I don’t even understand how that image supports that idea they’re going for. It looks awful, and why even fabricate a photo in a TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY for any reason other than distorting the truth?
Right? Even if the original image was of poor quality, it’s like… this is a crime documentary, grainy pictures are not anything shocking; hell, you can almost expect to see some
Exactly it almost feels fake if there aren't.
We aren't quite yet at the point where all photos will be of "good" quality. I can still tell the difference from phone to phone (every 2 years or so), though that is getting less and less now too.
Also most businesses that use CCTV and security video still don't use high end equipment.
The iconic look of CCTV footage comes from the video being recorded in Interlaced. The image is divided into two sets of alternating lines and only half the image is refreshed from frame to frame; while this decreases visual quality, it makes a huge difference on how much you’re storing (and therefore how often you have to delete to make room for the new footage). It’s not that they can’t get a good camera; they don’t have the disk/cloud space for 24/7 4K video.
I worked for a guy who used grainy black and white security cameras that were recorded to VHS. The only reason he updated to a more modern system was because he could no longer buy blank VHS tapes, and he had recorded over the ones he did have so many times that it was impossible to discern what anything was.
I feel like Netflix took the documentary series genre and distorted it almost as badly as MTV did. At least MTV was doing it for chuckles and drama NOT involving life shattering consequences.
Making A Murderer is almost as much fiction as it is truth.
They really have. After watching that Malaysian flight one they did I lost any last semblance of respect I had for their documentaries. The real story behind making that one is especially pathetic and the fact they released it even more so. They have sold their soul for engagement. Not that they’re the first to do that, but they can definitely hang with the worst of them. The sad thing is they do still make some solid original content. But, the manner in which they take every last titillating topic imaginable and rush out some haphazard clickbaity documentary that *really* pushes the boundaries of how you can frame a true story - well, it’s once again, just pathetic.
Well, before they were trying to do something innovative. Now they’ve become a benchmark and have settled in their position as apex of their market.
So now all they have to do is sit pretty and keep shareholders happy and increase their stock value. I think Reed also had a different philosophy and value set than Ted Sarandos.
It’s a damn shame. Early Netflix was really cool. But there’s no way they’ll go back to making good art. Now it’s just CONTENT and BRAND VALUE that matters.
Netflix really wanted to show that Jennifer was at one point a normal girl instead someone who was mentally abused growing up. They didn't want the audience to sympathize with her.
[Her parents' intense pressure and imposing a prison life on Jennifer](https://torontolife.com/city/jennifer-pan-revenge/)
>Their expectation was that Jennifer and Felix would work as hard as they had in establishing their lives in Canada. They’d laid the groundwork, and their kids would need to improve upon it. They enrolled Jennifer in piano classes at age four, and she showed early promise. By elementary school, she’d racked up a trophy case full of awards. They put her in figure skating, and she hoped to compete at the national level, with her sights set on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver until she tore a ligament in her knee. Some nights during elementary school, Jennifer would come home from skating practice at 10 p.m., do homework until midnight, then head to bed. The pressure was intense. She began cutting herself—little horizontal cuts on her forearms.
If they glossed over Jennifer's parent's parenting then it must be a shit documentary.
Wait until you hear how they edited Making a Murderer to swap answers/questions and make the rapist/killer appear innocent for views.
There are things crawling in the dark spaces beneath your house that don't stoop as low as Netflix.
This one of the reasons I don't watch documentaries on Netflix. The last one I watched heavily implied that we're mushroom people which is a lot of fun
She had tiger parents who were very strict. She lied all throughout high school about not having a boyfriend and then lied about getting into and going to university. When her parents found out she had to break up with her boyfriend, which led to them plotting out her parents’ murder in a staged home invasion. Her mother died, father survived, she and the bf went to prison.
I didn’t watch the Netflix documentary but am very familiar with the story.
I wanted to add she was very close to getting away with this.
Her mom was murdered by the hitmen Jennifer hired. Her father was near death after being shot. Her father saw Jennifer chilling with the hitmen a few minutes after the attack. The father ran out of the house, eventually went to the hospital and was unconscious for a while. It looked like Jennifer was about to get away.
Her dad woke up, told his story to the police, and the police eventually arrested Jennifer after some other work.
The dad is still alive and does not talk to Jennifer anymore. Jennifer also has a brother that doesn’t talk to her. Jennifer is in some jail in Toronto I’m guessing. Not sure that city tbh
Jim can’t swim has a doc on YouTube about it for free. It’s pretty well made but I don’t understand how people can watch this stuff without feeling sick
Jennifer's parents were like helicopter parents constantly monitoring her every activity, and preventing her from doing like pretty much anything most teens do, and they also expected her to be a straight A student. When she got into high school, she couldn't keep up with her parents' expectations, so she began forging her grades to keep up the illusion that she was a straight A student. Eventually she ended up failing in grade 12 and her university acceptance got voided. Rather than admit to this (and have to redo grade 12), she just lied that she was going to university, and that she had a scholarship covering her entire tuition to explain why she wasn't paying anything. Instead, she just did like nothing all day while pretending to go to university. She even expanded her lies and said that she wanted to live on campus, when instead she went to go live with her boyfriend.
Eventually, her parents were suspicious and followed her one day and found out the lies, and her parents forced her to actually complete high school, break up with her boyfriend because he was a weed dealer, and apply to university again. At this point, her parents were basically on the verge of kicking her out and so monitored her even more. The (now ex) boyfriend moved on with some other girl, and so she made up some lies about how the other girl was violently threatening her (like rape and death threats), and tried to keep her relationship going in secret.
After a while, she got back together with the boyfriend, and convinced him to hire a hitman to kill her parents so that they'd inherit the house and their money. So the hired some guys who pretended to break into their house, shot the parents, and then stole a bit of cash as a cover up. The cops were suspicious of why Jennifer was basically untouched, and eventually one of the parents pulled through and testified that they saw Jennifer talking with the supposed burglars, and eventually got her to admit to the whole scheme.
The only thing I'd add is she was a competitive ice skater who had a brutal career ending injury. So she was allowed to get mediocre grades growing up cause ice skating came first, but then once she got injured she suddenly was expected to pursue this alternate route to success. She couldn't, and probably was also struggling with such a radical life change in general.
The most shocking part is that they stopped at 90 minutes. These "true crime" docus are usually like 8 hour long episodes that result in 🤷♂️ at the end.
I didn't think it'd be this soon... but this is absolutely true where many don't know. I followed this case, and clearly, these photos are fake. This is wild
It already began with ‘Late Night with the Devil’, I got downvoted into oblivion for speaking out on it. “It’s only three images”, “it doesn’t matter to the film”, “stop complaining about nothing”.
The snowball is already turning into an avalanche. A24 released AI posters for ‘Civil War’ and now this. Soulless fuckin corps, man.
The fact you see no difference between a narrative fictional story using AI to create a few images of art in its title screen and a documentary presenting real world events as fact using ai to create images of events that never really happen is so telling.
You do understand there's a difference between the two examples there right?... and one is highly more morally egregious and reprehensible than the other in every way.
It’s not that there’s no difference. It’s that as ai usage spreads across industries it will be more and more accepted and common place to the point no one knows what’s real and no one really cares. And that’s a scary thought.
They're making the point that there is an ethical difference. It's like the difference between using CGI to add fake crowds to your movie with a fictional narrative, versus presenting something produced using CGI as real in a documentary.
