Talking to ghosts.

And wishing they talked back.

'Oh, What's That in the Hollow...?' (Edward Robert Hughes)

In one of those bits of online serendipity, a few weeks ago the small scandal over the use of an AI-generated voice in an Anthony Bourdain documentary, Roadrunner, was followed by a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Project December, a service that allows people to generate AI text messages by feeding it pieces of text. The article follows one guy, Joshua, who decides to create a bot on Project December using the text left behind by his dead fiancee, Jessica.

As far as the Bourdain documentary goes, I recommend both of the pieces Alicia Kennedy wrote on it (for her newsletter and for NBC), though they aren’t strictly on the AI issue. Also, this piece in Slate about how the documentary director commissioned a mural so it could… be destroyed… on camera…? I’m going to admit I find the whole business of this documentary mystifying, both because Bourdain is such an extensively documented person and because he was an interest…