Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1456671
36 C I N E M O N T A G E T E C H VOICE LESSONS AI IS EXPANDING CHOICES FOR VOICE AND DIALOGUE MANIPULATION IN POST-PRODUCTION. BUT WHAT ARE THE RISKS? By Jennifer Walden A I-generated voices and voice clon- ing technology have caused quite a commotion recently. Last year, an unconventional short film titled "In Event of Moon Disaster" won the News & Documentary Emmy Award for Interactive Media: Documentary. "Docu- mentary" summons up other words such as "factual," "real," "non-fiction," and "truth." Interestingly, this film asks the question, "Can you spot a deepfake?" "In Event of Moon Disaster" (produced by MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality and directed by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund) utilized machine learning tech- nologies from Canny AI and Respeecher to manipulate both the picture and sound of a broadcast from 1969 in which President Nixon delivers a speech about the Apollo 11 mission. He's reading a contingency speech that was actually written in 1969, just in case the Apollo 11 mission ended in disas- ter. Nixon never read it aloud on camera. He didn't need to. So his voice for "In Event of Moon Disaster" was AI-generated – i.e., fake. Another documentary film released in 2021, "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony B o u rd a i n ," a l s o u s e d a n A I - ge n e rate d voice – in this case to read a few lines that Bourdain wrote but never recorded. This film sparked a huge conversation in the film industry about the use of AI voice cloning. MPSE award-winning supervising sound editor Al Nelson — who supervised the film's sound but wasn't directly involved in the voice cloning process — explained that dialogue editing (from feature films to news clips) sometimes involves cutting together pieces of lines in order to create a more con- cise, clear sentence that is grammatically correct. These edited dialogue chunks are widely known in the reality TV world as "Frankenbites." (This practice isn't unheard of in jour- nalism, too. In fact, I've tightened up some quotes in this story for readability and clarity, but they all retain the essence of what the source said.) Nelson said, "It's not done to twist or manipulate the context, at least in my experience. It's done to make a more con- cise statement. And that's what happened with this film. The dialogue was based on something that Anthony had written, and rather than have an actor read it or have it