With Missing in Arizona, true crime has gone too far
In a recent trailer for the True Crime Podcast Missing in Arizonathe latest addition to an already crowded genre, a man introduces himself: “I’m Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. The police say I killed my family… and rigged my house to explode.” The whole thing is delivered in a strangely cheery, high-pitched monotone that just sounds wrong. And the reason for this is simple: As the podcast host happily admits, they recreated Robert Fisher’s voice using artificial intelligence.
The details of Fisher’s alleged crimes are as grotesque as you would expect from a podcast of this genre. In 2001, the house where Fisher lived with his wife and two children suddenly exploded. Inside the burned-out house lay the bodies of Fisher’s wife Mary and his two children Brittany and Robert Jr., all with their throats slit. Mary had also been shot in the back of the head. Fisher had previously been controlling of Mary, cheating on her, and being seen committing violent acts in public.
Fisher was the prime suspect. Mary’s car, which Fisher presumably drove away from the crime scene, was found in the wilderness ten days after the explosion – with the family dog alive underneath. A large and highly publicized manhunt was launched for Fisher, but he was never found and a body was never discovered. It’s tragic, nightmarish – and the stuff of a true crime podcast.
Dozens of new miniseries are released every week, and they almost all follow the same formula: Either an attractive young woman, or sometimes her entire family, was murdered at some point in the recent past, and an intrepid podcaster decides to rehash the trauma of the victims’ families for our listening pleasure. Most choose unsolved murders – in the hope that the podcast or its listeners might solve the case – while some follow the trail of the mega-hit Serial podcast (which essentially launched the genre in 2014) and suggests that the suspected killer might actually be innocent. It’s formulaic, but it’s a winning formula – in fact, almost no other narrative podcasts are made.
If recreating Fisher’s voice is producer iHeartRadio’s attempt to stand out, then it worked — but not for good reason. Simply using AI to recreate documented things Fisher said may be dubious but defensible, but using it to dramatize the script of their advertisement is something else entirely. Imagine listening to a podcast and suddenly hearing the voice of someone you believe killed your friend, for no other reason than marketing.
Even for a genre known for plumbing the depths of decency, impersonation of voices is surely a new low. True crime relies on a veneer of middle-class respectability and uses the tropes of the documentary format to suggest that this is quality programming – that audiences are listening to hear about a miscarriage of justice or to see justice being served, not just hear sordid and unsavory details of crimes in meticulous detail.
Voice cloning destroys this illusion. It is clearly done for effect, for drama, to stand out from a crowded field. The quality of voice cloning in Missing in Arizona is terrible: the intonation is flat – some would say robotic – and atonal. A typical listener would know within seconds that something was wrong. It is not a useful tool for tracking down a potential murderer.
Given how cheap and widespread technology is, and how quickly it’s improving, the killer co-host could become the new normal. It could launch a whole new subgenre of true crime if listeners are macabre enough to find it enhances their enjoyment of the form.
Friends and families of victims – or even those of the alleged killers – can seemingly do nothing in most parts of the world if they wish to object to such tactics. Most laws protecting our identities are designed either to protect us from identity fraud or to protect our works through copyright or trademark. Lawmakers didn’t make it illegal to create voice or video clones of people because they didn’t even think it was possible – it was the stuff of science fiction.
Robert Fisher has been either missing or dead for more than two decades. His voice could easily have never been heard again, and the world would have been better off for it. Bringing him back as an inferior AI clone to promote a podcast is certainly unconscionable. True crime is a genre that thrives on showing us the worst sides of humanity. Have the people working on it stared into the abyss for too long?
