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On Tuesday, Jennifer Petrucelli, Stephanie Jenkins, and Rachel Antell presented documentary filmmakers at the International Documentary Association’s “Getting Real” conference with a draft of guidelines for how they could thoughtfully and ethically use generative AI in their work.
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.
Around the same time they made these guidelines public, a story in Futurism revealed that Netflix had already done exactly what they feared. In the recently released true crime documentary, What Jennifer Did, the movie uses a couple of clearly AI-generated images to help establish accused murderer Jennifer Pan as a normal, fun loving teenaged girl.
“Jennifer was bubbly, happy, confident,” a high school friend of Pan’s says during the sequence. As he’s saying this, a series of three photos of Pan in a red dress flash on screen. These images offer a stark contrast to how the audience sees Pan for most of the film: quiet, shaken, and under the harsh lighting of an interrogation room.