10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, will see you in class at BBC Maestro
With the help of artificial intelligence, Agatha Christie has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series. PHOTO: BBC MAESTRO/INSTAGRAM
Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, will see you in class at BBC Maestro
LONDON – Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class.
'I must confess,' she says, in a cut-glass English accent, 'that this is all rather new to me.'
The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture serie s. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with £79 (S$136) to spare.
She has been reanimated with the help of academic researchers – who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews – and a 'digital prosthetic' made with artificial intelligence an d fitted over a real actor's performance.
'We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,' Mr Michael Levine, chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a telephone interview. 'This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.'
The course's release coincides with a heated debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train AI models without their consent.
In this case, however, there is no copyright issue. Christie's family, who manages her estate, is fully on board.
'We just had the red line that it had to be her words,' said Mr James Prichard, her great-grandson and chief executive of Agatha Christie Limited. 'And the image an d voice had to be like her.'
Christie is hardly the only person to have been resurrected with AI. Using the technology to talk to the dead has become something of a cottage industry for wealthy nostalgics.
She is not the first dead artist to be turned into an avatar either.
In 2021, AI was used to generate American celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain's voice reading out his own words. English actor Peter Cushing has been resurrected to act in movies. In 2024 , a Polish radio station used AI to 'interview' a dead luminary, leading many to worry that it had put words in her mouth.
For Christie, AI was used only to create her likeness, not to build the course or write the script.
That is part of why Mr Levine rejects the idea that this is an Agatha Christie deepfake. 'The implication of the word 'fake' suggests that there is something about this which is sort of passing off,' he said. 'I don't think that's the case.'
Mr Prichard said his family would never have agreed to a project that invented Christie's views. And they are proud of the course.
'We're not speaking for her,' he added. 'We are collecting what she said and putting it out in a digestible and shareable format.'
A team of academics combined or paraphrased statements from Christie's archive to distill her advice about the writing process. They took care to preserve what they believed to be her intended meaning, with the aim of helping more of her fans interact with her work, and with fiction writing in general.
'We didn't make anything up in terms of things like her suggestions and what she did,' said Mr Mark Aldridge, who led the academic team.
That, for Dr Carissa Veliz, a professor of philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at Oxford University, is still 'extremely problematic'.
Even if the author's family consented, Christie has not, and cannot, agree to the course. That is complex with any sort of historical re-enactment or animation, but Dr Veliz noted that writers spend hours finding the right word, or the right rhythm.
'Agatha Christie never said those words,' Dr Veliz said in a telephone interview. 'She's not sitting there. And therefore, yes, it's a deepfake.'
She added: 'When you see someone who looks like Agatha Christie and talks like Agatha Christie , i t's easy for the boundaries to be blurred. What do we gain? Other than it being gimmicky?'
But Dr Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and digital news at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, noted that this Christie was meant to entertain and also educate – which the author did when she was alive.
And the representation draws from something 'close to her actual writings and her actual words – and therefore by her extension, to some degree, her thinking', he said.
'There's also very little risk of this harming, posthumously, her dignity or her reputation,' he added. 'I think that makes these cases so complicated because you can't apply a hard and fast rule for every single one of them and say: 'This is generally good or generally bad.''
Perhaps this sort of fact-fiction-futurism melange is just the way things are going in an age when AI can be used to finish sentences, replace jobs and, perhaps, even try to resurrect the dead.
Either way, the creators think Christie – a brave and creative adventurer – would have liked it. 'Can we definitively know that this something she would be approving of?' said Mr Levine. 'We hope. But we don't definitively know, because she's not here.' NYTIMES
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