12 ms·

Using Generative AI in Content Production

190 points by CaRDiaK 11mo ago

purplezooey 11mo ago
Netflix joins everyone else jumping on the "rules for thee, but not for me" train.
roughly 11mo ago
Shouldn’t be particularly surprising Netflix is leaning in here - they’ve been pretty open about viewing themselves as “second screen”/background content for people doing other things. Their primary need these days is for a large volume of somewhat passable content, especially content they can get for cheap. Spotify’s in a similar boat and has been filling the recommended playlists up with low-royalty elevator music.
- sixtyj 11mo ago
  Yup. Everything will be muzak in the end. But what word should we coin as buzzword for “Netflix-Muzak”? And when we're saturated with it all, we'll start buying DVDs (or other future media) again.
- simonw 11mo ago
  "Generated material is temporary and not part of the final deliverables" sounds like they are not looking to generative AI for content that they will air to the public. Later on they do have a note suggesting that the following might be OK if you use judgement and get their approval: "Using GenAI to generate background elements (e.g., signage, posters) that appear on camera"
  - yorwba 11mo ago
    "If you can confidently say "yes" to all the above, socializing the intended use with your Netflix contact may be sufficient. If you answer “no” or “unsure” to any of these principles, escalate to your Netflix contact for more guidance before proceeding, as written approval may be required." They do want to save money by cheaply generating content, but it's only cheap if no expensive lawsuits result. Hence the need for clear boundaries and legal review of uses that may be risky from a copyright perspective.
    - simonw 11mo ago
      Yeah, that's a fair assessment. The specific mention of "union-covered work" plays to that interpretation as well: > GenAI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances or union-covered work without consent.
      - eszed 11mo ago
        Yeah, I read the "Talent" section and it's very balanced. I can't see much, if anything, to complain about, so thank goodness for SAG-AFTRA. The strike a couple of years ago was well judged.
    - captainkrtek 11mo ago
      They also mention reputation / image in there. If I can’t tell something is generated by AI (some background image in a small part of a scene), it’s just CGI. But if its the uncanny valley view of a person/animal/thing that is clearly AI generated, that shows laziness.
- 3abiton 11mo ago
  Tbh I think theseguidelines are just anticipating future trends.
barbazoo 11mo ago
> Using unowned training data (e.g., celebrity faces, copyrighted art) How would one ever know that the GenAI output is not influenced or based on copyrighted content.
- BadCookie 11mo ago
  Getty and Adobe offer models that were trained only on images that they have the rights to. Those models might meet Netflix’s standards?
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    I kind of wonder if that even works. If you take a model trained on Getty and ask it for Indiana Jones or Harry Potter, what does it give you? These things are popular enough that it's likely to be present in any large set of training data, either erroneously or because some specific works incorporated them in a way that was licensed or fair use for those particular works even if it isn't in general. And then when it conjures something like that by description rather than by name, how are you any better off than something trained from random social media? It's not like you get to make unlicensed AI India Jones derivatives just because Getty has a photo of Harrison Ford.
    - BadCookie 11mo ago
      It comes down to who is liable for the edge cases, I suspect. Adobe will compensate the end user if they get sued for using a Firefly-generated image (probably up to some limit). Getting sued occasionally is a cost of doing business in some industries. It’s about risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.
      - jonplackett 11mo ago
        All the indemnities I’ve read have clauses though that say if you intentionally use it to make something copyrighted they won’t protect you. So if you put obviously copyrighted things in the prompt you’ll still be on your own.
eric-burel 11mo ago
I am thinking of building an association of AI consumers so we can organize to praise or boycott whatever we collectevily find acceptable or not. I'll spend some time reading this in details later on, but whatever it states or imply, positive or negative, it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. Consumer associations are powerful and can't be fired when striking, since the customer is always right.
- echelon 11mo ago
  > it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. This is for studios and companies that are producing content for Netflix. If you want to sell to Netflix, you have to play by Netflix's rules. Netflix has all kinds of rules and guidelines, including which camera bodies and lenses are allowed [1]. [1] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
