Yes, That Was an AI Recreation of Gabby Petito’s Voice
The directors of Netflix’s American Murder: Gabby Petito docuseries said they got her family’s “blessing.”
admin
It’s nothing new for documentary filmmakers to say they want to give a voice to their subjects, but using AI to accomplish that is still relatively new (and controversial). About 21 minutes into the first episode of Netflix’s three-part docuseries American Murder: Gabby Petito, a message informs viewers that Petitor’s “journal entries and text messages are brought to life in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology.” While the AI version of Petito’s voice has been criticized by some online as unsettling or even disrespectful to her memory, directors and executive producers Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro told Us Weekly that they got permission from her relatives to use it. “We reached out to the family to get their blessing and then we worked diligently to represent it in exactly how it was written,” Gasparro said. “That allowed you to hear it through her own words.”
In addition to interviews with the late travel vlogger’s loved ones, the new docuseries features videos, artwork, and writing by Petito. According to Gasparro, Petito’s parents provided access to “so much material,” notably including “all of her journals since she was young” in which she documented trips and much of her life. “We thought it was really important to bring that to life,” Gasparro said. “At the end of the day, we wanted to tell the story as much through Gabby as possible. It’s her story.”
Nason added that she hopes that people who watch American Murder also feel like they’ve learned something about Petito outside of the context of her relationship with fiancé Brian Laundrie, who admitted to killing her after she went missing on a trip with him in 2021. “We really didn’t want to oversaturate the viewer and we wanted to balance it out with the actual scope of the crime, the ins and outs of the investigation and how national this case was,” she said. “We wanted to balance it out, but if we could do a whole doc that was just Gabby’s journals, we would.”
Related
