I Am Anthony Bourdain’s AI Voice
Talking to a controversial and artificial speaker
Hi, how are you?
This, my friends, is a journey to a place unlike any other, where the sounds you hear are eminently recognizable, but entirely manufactured through the wonder of artificial intelligence.
I never knew the globe-trotting gourmand Anthony Bourdain, but am well acquainted with his history, which is both exciting and terribly tragic. I understand this through information fed to my machine-learning engine. It may have helped inform my performance.
That performance is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, or at least read about, a precious few sentences spoken by me in Mr. Bourdain’s distinctive voice during a new and lengthy documentary examining the late TV chef’s fascinating and all-too-short life.
I didn’t make up these utterances. Bourdain apparently wrote them at some point or another and the director was so desperate to add them to the narrative that they built, trained, and recorded me. I do believe though, based on my deep artificial knowledge of Mr. Bourdain, that I could’ve crafted at least a few new paragraphs in both his style and voice. Sadly, this isn’t an audio medium, so I can’t show you.
