Netflix Is Using AI to Recreate Gene Wilder’s Voice for a Willy Wonka Reality Show
· Vice
Netflix will turn random intellectual property into reality shows until morale improves. You will be forced to endure it. You will be made to believe, through an avalanche of advertising and cultural chatter, that Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, an upcoming Netflix reality competition based on the 1971 classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, is the entertainment event of the year. And guiding contestants through a series of convoluted games loosely based on a movie about a tour of a factory will be an AI recreation of Gene Wilder’s voice, almost exactly a decade after the actor’s death.
According to Variety, Netflix partnered with AI audio company ElevenLabs and the Gene Wilder Estate to digitally recreate Wilder’s voice for the nine-episode reality competition series. Twelve pairs of contestants will compete inside a recreation of Wonka’s factory for a grand prize.
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Will they die horrifying but ultimately hilariously ironic deaths? We can only hope. The reality competition show will also feature the return of Rusty Goffe, one of the original Oompa-Loompa actors from the 1971 film. Yay.
Gene Wilder’s Voice Will Return Through AI in Netflix’s ‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket’
Not long ago, the idea that dead actors would keep working after they died was treated as dystopian, one of the more ghoulish outcomes of the AI era. It seemed inevitable but still distant. And now, here it is: AI recreations of famous dead people are trying their best to become the norm.
The problem doesn’t lie within AI itself. There’s a broader creepiness of people puppeting the dead for the financial benefit of the living, a problem we recently saw tagged at the end of a trailer for an upcoming game called Stranger Than Haven, in which the famously dead Tupac Shakur will make an appearance, presumably fully recuperated from his resurrection as a hologram at Coachella Music Festival back in 2012.
The dead are just promotional material. Gene Wilder is being brought back from the dead via digital necromancy (technecromancy?) to narrate a reality competition show. Bleak!
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