Talk:Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Not keen on using "dicey territory"

Filmmaker and journalist Adam Benzine described Neville's remark about "hav[ing] a documentary-ethics panel about it later" as being "as much problematic as the use of the technology", and added: "But the fact that he discussed it as an ethical debate seems to suggest that he himself knew that he was in dicey territory."

I viewed this film last night, and it's fresh in my mind. Near the outset of covering Bourdain's TV career, there's material from Bourdain about not yet knowing the secret insider-code of the industry, to the effect that someday finding out those codes was not going to be heart-warming.

This is an industry notoriously packed with fragile, red-haired creatives, blood type drama-positive if there's any feasible way to make an attention-getting stink. When there's not such thing as bad publicity, it also follows that no stone of prospective outrage remains unturned. The entire ethos of Hollywood is that it's dicey territory, left-right, up-down, backwards and forwards.

For Wikipedia, there's no viable way to properly contextualize this dubious use of the word "dicey" without stumbling into OR.

Contextualization matters in woke-space. That was the actual charge against Lindsay Shepherd when she played a clip to her classroom from Jordan Peterson: that she hadn't sufficiently contextualized the material. This phrasing is used to suggest that free speech is still fundamentally permitted, but in practice, only top of a sufficient ocean of footnotes, one which the time structure of her classroom could never have accommodated in the case of Peterson, therefore, almost by definition, if she played a clip from Peterson in the time available, it was insufficiently contextualized.

So I see. Jordan Peterson requires context, while "dicey territory" is a free-radical sound bite.

In this film, the use of AI voice reproduction was an interesting artistic decision, that some people will like and some won't. As the artist, I would have done the same: disclosed use of the technique, without pinpointing each specific instance. There's already more than enough to complain about. If you told them where, precisely, they would zoom in on those moments to find things that aren't even there. There's a funny line in Life Itself (2014 film) where Ebert addresses a room full of film critics at a major film festival, before analyzing a film frame by frame, informing the audience that he's open to questions at any time, and that by this process each year they "find something new ...[pause] ... it's not there, but we find it anyway". Entire audience explodes into a collective ROTFLgasm. Yeah, this is well known. Zoom in on any specific frame long enough, soon enough you find things ... even when they aren't there. This is why the red-haired children of the world are on the ascendance lately in modern social media culture. In response, it's perfectly sane to admit what you've done, while not also handing out free magnifying glasses to a group of people who excel at making noise.

How is this AI voice decision any more dicey than the long-established selective filter applied to what passages to quote, in what sequence, and to what extent, starting exactly here and ending exactly there? Every one of these choices can potentially slant the response. There is no unslanted option. When overtly using a voice actor to read the text, slant accrues. If I passed on, and anyone cared enough to reconstruct my life (fear not), I'd have very little concern about my actual voice being reconstructed to recite my actual written words, so long as it was done to a high quality, which to a first instance implies seamlessly within the larger creative whole. Mission already 70% accomplished.

Bourdain was anything but a microcosm of linguistic nuance turning upon the enunciation of any single word. In the end, the broad strokes of his life were all too regular. So really, this is mainly "dicey territory" because some other documentary film might deal with a subject where parsing by microscope might be central to the project, and in that context, random AI enunciation really could be problematic. The red haired children want to lump this use of AI voice reconstruction into the realm of all possible AI voice reconstruction, and make this artistic filmmaker responsible for spearheading the entire debate, for having dared to do something new with a potentially scary technology. This particular film is actually a terrible context for having that debate, because the subject of this film was one-way force of nature, and all the churn on top was finally emblematic of the rigidity underneath (affirmed in many direct interviews with his closest confidants). Your mission, if you choose to accept it: spin the narrative around the life and death of Anthony Bourdain by tweaking the enunciation of a few voice passages, without creating perceptible cracks in the seamless whole.

There are, indeed, a couple of brief moments in this film that do manage to tilt the entire narrative, and they aren't anything spoken by Bourdain (or BourdAI) off camera. One is the scene where they interrupt the guest at the peak of heartfelt confession to move the table and his stupid chair. The other is the scene where a close friend confesses that Bourdain once told him he couldn't ever be a good father. "Of course he was projecting." But it didn't negate the hurt. After those two scenes, BourdAI is left tilting the landscape as seventh fiddle, which is four fiddles further down the list than any critic normally bothers to diagnose. Here's a phrase where enunciation actually mattered: "shit show of the last two years". But that wasn't spoken by Bourdain, it was one of his closest confidants. That was an isolated squeak in extremis from a person you've only barely begun to know. An AI performance of this line would have been hopelessly inappropriate.

I know I'm tilting at windmills to some degree here, but nevertheless I object to the use of quoted material to evade {clarification needed}, e.g. "he knew he was in dicey territory.^{[Clarification needed: If you ask enough overexposed people in an emotionally fraught industry, finally the whole of life is "dicey territory" and it ceases to mean anything in particular.]}

Why waste my time tilting at windmills? Because if everyone thinks this way, then these objections are never voiced, and finally someone observes in smug retrospect "it can't really be a problem, because it's never been written down" (which actually says far more about the windmill headwind, so easily glossed over from the smug, retrospective side). Screw that. Consider it written down.

If Not Now, When? (novel) — the one work by Levi where the title is eternal, while the work inside is fleeting

Wikipedia edition:

If Not Here, Where? — waiting to pick your spot = death by 1000 cuts + parable of the boiled frog

— MaxEnt 19:10, 10 October 2022 (UTC)