It sounded technically possible with manual editing back then, but it has already gone so far as to automatable.
In this case, for a documentary, I see how that’s a defensible used case. They could hire an actor to read the email, imitating Bourdain’s voice as closely as possible, to the same effect. Other uses certainly could be problematic. Discussing them and working out legal and cultural rules is very relevant right now. We’ve already had posthumous celebrity event appearances over the past couple of years. Famous actors could be in movies with needing to be involved very much - mainly an IP license. I have no doubt record companies would love to create new music with all the artists of the 60s-80s, dead or alive.
There are ethical concerns but I think we'll just learn to live with it.
Forging signatures are easy and have been around forever but signatures are still used for very important purposes (even electronically now!).
It may take a while for the legal system to catch up and using voice recordings as evidence may be tricker than before.
But on a more exciting front, I think synthetic voice can be made like fonts.
Celebrities and voice actors will be able to sell their synthetic voice like how fonts are sold today.
You'll be able to change the voice of your Alexa, Siri to a voice you downloaded from a marketplace.
Netflix may even let you select the narrator's voice for your favorite documentary.
Hundreds of years later, people may be watching a documentary in Morgan Freeman's voice while having no idea that he was actually a famous actor in the past.
Signatures used for very important purposes are only decoration. They must be used in conjunction with something else (a notary, an independent exchange that confirms that the signature is actually binding, etc.).
The electronic signature is completely different: there is no visible artefact anymore, but a process that seals a document and (under appropriate legislation), certifies that the signer is who he is. A visual object is sometimes added for aesthetic purposes.
What you listed are just ways we've learned to live with the forgeable nature of signatures. Now voice recordings (and even videos) will have a similar fate in the future.
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He hated fake phoney people, or food.
He hated when his production crew would stovepipe his bits.
He hated a scene in Greese (I believe) where crew went out and bought squid, and threw them into the water to made the shoot better.
I really liked Bourdain. He was one of the few celebrities that didn't seem to change with fame, or money.
I watched him for years, and knew he was unhappy, but never thought suicide unhappy.
I would just like to point out the irony in this comment. You're speaking on behalf of a dead person in objection to someone else speaking on behalf of that person.
We can debate the ethics of this whole thing without trying to lay claim to what Bourdain would have thought.
The objection isn't to speaking on the behalf of the dead, it is to using phoney tactics to do so, playing them up for emotional value
I think the squeamishness about AI as it becomes more and more capable will be interesting to define why we are feeling it. The machine is going to be capable of (and consequently used to do) these things whether you like it or not.
> “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
...or we can have it sooner, on Twitter, and you'll get excoriated, and rightly so. I don't care if they train an AI to imitate Bourdain rapping the third verse from Modern Major General, it's a free country, but you have to be honest about it. You can't call yourself a documentarian and get cutesy about the authenticity of the material.
[1] https://twitter.com/OttaviaBourdain/status/14158894550057164...
Creating a digital voice model of abraham lincoln and then using it for ??? is not.
All of this is being done for profit means (the orville redenbacher, fast furious, star wars).
Just because we can doesn't mean we shouldn't stop and think if we should.
Refusing to disclose which dialogue the AI generated serves no one but the documentary maker himself. He’s not protecting a source or doing anything commendable. It doesn’t make the documentary better on any way.
It’s a media stunt.
It’s despicable.
I have no problem with a fake voice reading Bourdain’s own words.
Deleted Comment
I've had an idea to use propellerhead recycle to chop the output cloned voice into syllables, and then "play" the chopped parts in rhythm, through autotune.
The issue is you get Eifel 65 sounding autotune if your base vocals are monotonic or way off key. The only way I can think of fixing this is to use something like audacity's pitch changer that doesn't affect the speed of the sample - rough the lyrical tones in with audacity/recycle, then autotune it where it needs to go.
I'd like to say I'm too busy to get this workflow going, but mostly I'm lazy and someone else will do it first - and better - I can't improve the AI cloning software.