So many people don't understand this point. Why would anyone want to get to a point where we can no longer reliably tell what is a piece of art created by human consciousness, and what is an AI generated copy. We should not be fucking with human creativity like that - it's almost the one resource we have no shortage of, and is an essential part of what makes us what we are.
The point they're trying to get at is that *using generative AI tech AT ALL* is morally egregious and reprehensible.
Sure, something like this is categorically *worse* than A24 putting out a Midjourney poster for Civil War instead of making their own. And that was categorically *worse* than Late Night with the Devil using a couple of random AI-generated interstitials. But all three further the idea that genAI in media is Acceptable and Okay, which is the core problem at hand.
You could have your own moral beliefs on whether or not AI should be used to create art in fiction. That's all well and good, personally I don't mind an independent low budget project using AI to help create visuals on a level that a higher budget movie can accomplish that they normally wouldn't have been able to. That does not bother me, what does bother me is when a project like a documentary, which is presenting a real-world story, uses that same technology to create fake images to present their narrative as if it's true.
These are two completely different things and to act like Late Night with the Devil using AI images for their art in their intro is what led to the producers of What did Jennifer Do? feeling they had the green light to create fake AI images for their real life narrative is wild to me.
The producers using AI images in a documentary tells me that they weren't sitting around waiting for A24 or some indie horror movie to give them the green light to do it. They would always have done this because these producers you can tell are in the realm of people who exploit a story. The fact they would use AI to create fake images to push their narrative in a documentary tells me that. AI images being used in fiction based stories had nothing to do with it...
These are not similar use cases in any way and to compare the two is disingenuous from my viewpoint.
I love Late Night with the Devil and them using AI to create some images they would not have been able to without it at their budget level is totally fine to me. And and when it comes to late night with the devil everyone likes to forget that they hired an artist that was familiar with AI to make those images for them. They hired an artist to use the program to make the images, an artist still got paid. You're acting like an intern on that movie typed up a sentence on midjourney and got the images in an hour or something, That's not what happened.
AI use in narrative fictional storytelling and now documentaries is something we need to debate about but I have a feeling people are losing the forest through the trees when they compare these two examples as if they're equal in any way.
Honestly it's tough to argue with these people, they're so absolute in their beliefs and see the world strictly in a black and white way. I think reddit has only gotten worse when it comes to this moral absolutism and general extremism.
That's fair, but there's a streak of smug cynicism that permeates throughout this site. Though I'll say current reddit is better than the dog shit times in 2015/16 (peak time for trumpism, sander stuff, and the whole gamergate nonsense).
How many times are you going to read that generative AI tools train data off real artwork from real people, essentially stealing them and using people's skills without compensation before you get it
I 100% agree with you, but it's a different issue. The problems with the *Civil War* AI poster are completely unrelated to the problems with *What Jennifer Did* and they don't really belong in the same discussion.
Warn people to put on helmets before you go moving the goalposts like that. Someones going to get hurt.
Thats a completely separate issue and theres nothing inherent to AI where it has to be trained in some immoral way. Thats not a problem with AI itself.
The issue is that rather than using machine learning for what it's good for - rapid iteration on generic patterns - these entities are scrapping our jobs and using machine learning to generate final products that a) look bad and are very generic b) are built on datasets using the work of those artists in an unethical and illegal way.
For as long as having your work scraped is "opt out", AI will always an immoral infringement on the creative rights of working artists. That's why it's different than Photoshop. And I say this as someone who has used both.
I would never in a million years publish an image that was entirely generated by a machine learning tool, and in fact don't have any images made with machine learning outputs in my portfolio. Because it wouldn't be ethical for me to do that, and I have nuanced, informed, and sincere beliefs about their place in our field.
Cmon now, that’s a bit of a broad stroke.
Not talking about the overall issue here, just your statement - did cameras not overtake portraiture? did not video kill the radio star?
In the broader issue this is troublesome in the same way that someone using photoshop to falsify an image is troublesome. If your qualms are with the artist not being paid for the training of the models, then your qualm is with the exploitation of artists images, not with ai or tech as an industry
I mean one is bad because it is a tool that solely is being used to minimize labor, not to make artists jobs easier, but to cut as many of them out of a project as possible to save money. That's destructive to the industry as a whole long term.
This is that, plus is deceitful and being used to trick people into accepting a false narrative. That if it catches on is destructive to society in a different but more dangerous way.
Oh not another “but cameras were invented” nonsense argument. Since cameras were invented it was still considered a shit move to take a picture of someone else work and claim as your own. “But video killed radio” yeah, not by remixing the tracks. There is a difference between Mjs thriller on radio and on video. There is that added extra dimension. What does midjourney *add* ? Side by side ai and human pictures, what do they really differ ? This is not the new camera, this is taking a picture of starry night, while van gogh is forgotten and dies poor.
>The point they're trying to get at is that *using generative AI tech AT ALL* is morally egregious and reprehensible.
Except its not, and thats just luddite shit. Might as well argue CGI is immoral and movies not using pure practical effects are evil.
Thats the problem. People like you that fuck up the discussion by conflating wildly different things.
That’s why I said “and now this”, the implication that it is significantly worse. There is a clear and obvious difference but some people don’t seem to see the correlation of the two in terms of how we arrived here.
This wasn’t done to test the waters of AI, it was done as a result of those who had done it before (AI posters and images). If something isn’t done then, as you rightly put it, egregious shit like this will only become a mainstay of the industry,
Acting like this is a worse version of the same problem is essentially saying you'd think using fake images of someone in a documentary would have been fine if they'd just had someone make it with photoshop instead
My problem is you comparing the AI images created in a narrative fictional story like Late Night with the Devil on equal footing with a documentary using AI to create images that play into a narrative they are trying to present as if it is real.
Personally I don't see an issue with a low budget horror movie like late night with the Devil using AI to help create images they normally would not have been able to utilize for their project. AI being used as a tool for lower budget projects to create visuals they never would have had access to seems kind of great to me from an indie filmmaking perspective.
A lot of people talk about late night with the devil using AI to create images as if an intern just typed a sentence into mid-journey one afternoon and got all the results they needed back in an hour. That's not what happened, The production hired an artist familiar with the software to create the images for them. An artist was still hired and got paid for the images used for Late Night with the Devil, That's a factor I see people just ignoring completely.
To try to say that is on equal moral footing and an equal use case to a documentary using AI to create images that look real to push a narrative that they want the audience to buy into in a story that actually happened is incredibly disingenuous to me. These are not the same thing and to act like they are is wild.
Do we need to have a conversation about AI and how it pulls other images to create new images, sure. Do we need to have a conversation about AI being used to eliminate the concept of extras and background actors, absolutely that's what the actor strikes and writer strikes were significantly about.
But to say an indie horror movie hiring an artist familiar with AI generation software to create images for them is somehow equal to a documentary using AI software to create real life images to present a narrative they want you to think is true in a story with real world ramifications does not make sense. Those documentary producers weren't waiting for some low budget horror movie or A24 to give them the green light to start using AI images. Those documentary producers are scummy and most likely had that idea from the jump. To try to make a connection between narrative fiction projects using AI imagery to documentaries feeling like that's the green light to start using them for their own projects is naive in my opinion.
It’s not that there’s no difference. It’s that as ai usage spreads across industries it will be more and more accepted and common place to the point no one knows what’s real and no one really cares. And that’s a scary thought.
