A new documentary about late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain utilized artificial intelligence to recreate his voice, spurring a debate about the ethics of this practice.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Morgan Neville, the director of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain , said that he used AI to create a voiceover of Bourdain reading an email hed written.

My life is sort of shit now, Bourdains voice says in the film, reading an email Bourdain had written to his friend David Choe. You are successful and I am successful and Im wondering: Are you happy?

Bourdain, who hosted CNN s Parts Unknown, died by suicide in 2018 at age 61.

Neville told The New Yorker that hed sent a software company hours of recordings of Bourdains voice, from TV, podcasts and other media, to create an AI version of his voice. He used this to have Bourdains deepfake voice express three quotes in the film that the late chef and TV host had never actually said out loud.

Some people raised concerns on social media about the ethics of using an artificially recreated voice and not telling viewers to depict Bourdain expressing things aloud that he never did in real life.

Neville noted in his interview that the voiceover is so seamless that you probably dont know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and youre not going to know. The filmmaker added: We can have a documentary ethics panel about it later.

After online backlash, the director told GQ that he checked with Bourdains widow and literary executor about his re-creation of the voice, just to make sure people were cool with that; and they were like, Tony would have been cool with that.

Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, who was separated from Bourdain in 2016, tweeted in response: I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that. Bourdain was dating actress Asia Argento when he died. Its unclear who Neville was referring to when he said he spoke to his widow.

Nevilles representatives did not immediately return HuffPosts request for comment.