It isn't wrong to replace a human with a machine, I'm not going after calculators, spreadsheets, or farm machinery.
What is to come though is a moral imperative that making machines mimic people is deeply wrong.
Our worldviews, values, and judgements are based on interacting with other humans and to have that set of long-tuned intelligence modeling of minds around us subverted by a computer model will bring out strong objections and eventually violence.
The science fiction writers had it wrong, the first conflict with machines isn't going to happen with an advanced artificial intelligence, it is going to be against naive misbehavior and trickery much like this, especially when the artifice comes into the real world (first iteration: self-driving cars). Semi-religious anti-machine fanatics will be the first wave with terrorist style attacks on machines ... that is if the sane moderates don't do enough to rein in the coming of the artificials first. Wait for a smoking gun event like a car driving itself into a gathering of schoolchildren to get things started.
Until then, it's not the machines that are the problem. It's the people behind the machines, people making business decisions about operations and deployment of the machines.
The actual gun industry has somehow managed to avoid being sunk by this problem by keeping the blame on humans despite a school shooting every few months in the US.
Cars will be explicitly advertised that you can turn the automation on, go to sleep, and arrive at the destination, but if the automation hits anything the sleeping human will remain liable. The misleading advert will not.
https://twitter.com/OttaviaBourdain/status/14158894550057164...
She is not his widow. She is an ex-wife.
There are two noteworthy limitations here:
1. The laws require a plaintiff to sue. If Bourdain left control of his public likeness to someone (like a family member or agent), they would have standing. I have no idea if anyone receives them by default if he died without explicitly granting them.
2. You don't need permission for using a person's name or likeness in relevant news or commentary. So this documentary might be protected.
IANAL, so if anyone knows relevant case law, please share.
And, of course, these are just the laws we have now. Whether we need new laws is iffy to me. I can just dislike this documentary using a generated voice because it's deceptive. Bourdain never recorded those words, but people watching the documentary could easily believe otherwise. It's not like TFA's example of a Civil War soldier reading a letter. I know he died before quality voice recording. And many documentaries label readings of modern documents with "Dramatic reading by actor" or similar.
[0] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...
What would happen between two people that sound similar, or even identical, to our imperfect human senses?
Deleted Comment
Getting away from the specifics of this case, cheap impersonation of arbitrary individuals getting easier raises lots of questions... all those TV spy shows "voice print cloning" stuff becoming more real will make a lot of things involving non-face-to-face trust more interesting.
Consider getting a voicemail from your dead grandmother tomorrow. Public figure or not, we need to have a line somewhere where it’s no longer okay to scrape a profit from every little thing we can think of. Can we let dead guys just be dead?
We hang photos to remember. A voicemail or more would help our kids hear grandma.
The snide remarks from the documentary maker; “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.” make it seem like he is trying to get a fire burning around this.
To discuss it now would only benefit the commercial interests who purposely baked this outrage manna in their advertising oven.
In this case, for a documentary, I see how that’s a defensible used case. They could hire an actor to read the email, imitating Bourdain’s voice as closely as possible, to the same effect. Other uses certainly could be problematic. Discussing them and working out legal and cultural rules is very relevant right now. We’ve already had posthumous celebrity event appearances over the past couple of years. Famous actors could be in movies with needing to be involved very much - mainly an IP license. I have no doubt record companies would love to create new music with all the artists of the 60s-80s, dead or alive.
But on a more exciting front, I think synthetic voice can be made like fonts. Celebrities and voice actors will be able to sell their synthetic voice like how fonts are sold today. You'll be able to change the voice of your Alexa, Siri to a voice you downloaded from a marketplace. Netflix may even let you select the narrator's voice for your favorite documentary. Hundreds of years later, people may be watching a documentary in Morgan Freeman's voice while having no idea that he was actually a famous actor in the past.
The electronic signature is completely different: there is no visible artefact anymore, but a process that seals a document and (under appropriate legislation), certifies that the signer is who he is. A visual object is sometimes added for aesthetic purposes.