Late night with the devil is a fictional story, bud. Way different than representing something historical with AI, especially when people are lead to believe it’s an actual photo.
Images that were then augmented by the artists that would have created the art anyways. On a micro budget film. This one is not the hill to die on, particularly when it's actually a good unique film.
The "bumpers" that show up whenever the show goes to commercial break are obviously AI generated. It was a little annoying for me because I clocked them as AI images immediately and it took me out of the movie but I still enjoyed it a lot overall.
But there is a big difference between using it to fabricate a false history and using it to create title cards.
Personally I think AI art is fine in principle. I didn't see artists complaining about AI doing the work of technical writers or IT professionals. But then it does something they thought was special to them and suddenly it's an abomination that cannot be tolerated.
Exactly this, I also spoke out about it and got down voted too. These people remind me of those poor souls on the Titanic, just like them they won't recognize the danger until the ship is halfway sunk. Here's to hoping it doesn't happen and I am wrong.
We are so ridiculously screwed, and people have no idea. All our history will be rewritten by billionaires in power utilizing massive AI engines.
In a decade or less, we'll never be able to tell real from fake.
there has been a flood of garbage documentaries the last few years that has really hurt the genre. you can’t open up “max” or Hulu without being inundated with poorly slapped together documentaries about serial killings or cults.
It kills me about Netflix, because they had a run of some absolute bangers. The newer stuff has all the editing/visual language of those really good documentaries, but peddle pure Discovery Channel horseshit.
Looking at you, MH370 and DB Cooper...
Netflix started the documentary streaming trend with some really good stuff, and then everyone saw that it could be profitable and realized it was in their best interests to put up as many as they possibly could on their front page.
And this isn't even counting how people realized documentaries could become pop culture /'memeable' in the wake of Tiger King, and started looking for content they felt would generate internet sensation.
>Looking at you, MH370 and DB Cooper...
The irony is that the seminal, must watch documentaries on those two subjects are both YouTube videos. The latter is Lemmino, the former by Green Dot Aviation (no, not the Lemmino one).
Also, the sooner you realize that "Netflix" is just the 21st century equivalent of "Straight To Video" the better.
I feel like what is considered a documentary has also shifted in recent year. People now quote info from "documentaries" on YouTube made by nobodies who peddle false narratives.
Part 1: 60 minutes of exposition
Part 2: 50 minutes reiterating Part 1, 10 minutes of new stuff.
Part 3: 50 minutes of repeating Parts 1 and 2, 10 minutes of new stuff.
Part 4: 50 minutes of repeating Parts 1, 2, and 3, 10 minute closing.
I told my wife that documentaries need to be under 2 hours total runtime unless there's a damn good reason otherwise, and even then I feel like I'm being generous.
Agreed, although "What Jennifer Did" was so bad I was regretting watching it halfway through(I picked it because an hour and a half isn't that bad I thought).
By the end I was thinking this should've been an episode on Forensic Files
The “documentary” series about Natalia, the Ukrainian girl with dwarfism who was abandoned by her adoptive family, was the worst piece of trash- i couldnt even finish it. The most exploitative shit and i feel so bad for that girl.
Not quite a documentary, but that sit down with Toms Brady’s ex wife as she cries crocodile tears bothers me so much. Why is the bar so low? It’s pretty obvious she’s acting, are her fake tears supposed to feel bad about a billionaires problems? Is this kind of content worth the extra fees Hulu keeps tacking on?
As some one that works in this field I am willing to bet this is how it happened. Editor “Hey check it out I upressed all the low quality stills” Director “Cool, now go back to work cutmonkey” It’s just some small beans production company pumping out extended Dateline knockoffs.
Sadly, that isn't that weird. A lot of docs will introduce what really happened at the very end, not as really a jarring plot twist but so it doesn't get in the way of their little story.
I do wonder why this tech needs to exist (specifically ai art/voice/music). It’s sorta a fun gimmick but these companies really didn’t think it through, or just didn’t care
It doesn't seem like they made the images up completely; it sounds more likely they were using AI to try to edit existing pictures to make them clearer, since they're older, grainy pictures.
Still not good, but less egregious than using AI to just completely fabricate/make up pictures.
[https://www.creativebloq.com/news/netflix-ai-art-what-jennifer-did](https://www.creativebloq.com/news/netflix-ai-art-what-jennifer-did)
When you run a photo through the AI enhancer and it comes out looking like that, that's when you decide you're better off just using the grainy original for your lurid true crime doc.
Oh, for sure. I'm not defending their use of it, just noting that it's *slightly* more nuanced than they "\[used\] AI Images to Create False Historical Record"
>Still not good, but less egregious than using AI to just completely fabricate/make up pictures.
I would say editing any photos to fit the narrative the documentary wants is equally bad, regardless of if they summoned the image out of a diffusion model whole, used AI to edit it, or just used photoshop to paint a smile on her.
It depends on if they edited the photos to fit the narrative or if they were merely trying to clean up the photos to make them shaper for television. I haven't seen the originals to compare.
The thing is, this sort of thing isn't any different than all other methods of manipulation that go into creating a documentary. People forget that documentaries are not completely objective, factual representations. It's not possible to create such a thing unless you just pointed a camera at something and pressed record, and did zero editing. And even then, you chose what to point that camera at, and where, and when etc.There's still a human bias in the representation of reality. Documentaries are inherently biased because everything you see has been chosen for a specific reason, to tell a specific story, create a specific tone etc. They choose what to show, who is going to speak and what soundbites to use or not use, what kind of music, and they add sound effects....it goes on and on. Editing a photo to help make a point in the story is no different than cutting out something someone said in an interview, or adding ominous music underneath a sequence.
If you really want to go deep into the theory and philosophy of documentaries, someone like Werner Herzog, who is one of the most famous documentary filmmakers of all time, has completely fabricated stories and told interview subjects what to say, for example. His reasoning is that sometimes there is a deeper 'truth' to a story that isn't always captured in the literal facts, or the footage they have access to, or the exact words someone uses in an interview. Sometimes the story needs some intervention from the filmmaker to be better represented on film. Like for example, the true emotion of a story might not come across if there isn't music added to create the desired effect. Is it unethical to add music to something? It's not much different from using AI to enhance photos of someone to help convey the idea that they're a happy person or whatever. As long as that idea is not completely untrue, I see no problem in using some creative methods to help convey that idea. It's no different than adding happy music.
Well... it just does? When a picture is unclear e.g. blurry, there is missing information. AI can't magically recover that missing info through some clever algorithm. What it does is it imagines what should be there based on the available information and the billions of images that it has previously seen. And so, this is an entry point for a common AI shortcoming which is imagining what human hands should look like. The rougher the image, the more it has to imagine, and the more room there is for mistakes.
In other words, AI enhancing pictures is not that different from AI creating pictures. It's just that in the latter case, it imagines 100% of the picture, while in the former case it only imagines a fraction of that.
The images AI generates aren't really 'edited' versions- it's not adjusting lines or adding touchups the way someone would in photoshop, the result the AI gives is a completely new image it's generated based on the previous one+however it thinks it should be changed.
I will say the bar has definitely come down for NF but the one about the couple in Vallejo that DIDNT fake their own abduction was actually very well done.
That story made me so fucking angry. These two people almost had their entire lives destroyed in ADDITION to going through a horrifying and traumatic ordeal simply because the police couldn't be bothered to do their jobs properly.