  - eric-burel 11mo ago
    If you want to sell anything as an SME almost anywhere in the world, you have to play by Google's obscure SEO rules. It doesn't make it right. I feel the same vibe with this kind of rules. Are thise guidelines negotiated with unions or federation that includes the content producers, actors, authors? If yes, is decision power equally balanced? Who writes the rules?
- lawlessone 11mo ago
  >I am thinking of building an association of AI consumers The Gooner Association?
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  > it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. ... Of course it is. As the distributor, Netflix obviously has a fairly broad ability to control what it distributes.
  - 11mo ago
stego-tech 11mo ago
This actually looks pretty good. The key takeaway I got was that they know their business is dependent upon Intellectual Property rights, and that Generative AI in final outputs or productive work undermines the foundation of their future success vis a vis discounting or dismissing IP Law and Rights. That’s likely to be the middle ground going forward for the smarter creative companies, and I’m personally all for it. Sure, use it for a pitch, or a demo, or a test - but once there’s money on the line (copyright in particular), get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else.
- amelius 11mo ago
  > get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else How does anyone prove it though? You can say "does that matter?" but once everybody starts doing it, it becomes a different story.
  - higginsniggins 11mo ago
    Any one with a brain knows it is not stolen, but nevertheless the fact that people will claim so is a risk.
    - exasperaited 11mo ago
      It is stolen on a cultural level at least. But since many of these models will blurt out very obviously infringing material without targeted prompting, it’s also an active, continuous thief.
  - bjt 11mo ago
    It's partly about Netflix getting sued by someone claiming infringement, but also partly (maybe mostly) about Netflix maintaining their right to sue others for infringement. The scenario looks like this: * Be Netflix. Own some movie or series where the main elements (plot, characters, setting) were GenAI-created. * See someone else using your plot/characters/setting in their own for-profit works. * Try suing that someone else for copyright infringement. * Get laughed out of court because the US Copyright Office has already said that GenAI is not copyrightable. [1] [1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
hexage1814 11mo ago
>GenAI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances This is 100% a lie. Studios will use this to replace humans. In fact, the idea is for the technology – AI in general – to be so good you don't need humans anywhere in the pipeline. Like, the best thing a human could produce would only be as good as the average output of their model, except the model would be far cheaper and faster. And... that's okay, honestly. I mean, it's a capitalism problem. I believe with all my strength that this automation is fundamentally different from the ones from back in the day. There won't be new jobs. But the solution was never to ban technology
- yorwba 11mo ago
  The part you quote is part of the list of conditions for an if-statement, so how could it be a lie?
  - hexage1814 11mo ago
    The issue wasn't if they said that thing or not; companies say a lot of things which are fundamentally a lie, things to keep up appearances – which are oftentimes not enforced. It's like companies arguing they believe in fair pay while using Chinese sweatshops or whatever. In this case, for instance, Netflix still has a relation with their partners that they don't want to damage at this moment, and we are not at the point of AI being able to generate a whole feature length film indistinguishable from a traditional one . Also, they might be apprehensive regarding legal risks and the copyrightability at this exact moment; big companies' lawyers are usually pretty conservative regarding taking any "risks," so they probably want to wait for the dust to settle down as far as legal precedents and the like. Anyway, the issue here is: "Does that statement actually reflect what Netflix truly think and that they actually believe GenAI shouldn't be used to replace or generate new talent performances?" Because they believe in the sanctity of human authorship or whatever? And the answer is: no, no, hell no, absolutely no. That is a lie.
    - doodaddy 11mo ago
      I’m inclined to agree. The goalposts will move once the time is right. I’ve already personally witnessed it happening; a company sells their AI-whatever strictly along the lines of staff augmentation and a force multiplier for employees. Not a year later and the marketing has shifted to cost optimization, efficiency, and better “uptime” over real employees.
