Hollywood keeps getting in trouble for using AI to modulate voices and the most recent scandal involves Netflix’s boneheaded decision to recreate the voice of murdered travel vlogger Gabby Petito.
The Petito disappearance in the summer of 2021 transfixed Americans. Unfolding against the backdrop of the pandemic, the case went viral on social media, where TikTokers and YouTubers endlessly theorized and dissected the case. Eventually, Petito’s body was found and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, was charged with her murder. Laundrie went on the run and eventually committed suicide. Now, Netflix has predictably made a flashy documentary about the case. To bring the morbid story to life, the filmmakers behind American Murder: Gabby Petito—a new three-part docu-series—decided to use an AI program to re-create Petito’s voice so that she could read her own journal entries. Even more predictably, people have been grossed out by this.
“So in the Netflix documentary, they read Gabby Petito’s journal entries and texts using ‘voice recreation technology’ from her own voice and I do not think that’s okay,” one X user wrote. “It’s very weird – even disrespectful maybe – and truly off-putting.”
“the ai gabby petito voice in the new documentary?????? deeply uncomfortable why would they do that,” another posted.
“Lol this gabby petito doc uses an AI to recreate her voice reading her own diary what a fucking monstrous creative decision,” yet another user posted.
The filmmakers have defended their decision to use AI to re-create the voice of a dead girl, noting that they got permission from the Petito family to do this. “We reached out to the family to get their blessing and then we worked diligently to represent it in exactly how it was written,” executive producer Michael Gasparro told US Weekly. “That allowed you to hear it through her own words.” Gasparro further said that AI was a way to re-animate the deceased. “We thought it was really important to bring that to life,” he said. “At the end of the day, we wanted to tell the story as much through Gabby as possible. It’s her story.”
The filmmakers may have a point. After all, this isn’t the first time that a documentary has done something like this. Voice actors narrate the written words of historical figures all the time. There is a slight difference in this case, however. It just so happens that when the subject of your documentary is a recently murdered young woman, and the voice-over is auto-generated by an uncanny valley-type algorithm, the impact is significantly creepier.
The team behind the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist recently got into hot water after it was revealed that the production had used AI to make the Hungarian accents of the actors more accurate. The Academy is now reportedly considering instituting new disclosure rules for the use of AI in movies, to stem future controversies.
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