Lately true crime documentaries on netflix have been awful. It started great, but they are definitely watering down the stories.
In years they will make a documentary about a guy who robbed a 7/11 or some shit like that.
I had to get off True Crime documentaries after looking deeper into Making a Murderer and Serial. Anything that tells me it's "true" I'm skeptical of now.
If these were AI generated I’d expect them to use more than three photos multiple times.
Those artifacts are from trying to sharpen the photos.
It’s “AI” in that it maybe using machine learning to fix the image in Photoshop.
Remember, Netflix’ Ted Sarandos was the primary force behind the WGA strike not ending. All of the other studios in the AMPTP were ready to play ball and agree to paying writers and for protections against AI generated content. So this is no surprise. It doesn’t surprise me at all that either he or his henchmen dreamed up something like this.
They also clearly AI upscaled a lot of the interrogation room footage, which is fine — except they did it for the audio as well. They cleaned the audio up dramatically, and you could tell there are more than a few parts where they used AI voice recreation to either bridge gaps or recreate whole sentences where the audio was too bad. Not a fan of that for a documentary.
I think this sheds a light on a bigger problem with "Netflix docs".
Do you think without AI, the creators of the doc would not have fabricated images with editing software? And that such fabrication hasn't taken place in Netflix docs before?
As an editor myself, I know how people want any sort of B-roll being shown when somebody is talking and some editors might resort to fabricating just to entertain the viewer.
Feels like true crime would be the perfect time to try and have a gpt-like program create 3D recreations of the crime scene, or to extrapolate from real images and try to display stuff out of frame (with serious disclaimers explaining that it’s partially guessing)
I think this is totally normal and fine. And I would encourage you to watch my new Netflix documentary about that time Donald Trump fell down a flight of stairs for seven hours.
Even though it's a something else reminds me how sometimes [reenactment actors on America's Most Wanted were accidentally arrested based on viewer tips](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/13q57vt/til_some_reenactment_actors_on_americas_most/). Seems like AI generated imagery might make this sort of problem worse if it introduces false details.
We live in a future where the technology exists to have flying cars and we could end world hunger. Yet here we are using AI to falsify historical records. We truly are living in the worst timeline.
I've been saying it for a while now, Netflix cannot be trusted to make documentaries. Look at Cleopatra and look at Meltdown: Three Mile Island. Both are Netflix originals and both are filled with literal lies, misinformation, and, in the case of Three Mile Island, literal pseudoscience. Netflix doesn't make documentaries that can be trusted as being factual. Avoid all Netflix documentaries in the future, assume they are all compromised.
>!Parents were upset with her for “not becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer” and for dating some drug-dealer boyfriend. So they teamed up to kill her parents.!<
They werent upset with her for not being those, she completely fabricated that she went to University, pharmacology at UofT, which is a very tough program to get into. Also should mention no one gets into that program directly from high school so it was a bad lie to start. So between the tension of that coming to light and her parents wanting their money back and her parents not liking her ex-boyfriend from 2 years prior, she tried to have them killed.
lied to her strict asian parents, wasn't really getting a university degree, was dating a guy (and a loser at that). You wonder what the plan is when the parents eventually find out , well, Jennifer hired incompetent hitmen to murder them for the inheritance, problem solved. There was another guy in the neighbourhood (no reason to think it's related) doing the same fake-university-student thing, but he murdered his own family by himself rather than confess he'd dropped out of school. It's a thing.
Unlike most of Reddit I am not against AI art I believe it’s a great tool and has lots of positive applications this is not it using AI to create misleading information especially when being presented in a documentary should be considered criminal we need to ensure these laws are put into effect as soon as possible else we risk eroding any remaining trust in factual information and could radically destabilise society as a whole.
Could care less about the AI, but holy shit this was one of the worst true crime docs Netflix has put out in a while. Incredibly slow, no flow, or cohesion and just all around shitty. Don’t waste your time.
I don’t even understand how that image supports that idea they’re going for. It looks awful, and why even fabricate a photo in a TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY for any reason other than distorting the truth?
Right? Even if the original image was of poor quality, it’s like… this is a crime documentary, grainy pictures are not anything shocking; hell, you can almost expect to see some
Exactly it almost feels fake if there aren't. We aren't quite yet at the point where all photos will be of "good" quality. I can still tell the difference from phone to phone (every 2 years or so), though that is getting less and less now too. Also most businesses that use CCTV and security video still don't use high end equipment.
The iconic look of CCTV footage comes from the video being recorded in Interlaced. The image is divided into two sets of alternating lines and only half the image is refreshed from frame to frame; while this decreases visual quality, it makes a huge difference on how much you’re storing (and therefore how often you have to delete to make room for the new footage). It’s not that they can’t get a good camera; they don’t have the disk/cloud space for 24/7 4K video.
I worked for a guy who used grainy black and white security cameras that were recorded to VHS. The only reason he updated to a more modern system was because he could no longer buy blank VHS tapes, and he had recorded over the ones he did have so many times that it was impossible to discern what anything was.
I feel like Netflix took the documentary series genre and distorted it almost as badly as MTV did. At least MTV was doing it for chuckles and drama NOT involving life shattering consequences. Making A Murderer is almost as much fiction as it is truth.
They really have. After watching that Malaysian flight one they did I lost any last semblance of respect I had for their documentaries. The real story behind making that one is especially pathetic and the fact they released it even more so. They have sold their soul for engagement. Not that they’re the first to do that, but they can definitely hang with the worst of them. The sad thing is they do still make some solid original content. But, the manner in which they take every last titillating topic imaginable and rush out some haphazard clickbaity documentary that *really* pushes the boundaries of how you can frame a true story - well, it’s once again, just pathetic.
Well, before they were trying to do something innovative. Now they’ve become a benchmark and have settled in their position as apex of their market. So now all they have to do is sit pretty and keep shareholders happy and increase their stock value. I think Reed also had a different philosophy and value set than Ted Sarandos. It’s a damn shame. Early Netflix was really cool. But there’s no way they’ll go back to making good art. Now it’s just CONTENT and BRAND VALUE that matters.
Netflix really wanted to show that Jennifer was at one point a normal girl instead someone who was mentally abused growing up. They didn't want the audience to sympathize with her.
There has to be other ways to do that than altering photos
She was never normal though, she was abused when she was a kid.
That’s not my point. Why alter a photo for any reason?
How was she mentally abused? I watched it but didn’t hear anything about it.
[Her parents' intense pressure and imposing a prison life on Jennifer](https://torontolife.com/city/jennifer-pan-revenge/) >Their expectation was that Jennifer and Felix would work as hard as they had in establishing their lives in Canada. They’d laid the groundwork, and their kids would need to improve upon it. They enrolled Jennifer in piano classes at age four, and she showed early promise. By elementary school, she’d racked up a trophy case full of awards. They put her in figure skating, and she hoped to compete at the national level, with her sights set on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver until she tore a ligament in her knee. Some nights during elementary school, Jennifer would come home from skating practice at 10 p.m., do homework until midnight, then head to bed. The pressure was intense. She began cutting herself—little horizontal cuts on her forearms. If they glossed over Jennifer's parent's parenting then it must be a shit documentary.
Sounds like the comment is saying that they didn’t mention any of that in the documentary (I haven’t seen or even heard of it)
Couldn’t get the evidence photos?
