"A primary concern for Petrucelli, Jenkins, and Antell, longtime documentary filmmakers and co-founders of the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), is to avoid a situation in which AI-generated images make their way into documentaries without proper disclosure, creating a false historical record."
They shouldn't be in a documentary period. A documentary is meant to be factual and historical so nothing fake should be injected into it.
Documentaries often include recreations of events, such as historical events that weren't filmed. It's usually noted as being a recreation or re-enactment. If AI-created images are used instead and are noted as being such, I don't really see the problem, assuming the images are curated to depict the scene accurately.
The problem in both cases is that people remember these artistic depiction as real, even if there's a disclosure.
Are we worrying about the fully functional adults that still need to be told not to drink Draino?
It wouldn’t be such a concern if they didn’t make up like 40% of the population.
We're all susceptible to this stuff, even when we're aware of it.
As someone who actually worked in the corporate propaganda industry... I concur.
If you think you are impervious to this, then I got news for you.
I think I'm pretty impervious to the impulse of drinking drain cleaner. 🤷
Ok but drinking draino is the cure for all life's problems. To each their own, though.
That or seeing Batman.
Yeah television doesn’t affect anyone. That’s been a great success. Fox News anybody? Pizzagate?
That argument extends to any realistic recreation of events. It's not wrong, I'm just not sure what could be done about it.
This is how I'm leaning too. If done appropriately this should be no different than "this is a reenactment of events" seen in 90s and 00s true crime shows.
The big challenge is getting the content creators to respect that template and not bury the disclosure in the credits.
Just to play devil's advocate, does that mean any "artist rendering" shouldn't be in a documentary? Documentaries have had drawings, with a disclaimer that it is an artist rendering, for as long as I can remember. Or what about when they hire actors to do a "dramatization" of what happened, how is this different?
They are different because they are clearly not real images or video. The fact that we can generate images of whatever we want that are near if not impossible to discern as fake by the naked eye, means that they shouldn't be in there at all.
Again, how is this different from an artist rendering? There's been artists creating digital media for documentaries for a long long time.
As a wrestling fan I know to never fuck with the APA!
Reading through these comments it seems that many lemmings have wildly optimistic ideals about ethics in the "true crime" genre of documentaries.
Even for sincere documentarians, presenting unvarnished history accurately and completely is an impossibility. For the bad-faith actors, you'd be amazed at how much is outright staged or otherwise faked. The only rule is that it be entertaining.
As far as "true crime", the question of "should we even make this" is pretty ethically fraught. True crime is cheap, popular, and stuffed to the brim with hacks and bad faith actors.
Well thanks to you I've found my niche...documentaries about true crime documentaries
Is this a real niche? Cuz I would watch some if you have recs
A proof of concept documentary about how fabricated evidence could be used to promote a fringe theory or even convict would be way cool.
How Jennifer shot JFK
Dunno if this is that.
Knew it all along; Jennifer was the second shooter!
Duuuuuuude... JFK. Jennifer Fucking Killed! It was in front of us the whole time! 😱
Yes there are re-enactments in documentaries but this was using actual photos of the subject. I def have a problem with that. It's exploitive at the very least and reminds of the AI shitshow to come. Disclosure should be on the damn picture itself, not in the credits.
Re-enactments have actors and no one confuses them for the actual subjects. If you dont have enough material, don't make a 'true crime documentary'.
okay, so, yes, its not 'true', and the crime its about didn't actually 'happen', but everyone knows' true crime' is a genre defined by its aesthetics and 'grittiness' and being very cheap to produce, so we here at Netflix believe we're being true to the highest ideals and aesthetics of the genre.
They might not be mistaken for the actual people in the case, but they certainly get beleived as 100% accurate reenactments.
We call that historical fiction.
We call that bullshit where I come from. Either it’s historical or it’s fiction. Fiction can be done in an historical setting, but is never historical itself.
Not if it poses as a documentary.
In the U.K. there’s a law (perhaps it’s an agreement between the broadcasters, no sure) to display a P in the corner of the screen when there’s product placements. So every time someone takes a phone out in a soap opera, the little P appears. Hilarious how ALL the characters in Hollyoaks chose Windows Mobile for a while.
Perhaps we ought to require the same for AI generated media.
So like Inglorious Bastards?
Are the images clearly labeled, or are they trying to pass them off as reality? There's a clear difference.
It’s Netflix marketing with ai. If this happened in the past it would just be photoshopped. They’re using buzzwords to get you engaged
You didn't read the article. These are images that appeared in the documentary and were not marked as generated. It was implied they were real photos.
I didn’t no but I gathered that. What I meant was that in the past the images that would have appeared in the documentary would have simply been photoshopped - it’s the deception that the images were real that is the problem. This article, I assume is using the topic of ai to imply something new has happened when it hasn’t
Is it just me, or is everyone here commenting on a half article, the other half being behind a paywall? 😬
Yeah I couldn’t read the whole article, so what I’d want to know is if the AI generated images were shown with a disclosure or not. Because that changes everything..
Edit: apparently there was no disclosure in the movie, which is the problem
If there was a disclosure, that would be fine. Documentaries used actors, reenactments, illustrations, 3D generated content, etc. before. If it helps viewers visualize the topic, it is fine. If it skews the story to push a theory of the documentary, that's not fine.
I think we can all agree on that... But without the entire article, one can only parametrise their answer... I was hoping someone with a full version could do an HTML dump. 😅
Or at the very least a markdown dump in here.
In my experience, most just read the headline. That's why the tldr bot is so important and most subs banning it are just doing the community a disservice.
Paywall :/
Fuck all these disgusting true crime documentaries regardless whether or not they use AI
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
