A Conversation with My Deepfake Dad
October 14, 2022
Presented by CultureHub
Sarah Sweeney's father died when he was forty-four and she was seventeen. He was a screenwriter who used a tape recorder to take notes about his work and his life. When she turned forty-four, she wanted to talk to him again. She reached out to Resemble AI, a company that uses machine learning to create clones of voices, to discuss the possibility of creating a deepfake of her father’s voice. Over the next couple months, she found six hours of his tape recordings and worked with Resemble AI and her mother to think through the ethical and technological challenges of recreating her father’s voice.
A Conversation with My Deepfake Dad is a series of conversations between Sarah and her deepfake dad that explores their relationship before and after death and reckons with our feelings about consent and the ownership of our digital bodies. The first conversation in the series was developed by Sarah Sweeney in residence at CultureHub and was shared with the public in a listening session, which was be followed by an open discussion about the project.
About the deepfake: In October 2021, Sarah worked with Resemble AI to complete the model of Sarah’s father’s voice and she was able to type words into the interface and hear him speak. In October 2022, Sarah gained access to Resemble AI’s “Speech-to-Speech” engine, which allows a human to speak into the interface in order to generate the deepfake, allowing for more natural-sounding speech that follows the speaker’s inflection, cadence, and pitch.
About the images: In 1999, Sarah Sweeney created “My Father Died Four Years Ago,” a series of photographs where she painstakingly built a digital background over images of her father so she could see the hole that he left when he died. In 2022, CultureHub Technical Director DeAndra Anthony remixed those images into digital collages fragmented, zoomed in, and blurred those images to create a visual accompaniment to the audio-based work.
A Conversation with My Deepfake Dad was developed within the CultureHub Residency Program.
Read Sarah Sweeney’s reflection on her time with CultureHub here.