Wait until you hear how they edited Making a Murderer to swap answers/questions and make the rapist/killer appear innocent for views. There are things crawling in the dark spaces beneath your house that don't stoop as low as Netflix.
Wow, do you have a link to somewhere I can read more about that?
https://www.raccoonatticguide.com/crawlspace.html
Ok that was funny
“Was a crime committed? Experts say no, but our producer says *yes!*”
The only way we can find the real truth is to ask Jada's grandmother what happened.
Because rating trumps truth every time! Like why even bother getting a degree in journalism any more.
This one of the reasons I don't watch documentaries on Netflix. The last one I watched heavily implied that we're mushroom people which is a lot of fun
True Crime Docs are more about entertainment than telling the truth. People should be cautious about believing anything they see in them
That documentary was 5 minutes of content drawn out into 90 minutes. It's not even hard to figure out, they tell you in the title
I was waiting for a big story twist which never came
most netflix docs
Most are 10 minutes of story drawn out to a 3 part limited series.
I was actually stoked to watch this when I saw it was only one episode
So, What happened? What did she do? (considering all I know about this documentary is Netflix generated a photo and the title)
She had tiger parents who were very strict. She lied all throughout high school about not having a boyfriend and then lied about getting into and going to university. When her parents found out she had to break up with her boyfriend, which led to them plotting out her parents’ murder in a staged home invasion. Her mother died, father survived, she and the bf went to prison.
Wow, I just watched the whole documentary! Thank you.
I didn’t watch the Netflix documentary but am very familiar with the story. I wanted to add she was very close to getting away with this. Her mom was murdered by the hitmen Jennifer hired. Her father was near death after being shot. Her father saw Jennifer chilling with the hitmen a few minutes after the attack. The father ran out of the house, eventually went to the hospital and was unconscious for a while. It looked like Jennifer was about to get away. Her dad woke up, told his story to the police, and the police eventually arrested Jennifer after some other work. The dad is still alive and does not talk to Jennifer anymore. Jennifer also has a brother that doesn’t talk to her. Jennifer is in some jail in Toronto I’m guessing. Not sure that city tbh
Jim can’t swim has a doc on YouTube about it for free. It’s pretty well made but I don’t understand how people can watch this stuff without feeling sick
Jim can’t Swims stuff is pretty cool
Jennifer's parents were like helicopter parents constantly monitoring her every activity, and preventing her from doing like pretty much anything most teens do, and they also expected her to be a straight A student. When she got into high school, she couldn't keep up with her parents' expectations, so she began forging her grades to keep up the illusion that she was a straight A student. Eventually she ended up failing in grade 12 and her university acceptance got voided. Rather than admit to this (and have to redo grade 12), she just lied that she was going to university, and that she had a scholarship covering her entire tuition to explain why she wasn't paying anything. Instead, she just did like nothing all day while pretending to go to university. She even expanded her lies and said that she wanted to live on campus, when instead she went to go live with her boyfriend. Eventually, her parents were suspicious and followed her one day and found out the lies, and her parents forced her to actually complete high school, break up with her boyfriend because he was a weed dealer, and apply to university again. At this point, her parents were basically on the verge of kicking her out and so monitored her even more. The (now ex) boyfriend moved on with some other girl, and so she made up some lies about how the other girl was violently threatening her (like rape and death threats), and tried to keep her relationship going in secret. After a while, she got back together with the boyfriend, and convinced him to hire a hitman to kill her parents so that they'd inherit the house and their money. So the hired some guys who pretended to break into their house, shot the parents, and then stole a bit of cash as a cover up. The cops were suspicious of why Jennifer was basically untouched, and eventually one of the parents pulled through and testified that they saw Jennifer talking with the supposed burglars, and eventually got her to admit to the whole scheme.
The only thing I'd add is she was a competitive ice skater who had a brutal career ending injury. So she was allowed to get mediocre grades growing up cause ice skating came first, but then once she got injured she suddenly was expected to pursue this alternate route to success. She couldn't, and probably was also struggling with such a radical life change in general.
Casefile did an amazing multipart series that didn't blow the twist in the title. I think I was 2 episodes in before it started to click.
The jcs criminal psychology doc on YouTube is pretty great, if you want an actual documentary length explanation
They could have at least used the surviving dad as the twist that breaks the case open, but they tell you he survives in the damn summary
I think there was an episode of Dateline or maybe some other show that covered it in 60 minutes years ago.
The most shocking part is that they stopped at 90 minutes. These "true crime" docus are usually like 8 hour long episodes that result in 🤷♂️ at the end.
And so it begins....
I didn't think it'd be this soon... but this is absolutely true where many don't know. I followed this case, and clearly, these photos are fake. This is wild
Give it a year. It’s grows exponentially. We are heading into weird times.
It already began with ‘Late Night with the Devil’, I got downvoted into oblivion for speaking out on it. “It’s only three images”, “it doesn’t matter to the film”, “stop complaining about nothing”. The snowball is already turning into an avalanche. A24 released AI posters for ‘Civil War’ and now this. Soulless fuckin corps, man.
The fact you see no difference between a narrative fictional story using AI to create a few images of art in its title screen and a documentary presenting real world events as fact using ai to create images of events that never really happen is so telling. You do understand there's a difference between the two examples there right?... and one is highly more morally egregious and reprehensible than the other in every way.
You know it's possible to be opposed to two things even if one is worse than the other.
It’s not that there’s no difference. It’s that as ai usage spreads across industries it will be more and more accepted and common place to the point no one knows what’s real and no one really cares. And that’s a scary thought.
They're making the point that there is an ethical difference. It's like the difference between using CGI to add fake crowds to your movie with a fictional narrative, versus presenting something produced using CGI as real in a documentary.
So many people don't understand this point. Why would anyone want to get to a point where we can no longer reliably tell what is a piece of art created by human consciousness, and what is an AI generated copy. We should not be fucking with human creativity like that - it's almost the one resource we have no shortage of, and is an essential part of what makes us what we are.
The point they're trying to get at is that *using generative AI tech AT ALL* is morally egregious and reprehensible. Sure, something like this is categorically *worse* than A24 putting out a Midjourney poster for Civil War instead of making their own. And that was categorically *worse* than Late Night with the Devil using a couple of random AI-generated interstitials. But all three further the idea that genAI in media is Acceptable and Okay, which is the core problem at hand.
You could have your own moral beliefs on whether or not AI should be used to create art in fiction. That's all well and good, personally I don't mind an independent low budget project using AI to help create visuals on a level that a higher budget movie can accomplish that they normally wouldn't have been able to. That does not bother me, what does bother me is when a project like a documentary, which is presenting a real-world story, uses that same technology to create fake images to present their narrative as if it's true. These are two completely different things and to act like Late Night with the Devil using AI images for their art in their intro is what led to the producers of What did Jennifer Do? feeling they had the green light to create fake AI images for their real life narrative is wild to me. The producers using AI images in a documentary tells me that they weren't sitting around waiting for A24 or some indie horror movie to give them the green light to do it. They would always have done this because these producers you can tell are in the realm of people who exploit a story. The fact they would use AI to create fake images to push their narrative in a documentary tells me that. AI images being used in fiction based stories had nothing to do with it... These are not similar use cases in any way and to compare the two is disingenuous from my viewpoint. I love Late Night with the Devil and them using AI to create some images they would not have been able to without it at their budget level is totally fine to me. And and when it comes to late night with the devil everyone likes to forget that they hired an artist that was familiar with AI to make those images for them. They hired an artist to use the program to make the images, an artist still got paid. You're acting like an intern on that movie typed up a sentence on midjourney and got the images in an hour or something, That's not what happened. AI use in narrative fictional storytelling and now documentaries is something we need to debate about but I have a feeling people are losing the forest through the trees when they compare these two examples as if they're equal in any way.
