This Is A Bomb: The Nevada Casino Heist (BBC2)
Rating: Four out of five stars
Maybe I’m being irrational. It’s only technology, after all.
But an AI reconstruction of a man’s voice, reading from his memoir years after his own death, gives me the creeps.
‘Little John’ Birges, whose father, ‘Big John’, masterminded a $3 million bomb-and-blackmail attack on a U.S. hotel in 1980, is no longer around to tell his own story.
Is it right to reanimate him via Artificial Intelligence?
Perhaps the digital reimagining of his voice is no more strange than using a video or photograph of anyone who is dead.
After all, This Is A Bomb: The Nevada Casino Heist reconstructed scenes using actors, a common technique for documentaries, and replayed archive news footage, as well as interviewing former FBI agents and explosives experts.
The reconstructions were wordless and brief, like snippets of memory – a gambler punching the air to celebrate winning at the blackjack table, thieves loading sticks of dynamite into the back of a van, and so on.
A lot of attention was paid to period detail such as facial hair and cigarette brands. Most of the men wore ten-gallon hats indoors, which might be an embellishment though it does seem credible.
John Birges’ (pictured) voice has been reconstructed with AI, but it feels lifeless and unnerving
The story is crying out to be made in Hollywood as gambling addict Birges runs up huge debts and is banned from the club. He then seeks his revenge – roping in his two sons
Birges plans to bomb the casino and disguises the 1,000lb explosive as a computer
What made me shiver, though, was a 16-year-old clip of John Jr on a U.S. television talk show, with the caption: ‘Using an interview John gave in 2010, the filmmakers recreated his voice using an AI program.’
The results did not sound entirely convincing – slightly expressionless, literally lifeless.
Concentrating on what ‘John’ was actually saying was all but impossible: the weirdness got in the way.
Hiring a human actor to read the lines would have been far less distracting.
If ever a true-crime tale deserved a weird retelling, though, it was this one.
Born in Hungary, Big John Birges was a former Luftwaffe pilot and escapee from a Red Army prisoner-of-war camp (or so he claimed) who made a fortune in landscape gardening and lost it at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
An alcoholic and a gambling addict, Birges loved the attention he commanded when he laid $10,000 bets at the table.
But after running up huge debts, he was banned from the club, and began plotting his revenge.
Roping in his sons, John and Jim, he stole 1,000lb of high explosives and built an ingeniously fiendish bomb, with eight boobytrap triggers, which he delivered to the casino – disguised as a computer.
His girlfriend, a parole officer, helped him to write the extortion demand. This 40-minute episode, the first of three, left us on a cliffhanger, with federal bomb disposal specialists flummoxed by the device.
After X-raying it gingerly, they decided it was safer to pay the $3 million and hope to catch the bombmaker when he collected the money.
It’s an extraordinary story, crying out to be made as a Hollywood movie. But not with AI actors please.
