- The American murder of Netflix: Gabby Petito has upset some people for having used a voice generated by AI to tell the start of the Petito Journal.
- Despite permission from Petito’s family, criticism argues that the voice of AI raises ethical concerns.
- This is not the first occurrence of such a debate, and it will probably continue to happen as technology improves.
Netflix’s latest real documentarys, American murder: Gabby Petitoaroused an animated debate on how to deploy AI to imitate the voices of deceased. The filmmakers used the AI to recreate the voice of Petito and to have it told extracts from his personal writings, which would have made many uncomfortable viewers and raised ethical concerns concerning the use of AI for give voice to the deceased.
The three -part series recounts the murder in 2021 of Petito, 22, in the hands of his fiancé, Brian Laundrie. He wrote his last months through interviews, personal videos and publications on social networks, evoking how the tragedy occurred in real time on the Internet. The real crime aficionados dissected each frame of the Vlogs de Voyage de Petito before the authorities remain in Wyoming.
At the start of the series, a warning appears: “Gabby’s newspaper entries and text messages are animated in this series in its own voice, using voice leisure technology.” This means that the voice narrating parts of the documentary is not really that of Petito, but a synthetic recreation made with a model of AI. Netflix said the filmmakers had received permission from Petito’s family to do so. This did not prevent some people from vocalizing how the voice generated by Ai-Ai feels strange. Social media content creators have accumulated hundreds of thousands of points of view by discussing.
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This is not the first controversy on the voices generated by AI. Roadrunner: a film about Anthony Bourdain Faced with similar criticisms when its director revealed that certain parts of the documentary presented a narration generated by the AI of Bourdain’s own words. This film did not indicate what bits were told by AI or Bourdain, which led a lot to feel that the technique was misleading.
The filmmaker Michael Gasparro defended the decision in an interview with Us Weekly, saying that the team wanted to tell the story as much as possible “by the voice of Gabby”. They had access to a wealth of his newspapers, notes and publications online and thought that the narration of the AI would give them life in a more powerful way. “In the end, it’s his story.”
Technology has always shaped the way we tell stories, but AI has a new challenge, especially when it comes to commemorating people who can no longer speak for themselves. Robert Downey Jr. promised that AI will never reproduce him on the screen, while James Earl Jones has entered into an agreement with Disney before dying, allowing them to use his voice for Dark Vador in certain circumstances.
Meanwhile, Elevenlabs signed agreements with the domains of James Dean, Burt Reynolds, Judy Garland and Sir Laurence Olivier to let him add AI versions of their voices to his Reader application. As Deepfake technology and vocal cloning become more sophisticated, filmmakers and media companies will have to count how (and if) these tools should be used to tell real stories.
