The producer is correct in that a lot of the stuff they use in these docuseries are mockups the make in photoshop and print out for the show to look nice. People only noticed it now because some graphics house got lazy and used a bunch of AI generated bullshit, and it looked like garbage. See, and they said it would take our jobs, well, ha! Take that, ya cheap assholes!
Usually, it takes graphics designers a long time to make sure everything looks great. It’s a lot of work. And that costs money. But they thought they could cut corners with AI. Well, this is the result.
People talking about the show that they otherwise wouldn’t have known existed?
“The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her,” he added. “The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source.”
Grimaldi’s comments are extremely vague on a core point: exactly what “photo editing software” did the team use to “anonymize” the images, and did they involve AI? When he says the foreground is “exactly her,” does that include her mangled fingers and teeth?
This absolutely tracks with what people I know said about people at Netflix when they interacted with them - they are unaware of their surroundings and full of shit / entitled / incompetent to an almost unbelievable degree. It explains a lot of events (The Witcher, Stranger Things). This guy who seems to sincerely believe that he can Jedi mind trick his way out of this question like a 4-year-old who says the cat ate the cookies is just a concrete example.
Title should be changed to “producer lies his ass off”.
Nobody is buying his bullshit.
“One of the things we’ve realized is once a piece of media exists, even if it is disclosed [that it’s AI generated], it can then be lifted out of any documentary, make its way onto the internet and into other films, and then it’s forever part of the historic record […] If it’s being represented as this is a picture of this person, then that’s what’s going into the historic record,” she added. “And it’s very hard to pull that back.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The film tells a story of a woman named Jennifer Pan, who was convicted of orchestrating a murder-for-hire plot against her parents in Canada back in 2010.
Now the executive producer of the documentary, Jeremy Grimaldi, has weighed in in an interview with the Toronto Star — but his remarks are hard to parse, and made no direct mention of AI.
Grimaldi’s comments are extremely vague on a core point: exactly what “photo editing software” did the team use to “anonymize” the images, and did they involve AI?
Regardless of intent, the use of AI-generated images in a true crime documentary has stirred a heated debate, with viewers and fellow documentarians accusing Netflix of distorting the historical record by failing to disclose the use of AI — which they say could set a dangerous precedent.
“Netflix has a long history of airing true crime docs with dubious standards of journalistic ethics,” one redditor wrote.
As 404 Media reports, filmmakers were gathering right around the time we published our story on Sunday to discuss guidelines for how to safely and responsibly use generative AI.
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