Director Morgan Neville abandons generative artificial intelligence after backlash to ‘Roadrunner’.

One of essentially the most attention-grabbing facets of “Roadrunner,” Morgan Neville’s documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville’s use of generative artificial intelligence to recreate Bourdain’s voice.

Looking back now Neville told Wired that he found it a “fun” way to “keep (Bourdain’s) voice in the film.” But his approach was met with harsh criticism — while the synthetic Bourdain only read the words the true Bourdain actually wrote, Neville said many viewers assumed, “Oh, they only made up the (expletive).

“Many people have told me that there are other documentary projects that are doing the same thing and they have all responded; either they changed what they were doing or they put huge caveats on everything,” he said.

Since then, the director has “steadfastly avoided” using artificial intelligence. Even in his recent documentary “Piece by Piece”, where he dramatizes musician Pharrell’s life with Lego bricks (yes, really), Neville was careful to stay away.

“Carl Sagan in (Piece by Piece) Says ‘Pharrell’ and I have made it clear to everyone that, with the consent of his widow, we will force him to say ‘Pharrell’ without the use of artificial intelligence,” Neville said. “We actually experimented by constructing a word from syllables (he actually said that).”