Anthony Bourdain's ex-wife Ottavia Busia denies giving 'Roadrunner' director permission for A.I. vocal re-creation

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain hit theaters Friday (July 16), and it gives people a never-before-seen glimpse into the life of the late chef and pop culture icon.

More controversially, Roadrunner contains never-before-heard bits as Bourdain posthumously narrates the documentary in part because director Morgan Neville used artificial intelligence software to re-create "a few things he wrote but that he never said," as Neville explained in a GQ interview published earlier this week:

In the beginning, I went and gathered everything he ever said about his life. I went through every book and podcast and voiceover session, and put together a binder of, like, 500 pages of him talking about his life. There was a moment when I was even like, ‘Gee, I could make the whole film in his voice,’ though I stopped myself instantly. But then I came across a few things he wrote but that he never said. And so, I had this idea to create an AI model of his voice, which we did.
We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an AI model. The bigger the quantity, the better the result. We worked with four companies before settling on the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: His speaking voice versus his “narrator” voice, which itself changed dramatically of over the years. The narrator voice got very performative and sing-songy in the No Reservation years. I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, Tony would have been cool with that. I wasn’t putting words into his mouth. I was just trying to make them come alive.

Well, Bourdain's ex-wife, Ottavia Busia, has a different take on the situation: