Today in "Why?": BBC using AI Agatha Christie to teach writing course

The ghost of Agatha Christie will be reanimated to teach a masterclass.

By Mary Kate Carr | April 30, 2025 | 4:50pm

Screenshot: BBC Maestro/YouTube

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Spookier than any murder mystery, Agatha Christie will be reanimated by artificial intelligence to teach a writing masterclass. This is part of the BBC’s BBC Maestro online courses, which have lectures by living experts and artists like Brian Cox, Jojo Moyes, and Harlan Coben. Now the broadcaster is dabbling in some digital necromancy in collaboration with Christie’s estate, led by her great-grandson James Prichard.

Apparently, Prichard’s requirement for signing off on this project was that everything had to be in Christie’s actual words, so a team of academics researched through her writing and any and all interviews and recordings to put together the actual lesson plan. The lectures were then delivered by actor Vivien Keene. (Per Deadline, Keene said she “literally got the job on the shape of my face” based on a biometrics test before her first audition, a somewhat troubling precedent for where the industry could go in the future.) AI came in to transpose Christie’s face over Keene’s, and make her voice sound like the long-dead author. The result is what The Telegraph describes as an “unnerving” version of the woman directly facing the camera with little movement over the course of 2.5 hours.

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“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t worries [about using AI],” Prichard admitted to The Telegraph. “But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn’t work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, ‘by her.'”

This begs the question, if they’re all Agatha Christie’s actual words, why does the information have to be presented by her AI likeness? Could it not have been a documentary format presented by a Christie scholar or by Prichard himself? Perhaps the only answer is that we’re living in the AI age, and the powers that be rarely ask if they should, only if they can. But if you like your teachers to be on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, well, this one’s for you.