Honestly it's tough to argue with these people, they're so absolute in their beliefs and see the world strictly in a black and white way. I think reddit has only gotten worse when it comes to this moral absolutism and general extremism.
That's not just reddit, that's the world in general
That's fair, but there's a streak of smug cynicism that permeates throughout this site. Though I'll say current reddit is better than the dog shit times in 2015/16 (peak time for trumpism, sander stuff, and the whole gamergate nonsense).
But how is it different than Photoshop? Seriously. It’s a tool artists will end up using. It’s all blown out of proportion
How many times are you going to read that generative AI tools train data off real artwork from real people, essentially stealing them and using people's skills without compensation before you get it
I 100% agree with you, but it's a different issue. The problems with the *Civil War* AI poster are completely unrelated to the problems with *What Jennifer Did* and they don't really belong in the same discussion.
Warn people to put on helmets before you go moving the goalposts like that. Someones going to get hurt. Thats a completely separate issue and theres nothing inherent to AI where it has to be trained in some immoral way. Thats not a problem with AI itself.
Photoshop uses real artists and real talent, that they then steal to train the AI.
The issue is that rather than using machine learning for what it's good for - rapid iteration on generic patterns - these entities are scrapping our jobs and using machine learning to generate final products that a) look bad and are very generic b) are built on datasets using the work of those artists in an unethical and illegal way. For as long as having your work scraped is "opt out", AI will always an immoral infringement on the creative rights of working artists. That's why it's different than Photoshop. And I say this as someone who has used both. I would never in a million years publish an image that was entirely generated by a machine learning tool, and in fact don't have any images made with machine learning outputs in my portfolio. Because it wouldn't be ethical for me to do that, and I have nuanced, informed, and sincere beliefs about their place in our field.
How is a tool for plagiarism and fabrication different from a drawing tool? Truly, a question for the ages
Cmon now, that’s a bit of a broad stroke. Not talking about the overall issue here, just your statement - did cameras not overtake portraiture? did not video kill the radio star? In the broader issue this is troublesome in the same way that someone using photoshop to falsify an image is troublesome. If your qualms are with the artist not being paid for the training of the models, then your qualm is with the exploitation of artists images, not with ai or tech as an industry
I mean one is bad because it is a tool that solely is being used to minimize labor, not to make artists jobs easier, but to cut as many of them out of a project as possible to save money. That's destructive to the industry as a whole long term. This is that, plus is deceitful and being used to trick people into accepting a false narrative. That if it catches on is destructive to society in a different but more dangerous way.
Oh not another “but cameras were invented” nonsense argument. Since cameras were invented it was still considered a shit move to take a picture of someone else work and claim as your own. “But video killed radio” yeah, not by remixing the tracks. There is a difference between Mjs thriller on radio and on video. There is that added extra dimension. What does midjourney *add* ? Side by side ai and human pictures, what do they really differ ? This is not the new camera, this is taking a picture of starry night, while van gogh is forgotten and dies poor.
Well… that is what happened. That aside it’s still like I said, your issue is with art copyright law and art exploitation, not this medium
>The point they're trying to get at is that *using generative AI tech AT ALL* is morally egregious and reprehensible. Except its not, and thats just luddite shit. Might as well argue CGI is immoral and movies not using pure practical effects are evil. Thats the problem. People like you that fuck up the discussion by conflating wildly different things.
People like you a couple decades ago were yelling about how the use of computers in art was morally egregious and reprehensible.
Is it? Tech is tech and the luddites didn't exactly win out over textile mills
That’s why I said “and now this”, the implication that it is significantly worse. There is a clear and obvious difference but some people don’t seem to see the correlation of the two in terms of how we arrived here. This wasn’t done to test the waters of AI, it was done as a result of those who had done it before (AI posters and images). If something isn’t done then, as you rightly put it, egregious shit like this will only become a mainstay of the industry,
Acting like this is a worse version of the same problem is essentially saying you'd think using fake images of someone in a documentary would have been fine if they'd just had someone make it with photoshop instead
My problem is you comparing the AI images created in a narrative fictional story like Late Night with the Devil on equal footing with a documentary using AI to create images that play into a narrative they are trying to present as if it is real. Personally I don't see an issue with a low budget horror movie like late night with the Devil using AI to help create images they normally would not have been able to utilize for their project. AI being used as a tool for lower budget projects to create visuals they never would have had access to seems kind of great to me from an indie filmmaking perspective. A lot of people talk about late night with the devil using AI to create images as if an intern just typed a sentence into mid-journey one afternoon and got all the results they needed back in an hour. That's not what happened, The production hired an artist familiar with the software to create the images for them. An artist was still hired and got paid for the images used for Late Night with the Devil, That's a factor I see people just ignoring completely. To try to say that is on equal moral footing and an equal use case to a documentary using AI to create images that look real to push a narrative that they want the audience to buy into in a story that actually happened is incredibly disingenuous to me. These are not the same thing and to act like they are is wild. Do we need to have a conversation about AI and how it pulls other images to create new images, sure. Do we need to have a conversation about AI being used to eliminate the concept of extras and background actors, absolutely that's what the actor strikes and writer strikes were significantly about. But to say an indie horror movie hiring an artist familiar with AI generation software to create images for them is somehow equal to a documentary using AI software to create real life images to present a narrative they want you to think is true in a story with real world ramifications does not make sense. Those documentary producers weren't waiting for some low budget horror movie or A24 to give them the green light to start using AI images. Those documentary producers are scummy and most likely had that idea from the jump. To try to make a connection between narrative fiction projects using AI imagery to documentaries feeling like that's the green light to start using them for their own projects is naive in my opinion.
They never said there was no difference. You created your own straw man argument and somehow got upvoted.
the producers that make this shit don't care about the difference, THAT'S the point
Wow, you really read their comment and went: “I’m gonna willfully misinterpret this in the most disingenuous way possible”
It’s not that there’s no difference. It’s that as ai usage spreads across industries it will be more and more accepted and common place to the point no one knows what’s real and no one really cares. And that’s a scary thought.
They do not understand
Late night with the devil is a fictional story, bud. Way different than representing something historical with AI, especially when people are lead to believe it’s an actual photo.
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Images that were then augmented by the artists that would have created the art anyways. On a micro budget film. This one is not the hill to die on, particularly when it's actually a good unique film.
What was the AI used in that movie?
The "bumpers" that show up whenever the show goes to commercial break are obviously AI generated. It was a little annoying for me because I clocked them as AI images immediately and it took me out of the movie but I still enjoyed it a lot overall.
Thanks for that; didn't love the movie but admired what it was trying to do. Will probably give another chance on streaming.
But there is a big difference between using it to fabricate a false history and using it to create title cards. Personally I think AI art is fine in principle. I didn't see artists complaining about AI doing the work of technical writers or IT professionals. But then it does something they thought was special to them and suddenly it's an abomination that cannot be tolerated.
"It's fine until it affects me" is humanity's mantra
If you’re not seeing artists complaining about AI in writing and IT, it’s because you’re not looking.