OldGreenYodaGPT 11mo ago
Netflix is basically strangling the creative potential of GenAI before it can even breathe. Their new “guidelines” read like a corporate legal panic document, not a policy for innovation. Every use case needs escalation, approval, or a lawyer’s blessing. That’s not how creativity works. The irony is rich they built their empire on disrupting old Hollywood gatekeeping, and now they’re recreating it in AI form. Instead of letting creators experiment freely with these tools, Netflix wants control over every brushstroke of ai creativity
- rimbo789 11mo ago
  Thankfully GenAI has no creative potential so we aren’t losing much. I do agree Netflix wants to crush creators.
HardCodedBias 11mo ago
I suspect that if GenAI starts to make content which can grab people's attention, and do it cheaply, then Netflix will become far more accommodating very quickly. They do not want to be disrupted.
- aurareturn 11mo ago
  They're already disrupted. Just look at early 20s people. They don't watch shows/movies. They only watch short form videos. Short form videos will mostly be created using GenAI tools as early as 2026.
neonmagenta 11mo ago
Having spent some time in post-production, this reads more like a “please don’t get us sued”
captainkrtek 11mo ago
This reads like a reasonable policy. More broadly speaking re: AI content: Sure, boomers scrolling facebook will continue to enjoy their AI slop baby and animal videos, but I think the fact that the term "AI slop" has become so commonplace reflects a bias (generally) against AI-generated content. Each time I scroll LinkedIn and I see some obviously AI produced images, with garbled text, etc. it immediately turns me off to whatever the content was associated with the image. I'd be very disappointed to see the arts, including film making, shift away from the core of human expression. “You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” - Joanna Maciejewka
- zer00eyz 11mo ago
  The problem with AI slop isnt the AI part. It's that not every one has the talent to produce something of quality. If you give a professional passionate chef, the same ingredients for a full meal, as your average home cook the results will NOT be the same by a far stretch. Much of "AI slop" is to content what Macdonald's is to food. Its technically edible but not high quality
  - captainkrtek 11mo ago
    That’s an interesting way to put it, which asks the bigger question of (perhaps?): Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists? The people doing as such do not have the talent they desire, nor did they do anything to upskill themselves. Its a short cut to an illusion of competency.
    - zer00eyz 11mo ago
      > Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists? Change the statement to: Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “photographer”, flooding society with low-quality photos using cell phones, never having to learn to develop film, or use focus, or understand lenses... Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “painter”, flooding society with low-quality paintings because acrylics are cheap, the old masters made their own paint after all... Why does it matter how it was created? It wasn't Bob Ross's "Joy of Making Incredible Art", it was simply the "Joy of Painting". And people do enjoy content that, for lack of a better word, is disposable. Look at the "short dramas" or "vertical dramas" industry that is making money hand over fist. The content isnt high brow, but people enjoy it all the same. > AI trained on the work product of actual artists? Should we teach people how to play guitar without using the songs of other artists? Should those artists be compensated for inspiring others? Some of this is an artifact of our ability to sell reproductions (and I would argue that the economics were all around distribution). There is a long (possibly decades) conversation that were going to have on this topic.
legitster 11mo ago
I know that people get very up in arms about AI in creative industries - but I feel like people don't necessarily understand that even in creative industries there is a LOT of monotonous, exploitative grunt work. For every person who gets to make creative decision, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose sole purpose is slavish adherence to those decisions. Miyazaki gets to design his beautiful characters - but the task of getting those characters to screen must be carried out by massive team of illustrators for whom "creative liberty" is a liability to their career. (And this example is only for the creative aspects of film-making. There is a lot of normal corporate and logistical stuff that never even affects what you see) That's not to say I'm looking forward to the wave of lazy AI-infused slop that is heading our way. But I also don't necessarily agree with the grandstanding that AI is inherently anti-creative or only destructive. I reserve the right to be open-minded. The irony is that movies and TV themselves represented a cheaper, industrialized and commoditized alternative to theater. And theater is still around and just as good as it ever was.
