Gabby Petito’s mum has mixed feelings about hearing her late daughter’s AI-generated voice in a new super popular Netflix docuseries.
‘American Murder: Gabby Petito’ covers the life and heartbreaking death of the young YouTuber, killed by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie.
To tell the story of her final moments, the series uses deepfake tech to bring her journal entries and text messages to life.
At the start of the first episode, an on-screen message lets people know: "Gabby Petito's journal entries and text messages are brought to life in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology."
While Gabby’s parents, Nichole Schmidt and Joe Petito, gave Netflix permission to use AI for this, Schmidt admitted it was a bit unsettling for her.
“I think it's weird, and because we know her actual voice, [it] is a little off,” she told The Independent.
It's just hard to hear.
Viewers were much more critical with many slamming the streaming platform for using AI in this way.
Many described it as “disgusting” and “violating”.
“Watching the Gabby Petito doc, absolutely invested… until the part it started using AI to make HER read out her texts and journal entries. That is absolutely NOT okay,” someone wrote on X.
She’s a murder victim. You are violating her again.
Another agreed, calling it “a deeply unsettling use of AI”.
“Using AI to recreate Gabby Petito’s voice to recreate the reading of her last messages before she died is beyond volatile and disgusting,” said a third.
“[You] should be ashamed of yourselves @netflix. She was a real human being and even though creating these documentaries is bad enough…using AI??”
Despite the backlash, filmmaker Michael Gasparro, who worked on the series, defended the decision to use it for Gabby’s story.
He told Us Weekly: “[Gabby] documented her trips and most of her life from a young age. We thought it was really important to bring that to life.”
“We had so much material from her parents that we were able to get. All of her journals since she was young and there was so much of her writing.”
He added: “At the end of the day, we wanted to tell the story as much through Gabby as possible. It's her story.”
But do you think AI should be used like this in real-life stories, or does it cross a sensitive line?