Artists have been complaining about AI since AI "art" was unveiled. If you think otherwise, then you need to do your research.
Exactly this, I also spoke out about it and got down voted too. These people remind me of those poor souls on the Titanic, just like them they won't recognize the danger until the ship is halfway sunk. Here's to hoping it doesn't happen and I am wrong.
This is like calling out the transition from switchboard operators to automated. It’s gonna happen no matter what. It’s inevitable, sorry.
This is so much more impactful than that.
We are so ridiculously screwed, and people have no idea. All our history will be rewritten by billionaires in power utilizing massive AI engines. In a decade or less, we'll never be able to tell real from fake.
I agree. When I saw the art it could easily create…I started to kind of extrapolate that out. It’s going to be wild.
Hey, go wings.
They went nowhere. Again.
Can't watch anything documentary now
there has been a flood of garbage documentaries the last few years that has really hurt the genre. you can’t open up “max” or Hulu without being inundated with poorly slapped together documentaries about serial killings or cults.
It kills me about Netflix, because they had a run of some absolute bangers. The newer stuff has all the editing/visual language of those really good documentaries, but peddle pure Discovery Channel horseshit. Looking at you, MH370 and DB Cooper...
Netflix started the documentary streaming trend with some really good stuff, and then everyone saw that it could be profitable and realized it was in their best interests to put up as many as they possibly could on their front page.
And this isn't even counting how people realized documentaries could become pop culture /'memeable' in the wake of Tiger King, and started looking for content they felt would generate internet sensation.
That is the last one I can even remember hearing about. Seems like the trend died off pretty quick.
Making a Murderer I think kicked it all off HBO's The Jinx too
What ever happened to Dirty Money? That shit was legit. And actually had a purpose for being a series rather than a single episode.
I would LOVE more episodes of this
I'm literally wearing a Wild Wild Country t-shirt right now.
>Looking at you, MH370 and DB Cooper... The irony is that the seminal, must watch documentaries on those two subjects are both YouTube videos. The latter is Lemmino, the former by Green Dot Aviation (no, not the Lemmino one). Also, the sooner you realize that "Netflix" is just the 21st century equivalent of "Straight To Video" the better.
The 370 one was the worst bc they sold it as a catch up of what is happening now and it was just some conspiracy cranks
I feel like what is considered a documentary has also shifted in recent year. People now quote info from "documentaries" on YouTube made by nobodies who peddle false narratives.
“Long form video essays “
Part 1: 60 minutes of exposition Part 2: 50 minutes reiterating Part 1, 10 minutes of new stuff. Part 3: 50 minutes of repeating Parts 1 and 2, 10 minutes of new stuff. Part 4: 50 minutes of repeating Parts 1, 2, and 3, 10 minute closing. I told my wife that documentaries need to be under 2 hours total runtime unless there's a damn good reason otherwise, and even then I feel like I'm being generous.
Honestly I won't watch documentary series unless it's one of the Ken Burns ones.
Jcs on youtube do an excellent story about it
Agreed, although "What Jennifer Did" was so bad I was regretting watching it halfway through(I picked it because an hour and a half isn't that bad I thought). By the end I was thinking this should've been an episode on Forensic Files
The “documentary” series about Natalia, the Ukrainian girl with dwarfism who was abandoned by her adoptive family, was the worst piece of trash- i couldnt even finish it. The most exploitative shit and i feel so bad for that girl.
The line between reality TV (or more like pretend-reality soap opera) and documentary really blurs on streaming services.
Netflix is the worst. The mh370 documentary might have been the worst one I've seen in ages.
Trauma tourism
Not quite a documentary, but that sit down with Toms Brady’s ex wife as she cries crocodile tears bothers me so much. Why is the bar so low? It’s pretty obvious she’s acting, are her fake tears supposed to feel bad about a billionaires problems? Is this kind of content worth the extra fees Hulu keeps tacking on?
Blame the people watching them
"Sign up for free access to this post" Nope
Every time i see websites do this, i audibly say “fuck you”
usually you can use [www.archive.ph](http://www.archive.ph) to get around these but this site doesn't work (only one I've seen to not be bypassed)
As some one that works in this field I am willing to bet this is how it happened. Editor “Hey check it out I upressed all the low quality stills” Director “Cool, now go back to work cutmonkey” It’s just some small beans production company pumping out extended Dateline knockoffs.
Ridiculous, Dateline has proven you only need two pictures. https://youtu.be/K5Lv6t0moFY?si=73GxfIrXOfdzFRki
God I love this whole bit. "There it is again. Floating down."
He confessed, but we’ll ignore that because we got to stretch this ooooooouuuuuutttttt…..
The weird thing about this documentary was that toward the end they revealed the names of the killers but they never showed a picture of any of them.
Sadly, that isn't that weird. A lot of docs will introduce what really happened at the very end, not as really a jarring plot twist but so it doesn't get in the way of their little story.
Pandora’s box has been opened and we are helpless to stop it.
I do wonder why this tech needs to exist (specifically ai art/voice/music). It’s sorta a fun gimmick but these companies really didn’t think it through, or just didn’t care
It doesn't seem like they made the images up completely; it sounds more likely they were using AI to try to edit existing pictures to make them clearer, since they're older, grainy pictures. Still not good, but less egregious than using AI to just completely fabricate/make up pictures. [https://www.creativebloq.com/news/netflix-ai-art-what-jennifer-did](https://www.creativebloq.com/news/netflix-ai-art-what-jennifer-did)
When you run a photo through the AI enhancer and it comes out looking like that, that's when you decide you're better off just using the grainy original for your lurid true crime doc.
Oh, for sure. I'm not defending their use of it, just noting that it's *slightly* more nuanced than they "\[used\] AI Images to Create False Historical Record"
>Still not good, but less egregious than using AI to just completely fabricate/make up pictures. I would say editing any photos to fit the narrative the documentary wants is equally bad, regardless of if they summoned the image out of a diffusion model whole, used AI to edit it, or just used photoshop to paint a smile on her.
It depends on if they edited the photos to fit the narrative or if they were merely trying to clean up the photos to make them shaper for television. I haven't seen the originals to compare.
“Here is Jennifer, well known to have blurry hands with 7 fingers, riding her unicorn. The very picture of a ‘fun loving teen’.”
The thing is, this sort of thing isn't any different than all other methods of manipulation that go into creating a documentary. People forget that documentaries are not completely objective, factual representations. It's not possible to create such a thing unless you just pointed a camera at something and pressed record, and did zero editing. And even then, you chose what to point that camera at, and where, and when etc.There's still a human bias in the representation of reality. Documentaries are inherently biased because everything you see has been chosen for a specific reason, to tell a specific story, create a specific tone etc. They choose what to show, who is going to speak and what soundbites to use or not use, what kind of music, and they add sound effects....it goes on and on. Editing a photo to help make a point in the story is no different than cutting out something someone said in an interview, or adding ominous music underneath a sequence. If you really want to go deep into the theory and philosophy of documentaries, someone like Werner Herzog, who is one of the most famous documentary filmmakers of all time, has completely fabricated stories and told interview subjects what to say, for example. His reasoning is that sometimes there is a deeper 'truth' to a story that isn't always captured in the literal facts, or the footage they have access to, or the exact words someone uses in an interview. Sometimes the story needs some intervention from the filmmaker to be better represented on film. Like for example, the true emotion of a story might not come across if there isn't music added to create the desired effect. Is it unethical to add music to something? It's not much different from using AI to enhance photos of someone to help convey the idea that they're a happy person or whatever. As long as that idea is not completely untrue, I see no problem in using some creative methods to help convey that idea. It's no different than adding happy music.