- lawlessone 11mo ago
  What happens to the illustrators now?
  - chemotaxis 11mo ago
    They get to frolic on a farm upstate. I'm curious if the parent poster thinks this is unique to film production, because I think you can make the same argument for pretty much any trade. Software engineering is 1% brilliance and 99% grunt work. This doesn't make that software engineers are going to enjoy a world where 99% of their job goes away. Further, I'm not sure the customers will, because the fact that human labor is comparatively expensive puts some checks and balances in place. If content generation is free, the incentive is to produce higher-volume but lower-quality output, and it's a race to the bottom. In the same way, when content-farming and rage-baiting became a way to make money, all the mainstream "news" publishers converged on that.
    - jaccola 11mo ago
deepsquirrelnet 11mo ago
One of the issues with using LLMs in content generation is that instruction tuning causes mode collapse. For example, if you ask an LLM to generate a random number between 1 and 10, it might pick something like 7 80% of the time. Base models do not exhibit the same behavior. “Creative Output” has an entirely different meaning when you start to think about them in the way they actually work.
- orbital-decay 11mo ago
  Creativity is a really ill-defined term, but generally it has a lot more to do with abstract thinking and understanding subtlety and nuance than with mode collapse. Mode collapse affects variation, which is probably a part of of creativity for some definitions of it, but they aren't the same at all.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
marcus_holmes 11mo ago
It's interesting that they don't explicitly state the fact that AI-generated content cannot be copyrighted. They seem to dance around that. The provision against generating a major character is about respect for talent and so on, rather than the fact that that would make the major character public domain and therefore able to be used by anyone for anything. I wonder if we're going to see a push back by media companies around copyright over AI-generated content. Though I don't see how; copyright is explicitly an artificial legal protection of human works.
exasperaited 11mo ago
Worth reading alongside: Equity’s GDPR FAQ. https://www.equity.org.uk/advice-and-support/know-your-rights/personal-data-performances-and-gdpr https://www.equity.org.uk/advice-and-support/know-your-right... Common-sense, practical, and covers a lot of the shifting ground around an artist’s ability to withdraw consent under GDPR and the ways they can properly use this to prevent their likenesses being used to train their digital replacements. (Equity is the UK equivalent of the AEA and SAG-AFTRA combined)
Luker88 11mo ago
I see a big one missing: * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it. Make sure any AI content gets substantially changed by humans, so that the result can be copyrighted. More importantly: don't brag and shut up about which parts are fully AI generated. Otherwise: public domain.
- jMyles 11mo ago
  > * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it. Simpler yet - and inevitable, on sufficiently long time scales - is to dispense entirely with the notion of intellectual property and treat _all_ content this way.
  - port11 11mo ago
    This would remove the incentive to generate content, no? Copyright duration could be much shorter, but I think artists, writers, etc. would prefer the continuing protection of their work. (And I'm pro-copyright reform.)
    - atrus 11mo ago
      It's true, before copyright existed, no one made any art at all, and they certainly weren't paid for it. Thanks to copyright, the large majority of artists have been well and fairly compensated for their work.
      - port11 11mo ago
        Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…
        jMyles 11mo ago
Havoc 11mo ago
Is be very surprised if Netflix doesn’t go all in on slop given their recent catalogue
nottorp 11mo ago
So they admit it. They don’t make movies they produce content.
natia_kurdadze 11mo ago
wow this is actually really solid from netflix like it doesn’t just hype up ai but sets real boundaries too i like how they focus on consent and data safety instead of just “use ai for everything” feels like they actually understand the risks around creative work and performers kinda refreshing to see a big studio taking the responsible route
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
buellerbueller 11mo ago
Driving up energy costs for all, to generate AI slop and put workers in their place!

