Netflix has come under fire for using generative AI to reproduce the voice of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old social media influencer who, according to the FBI, was murdered by her fiancé Brian Laundrie in August 2021.
In the opening credits of the company's true crime documentary, "American Murder: Gabby Petito," which premiered its first episode on Monday, a notice reveals that Petito's "journal entries and text messages are brought to life in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology."
I'm watching #AmericanMurderGabbyPetito and HOLY SHIT. They've used AI voice recreation to have Gabby Petito reading journal entries and text messages from the last months of her life. I'm assuming they got permission from the family, but this is a deeply unsettling use of AI. pic.twitter.com/uKd4bIFfBu — Laura (@editedbylaura) February 17, 2025
It's an eerie artistic choice, even for the fraught true crime genre, that had audiences startled, with one user calling it "deeply unsettling use of AI."
"Watching the Gabby Petito doc, absolutely invested... until the part it started using AI to make HER read out her texts and journal entries," another user wrote. "That is absolutely NOT okay. She’s a murder victim. You are violating her again."
Petito's parents appear to have been an integral part of Netflix's efforts to bring her voice back to life.
"We had so much material from her parents that we were able to get," filmmaker and producer Michael Gasparro told Us Weekly. "All of her journals since she was young and there was so much of her writing."
"At the end of the day, we wanted to tell the story as much through Gabby as possible," he added. "It’s her story."
But to many, using AI to synthesize the voice of a deceased person — particularly without consent — was a step too far.
"I understand they had permission from the parents, but that doesn’t make it feel any better," one X-formerly-Twitter user wrote. "This woman had her voice taken from her, so to recreate it with a poor substitute — a monotone, lacking in emotion AI model — is an insult to her. There is absolutely no need for it."
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