The uploader has now removed the original version featuring Elisabeth Sladen’s AI likeness. DigitalogMedia says the version now online is the reworked edition, with the role recast.
There is a long list of things nobody asked artificial intelligence to do, and this week it got longer. A fan production called Resistance to the Daleks is a four-part serial that calls itself an AI-assisted recreation of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who. It used generated images and sound to bring back Sarah Jane Smith as played by the late Elisabeth Sladen. Sladen’s daughter, Sadie Miller, was not impressed.
Miller posted about it on social media. She said she didn’t want to give the maker any publicity, then suggested people who make AI videos of other people’s dead relatives should be called “a bit of a pervy weirdo”. The video, she wrote, showed her mother saying and doing things she had never agreed to, because she is dead. “My mum would hate this, as would Jon.”
Her second point is the sharper one, and she has every right to make it. Since 2021 Miller has voiced Sarah Jane herself for Big Finish, so she clearly doesn’t think the character is untouchable. For her, the line falls between an actor reading a script and a synthetic copy of a real person who never had the chance to say yes or no. She also asked why, if this was done with good intentions, nobody told the family.
To be fair to DigitalogMedia, which made the serial, it was labelled unofficial and non-commercial, with a disclaimer saying the BBC had nothing to do with it. A spokesman says the serial went up on 10 October and Miller objected the next day. He then apologised, offered to remove it, and took it down on the 12th once she said yes. Episode one has since been reworked, with Sladen’s likeness replaced by actress Caroline Whitmore. The revised version went back up on 31 October. Releasing your digital-resurrection controversy on Halloween is either bad timing or the most honest scheduling decision in the whole affair.
Fan productions are as much a part of Doctor Who as wobbly sets and men in rubber suits. Sladen herself played Sarah Jane in Reeltime’s direct-to-video spin-off Downtime in 1995. She did it the old-fashioned way: she read the script, turned up and, crucially, agreed. That’s the difference the current wave of AI “recreations” keeps skipping over. Software can copy a face and a voice, but it can’t give permission on behalf of someone who’s no longer here.
For the record (and here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we keep a very careful record), the makers know their lore. The serial is set ten years after Genesis of the Daleks, with scattered Thal resistance fighters waging guerrilla war against their new Dalek masters. Pairing that with the Third Doctor rather than the Fourth is the sort of continuity wrinkle fandom will happily argue about for decades, which is arguably the most authentically 1970s thing about it.
The show got to this story first, of course. In 1975’s The Android Invasion, the Kraals built a synthetic Sarah Jane to fool the Doctor, and even then everyone could tell the copy was the villain. Fifty years on, it’s a shame anyone needed reminding.
Join the conversation (0)