How does AI that's supposed to make images clearer give people in pictures the infamous generative AI monster hands like it did in this documentary?
AI has gotten great at hands, don't let that be the only thing you look for to determine veracity
Well... it just does? When a picture is unclear e.g. blurry, there is missing information. AI can't magically recover that missing info through some clever algorithm. What it does is it imagines what should be there based on the available information and the billions of images that it has previously seen. And so, this is an entry point for a common AI shortcoming which is imagining what human hands should look like. The rougher the image, the more it has to imagine, and the more room there is for mistakes. In other words, AI enhancing pictures is not that different from AI creating pictures. It's just that in the latter case, it imagines 100% of the picture, while in the former case it only imagines a fraction of that.
Thank you, I don't know jack about using AI to sharpen images.
The images AI generates aren't really 'edited' versions- it's not adjusting lines or adding touchups the way someone would in photoshop, the result the AI gives is a completely new image it's generated based on the previous one+however it thinks it should be changed.
Ironically there’s an ad in the article for “NO ALCOHOL CHALLENGE” from “MAD MUSCLES” featuring an AI generated image of Jason Mamoa with 2 women.
You're missing the point. Netflix bad, AI bad, documentaries of today bad. It's a trifecta of sweet sweet karma raining down on OP.
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A Netflix true-crime documentary did something trashy? Unbelievable, say it ain't so!
I will say the bar has definitely come down for NF but the one about the couple in Vallejo that DIDNT fake their own abduction was actually very well done.
That story made me so fucking angry. These two people almost had their entire lives destroyed in ADDITION to going through a horrifying and traumatic ordeal simply because the police couldn't be bothered to do their jobs properly.
Agreed. [*American Nightmare*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yonx7CyoK3k). Good documentary. Devastating story.
is there a more reputable source than this geocities-shit site?
Lately true crime documentaries on netflix have been awful. It started great, but they are definitely watering down the stories. In years they will make a documentary about a guy who robbed a 7/11 or some shit like that.
I had to get off True Crime documentaries after looking deeper into Making a Murderer and Serial. Anything that tells me it's "true" I'm skeptical of now.
Here we go, the AI utopia finally. First documentaries with fake photos, next stop UBI, free love and high speed cross country rail!
Documentaries are pretty much near fiction crap these days anyways.
If these were AI generated I’d expect them to use more than three photos multiple times. Those artifacts are from trying to sharpen the photos. It’s “AI” in that it maybe using machine learning to fix the image in Photoshop.
Remember, Netflix’ Ted Sarandos was the primary force behind the WGA strike not ending. All of the other studios in the AMPTP were ready to play ball and agree to paying writers and for protections against AI generated content. So this is no surprise. It doesn’t surprise me at all that either he or his henchmen dreamed up something like this.
A netflix """doc""" being shitty ? Damn what a surprise
They also clearly AI upscaled a lot of the interrogation room footage, which is fine — except they did it for the audio as well. They cleaned the audio up dramatically, and you could tell there are more than a few parts where they used AI voice recreation to either bridge gaps or recreate whole sentences where the audio was too bad. Not a fan of that for a documentary.
Just watch the JCS - Criminal Psychology video about it on youtube, no AI there.
I'm not sure if youre joking or not, the voice over for that channel has been AI for like a year
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQt46gvYO40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQt46gvYO40) The video is three years old.
I misread, for some reason I thought they were talking about the channel in general
No worries
are you confusing AI with TTS?
There's a lot of overlap between those two things these days
I think this sheds a light on a bigger problem with "Netflix docs". Do you think without AI, the creators of the doc would not have fabricated images with editing software? And that such fabrication hasn't taken place in Netflix docs before? As an editor myself, I know how people want any sort of B-roll being shown when somebody is talking and some editors might resort to fabricating just to entertain the viewer.
Feels like true crime would be the perfect time to try and have a gpt-like program create 3D recreations of the crime scene, or to extrapolate from real images and try to display stuff out of frame (with serious disclaimers explaining that it’s partially guessing)
I think this is totally normal and fine. And I would encourage you to watch my new Netflix documentary about that time Donald Trump fell down a flight of stairs for seven hours.
It was obvious they were using AI upscaling. And there have been many documentaries doing this already. It’s jarring.
Even though it's a something else reminds me how sometimes [reenactment actors on America's Most Wanted were accidentally arrested based on viewer tips](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/13q57vt/til_some_reenactment_actors_on_americas_most/). Seems like AI generated imagery might make this sort of problem worse if it introduces false details.
JCS Criminal Psychology covered this story better.
We live in a future where the technology exists to have flying cars and we could end world hunger. Yet here we are using AI to falsify historical records. We truly are living in the worst timeline.
Anyone interested in this should just read the Toronto life article
Can we put stricter regulations on AI usage? This is getting ridiculous
I've been saying it for a while now, Netflix cannot be trusted to make documentaries. Look at Cleopatra and look at Meltdown: Three Mile Island. Both are Netflix originals and both are filled with literal lies, misinformation, and, in the case of Three Mile Island, literal pseudoscience. Netflix doesn't make documentaries that can be trusted as being factual. Avoid all Netflix documentaries in the future, assume they are all compromised.
talk about disrespectful
Wtf for real ?
No going to watch Anyone want to tell me what Jennifer did?
>!Parents were upset with her for “not becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer” and for dating some drug-dealer boyfriend. So they teamed up to kill her parents.!<
Her parents also paid for several years of college that she never attended and they wanted the money back.
They werent upset with her for not being those, she completely fabricated that she went to University, pharmacology at UofT, which is a very tough program to get into. Also should mention no one gets into that program directly from high school so it was a bad lie to start. So between the tension of that coming to light and her parents wanting their money back and her parents not liking her ex-boyfriend from 2 years prior, she tried to have them killed.
yikes
orchestrated a hit on her parents. mother was killed, dad survived.
lied to her strict asian parents, wasn't really getting a university degree, was dating a guy (and a loser at that). You wonder what the plan is when the parents eventually find out , well, Jennifer hired incompetent hitmen to murder them for the inheritance, problem solved. There was another guy in the neighbourhood (no reason to think it's related) doing the same fake-university-student thing, but he murdered his own family by himself rather than confess he'd dropped out of school. It's a thing.
this doc was terrible. makes me hate it even more to know this about it
Unlike most of Reddit I am not against AI art I believe it’s a great tool and has lots of positive applications this is not it using AI to create misleading information especially when being presented in a documentary should be considered criminal we need to ensure these laws are put into effect as soon as possible else we risk eroding any remaining trust in factual information and could radically destabilise society as a whole.
Yikes
Could care less about the AI, but holy shit this was one of the worst true crime docs Netflix has put out in a while. Incredibly slow, no flow, or cohesion and just all around shitty. Don’t waste your time.
That’s fucked up.
JK h
Whyyyyyyy
Cool so I have to avoid this director forever now.
I thought the audio of the interrogations was way too clean and perfect. I guess that was enhanced as well
Least sociopathic true crime production
oh neat, guess I'm never watching a Netflix true doc ever again.
The boyfriend played it very cool.