Adam Yauch, or MCA as you might better know him, died ten years ago. He was a founding member of the Beastie Boys, a punk, a director, and an activist who devoted himself to the Tibetan independence movement.
The day he died Coldplay were playing at the Hollywood Bowl. As a tribute, Chris Martin played a slowed down piano version of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)”.
I can remember this because I was watching it at work, and I showed my then boss who was a Beastie Boys fan.
“Hmmm…” he said “he would have fucking hated that…”
Anthony Bourdain killed himself four years ago. He was a chef, a writer, a restless soul, and a broadcaster. Despite his background, he was more interested in people than food. Food was simply the best way to get people to sit at a table and lower their guard.
Last year Morgan Neville released ‘Roadrunner’, a documentary about Bourdain’s life, in which he attempts to make some sense of the tragedy.
Toward the end there’s an extended scene with Bourdain on a beach. He’s happy, or at least he seems content. He strolls around feeling the sand between his toes. You feel the gears downshift, the fool in you — the optimist — hopes briefly for a better conclusion.
Then artist David Choe butts in through a scratch cut.
“Can I say something about him walking down the beach as an ending?” he asks, looking beyond the camera and straight at Neville “it resonates, and it’s sweet, but as I was upstairs using the restroom I was like, he would fucking hate that.”
“Going out in a blaze of glory is so fucking lame” continues Choe “but we live in a society where every great artist who kills themselves ends up on murals. And they are talked about like gods.”
Sensing a shot, Neville asks if there are really murals of Bourdain?
“Oh yeah” says Choe, and then, remembering Bourdain’s delight for the countercultural, an idea hits him “I should go deface them! He would love that!”
There is another reason the Bourdain documentary is of interest. In it the director uses a sophisticated piece of AI software to simulate Bourdain’s voice reading from a personal email he had written.
This is a gross act of artistic overreach. The whole film is focused on Bourdain. There are pictures, there’s archive footage, B-Roll, and old offcuts. It’s never clearly disclosed to the viewer that while he did write those words, he never chose to sit in a sound booth and read them out.
Robert Kardashian died almost twenty years ago. Depending on your age you’ll know him either as Kim Kardashian’s father or OJ Simpson’s lawyer.
Two years ago, at a birthday party, he flickered back to life in holographic form. Within thirty seconds he’s dancing awkwardly to “Who Put the Bomp” by Barry Mann. A minute later he’s praising her decision to marry Kanye West, who he describes as “the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world”.
Such lofty praise loses its lustre when we learn that it was Kanye himself who wrote these words for the deceased Kardashian to deliver. Working with a special effects team he created the whole piece — using AI not only to knit together archive footage, but also to generate new and original sentiments.
When it came, the announcement on Wednesday was almost a throwaway line.
Rohit Prasad, a senior scientist for Amazon working on Alexa, had already been on the stage for twenty minutes, as part of an extended set of talks.
“Let's take a look at one of the new capabilities we are working on which enables lasting personal relationships.”
A video played, a young boy laying on a couch.
“Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”
The grandmother’s voice streams out of the speaker.
“But how about my courage?” asked the lion anxiously.
“You have plenty of courage I am sure” answered Oz “all you need is confidence in yourself.”
Prasad explains that, with less than a minute of recording, they can now recreate somebody’s voice. This was just a demonstration so he doesn’t add any details. Maybe the grandmother has died, maybe she’s just not around. Doesn’t matter. He goes into describing how this is technically a “voice conversion task and not a speech generation task” and then there’s lots of applause and then he’s gone.
Giving the power to recreate somebody’s voice to anyone with a minute of audio and a smart speaker is incredibly foolish.
The technology has clear and obvious malicious applications, and represents another failure to properly answer the question of whether we should, simply because we can.
The examples here come from a pile that is growing quickly and they demonstrate both how little we understand about the wishes of the departed and the supreme arrogance involved in hauling them back to life, digitally reanimating them, and forcing them into ventriloquism.
In the novel ‘The Glass Hotel’ by Emily St.John Mandel, a character is sent to prison. Fearful of losing the memory of his dead brother he has his initials tattooed on his hand. His cellmate warns him to be careful thinking about memories too often. They are wet clay. Every time one is brought to mind it is inevitably corrupted by the experience of the present. Legacies are too often hardened in all the wrong places, but dangerously soft in others.
If we choose to bring people back like this, which minute of their speech are we choosing? Should we be able to pick from different vintages? Which decade was an actor’s finest? When was their tone just right to serve as the voiceover for this car advert? Have we used Brando too much recently? Oh well, let’s dust off Sinatra…
You might think this flippant or farfetched, but the estate of James Dean has already sold the rights for his likeness to be used in a series of upcoming films. It’s only a matter of time before the calculating and avaricious descendants of the somewhat famous have their ancestors shilling diet pills.
No. None of this please. Let the dead rest.