Netflix’s new documentary The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel premiered last Friday. It is, by most accounts, a genuinely affecting portrait of the band’s early years and the friendship at the center of it. It is also the latest example of AI voice reconstruction being used to speak for someone who cannot speak for themselves, and that choice deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

Hillel Slovak died in 1988 of a heroin overdose. He was 26. The documentary uses his personal journals as a narrative thread, which is a reasonable and even beautiful decision in principle. Journals are intimate. They reveal the person on the page in ways that interview subjects and authorized sources rarely do. The problem is what comes next: those journals are read aloud by an AI-generated voice trained to sound like Slovak.

The film does disclose this. Viewers are told early on that the voiceover has been digitally reconstructed. That transparency is worth acknowledging. But disclosure is not the same as justification. The question is not whether audiences are being deceived in real time – they are told what they are hearing – but whether this is the right way to handle the voice of a person who died before anyone asked him if this was okay.

Slovak’s brother James, his girlfriend Addie Brik, and musicians who knew him all appear in the film. They speak about him at length. Presumably, Slovak’s family and estate cooperated with the production. And yet: is family consent the same as personal consent? This is not a settled question, and music documentaries are increasingly having to confront it head-on.

The precedent matters. We are at a moment when AI voice cloning has become technically straightforward and legally murky. The estate of a dead artist can authorize a reconstruction. A streaming platform can greenlight it. A director can frame it sympathetically. None of those parties has to clear the actual person it is simulating, because that person is gone. The result is something that looks like intimacy but is fundamentally a production decision made by the living on behalf of the dead.

The counterargument is sincere: Slovak’s journals are the only way to hear him in his own words, and an AI reconstruction allows audiences to experience that material in a more emotionally direct way than a narrator reading the same text. The film is not trying to deceive. It is trying to reach people. Those are legitimate goals.

But there is something worth sitting with in the discomfort that the documentary’s own makers acknowledge – that it comes across as a bit unsettling, even with disclosure. That unsettledness is information. It is the reaction people have when a technology outpaces the ethical framework we have built around it.

Music documentaries have been figuring out their ethics as they go for decades. The question of archival footage, of posthumous albums, of who gets to tell whose story has been contested for as long as there have been musicians worth memorializing. The AI voice is the newest version of an old tension, not a categorically new problem. But the scale of how realistic it now is, and how easy it is to deploy, means the old frameworks are no longer sufficient.

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is reportedly a moving film. Kiedis and Flea’s accounts of their friendship with Slovak are, by all early accounts, genuinely raw. None of that is diminished by these questions. But the questions are worth asking every time this technology is used, and the fact that we are asking them about a beloved, sympathetically portrayed figure rather than a controversial one is probably the best-case scenario for having the conversation at all.