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 series similar to Master Class. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with 79 pounds (about $105) to spare.
She has been reanimated with the help of a team of academic researchers — who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews — and a “digital prosthetic” made with artificial intelligence and then fitted over a real actor’s performance.
“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” Michael Levine, the chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a phone 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. In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train A.I. models without their consent. In this case, however, there is no copyright issue: Christie’s family, who manage her estate, are fully on board.
“We just had the red line that it had to be her words,” said James Prichard, her great-grandson and the chief executive of Agatha Christie Ltd. “And the image and the voice had to be like her.”