190 points by CaRDiaK 11mo ago

Netflix joins everyone else jumping on the "rules for thee, but not for me" train.

Shouldn’t be particularly surprising Netflix is leaning in here - they’ve been pretty open about viewing themselves as “second screen”/background content for people doing other things. Their primary need these days is for a large volume of somewhat passable content, especially content they can get for cheap. Spotify’s in a similar boat and has been filling the recommended playlists up with low-royalty elevator music.

sixtyj 11mo ago
Yup. Everything will be muzak in the end. But what word should we coin as buzzword for “Netflix-Muzak”? And when we're saturated with it all, we'll start buying DVDs (or other future media) again.
simonw 11mo ago
"Generated material is temporary and not part of the final deliverables" sounds like they are not looking to generative AI for content that they will air to the public. Later on they do have a note suggesting that the following might be OK if you use judgement and get their approval: "Using GenAI to generate background elements (e.g., signage, posters) that appear on camera"
- yorwba 11mo ago
  "If you can confidently say "yes" to all the above, socializing the intended use with your Netflix contact may be sufficient. If you answer “no” or “unsure” to any of these principles, escalate to your Netflix contact for more guidance before proceeding, as written approval may be required." They do want to save money by cheaply generating content, but it's only cheap if no expensive lawsuits result. Hence the need for clear boundaries and legal review of uses that may be risky from a copyright perspective.
  - simonw 11mo ago
    Yeah, that's a fair assessment. The specific mention of "union-covered work" plays to that interpretation as well: > GenAI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances or union-covered work without consent.
    - eszed 11mo ago
      Yeah, I read the "Talent" section and it's very balanced. I can't see much, if anything, to complain about, so thank goodness for SAG-AFTRA. The strike a couple of years ago was well judged.
  - captainkrtek 11mo ago
    They also mention reputation / image in there. If I can’t tell something is generated by AI (some background image in a small part of a scene), it’s just CGI. But if its the uncanny valley view of a person/animal/thing that is clearly AI generated, that shows laziness.
3abiton 11mo ago
Tbh I think theseguidelines are just anticipating future trends.

barbazoo 11mo ago

> Using unowned training data (e.g., celebrity faces, copyrighted art) How would one ever know that the GenAI output is not influenced or based on copyrighted content.

BadCookie 11mo ago
Getty and Adobe offer models that were trained only on images that they have the rights to. Those models might meet Netflix’s standards?
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  I kind of wonder if that even works. If you take a model trained on Getty and ask it for Indiana Jones or Harry Potter, what does it give you? These things are popular enough that it's likely to be present in any large set of training data, either erroneously or because some specific works incorporated them in a way that was licensed or fair use for those particular works even if it isn't in general. And then when it conjures something like that by description rather than by name, how are you any better off than something trained from random social media? It's not like you get to make unlicensed AI India Jones derivatives just because Getty has a photo of Harrison Ford.
  - BadCookie 11mo ago
    It comes down to who is liable for the edge cases, I suspect. Adobe will compensate the end user if they get sued for using a Firefly-generated image (probably up to some limit). Getting sued occasionally is a cost of doing business in some industries. It’s about risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.
    - jonplackett 11mo ago
      All the indemnities I’ve read have clauses though that say if you intentionally use it to make something copyrighted they won’t protect you. So if you put obviously copyrighted things in the prompt you’ll still be on your own.

eric-burel 11mo ago

I am thinking of building an association of AI consumers so we can organize to praise or boycott whatever we collectevily find acceptable or not. I'll spend some time reading this in details later on, but whatever it states or imply, positive or negative, it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. Consumer associations are powerful and can't be fired when striking, since the customer is always right.

echelon 11mo ago
> it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. This is for studios and companies that are producing content for Netflix. If you want to sell to Netflix, you have to play by Netflix's rules. Netflix has all kinds of rules and guidelines, including which camera bodies and lenses are allowed [1]. [1] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
- eric-burel 11mo ago
  If you want to sell anything as an SME almost anywhere in the world, you have to play by Google's obscure SEO rules. It doesn't make it right. I feel the same vibe with this kind of rules. Are thise guidelines negotiated with unions or federation that includes the content producers, actors, authors? If yes, is decision power equally balanced? Who writes the rules?
lawlessone 11mo ago
>I am thinking of building an association of AI consumers The Gooner Association?
rsynnott 11mo ago
> it's not for businesses to set the rules as if they owned the place. ... Of course it is. As the distributor, Netflix obviously has a fairly broad ability to control what it distributes.
- 11mo ago

stego-tech 11mo ago

This actually looks pretty good. The key takeaway I got was that they know their business is dependent upon Intellectual Property rights, and that Generative AI in final outputs or productive work undermines the foundation of their future success vis a vis discounting or dismissing IP Law and Rights. That’s likely to be the middle ground going forward for the smarter creative companies, and I’m personally all for it. Sure, use it for a pitch, or a demo, or a test - but once there’s money on the line (copyright in particular), get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else.

amelius 11mo ago
> get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else How does anyone prove it though? You can say "does that matter?" but once everybody starts doing it, it becomes a different story.
- higginsniggins 11mo ago
  Any one with a brain knows it is not stolen, but nevertheless the fact that people will claim so is a risk.
  - exasperaited 11mo ago
    It is stolen on a cultural level at least. But since many of these models will blurt out very obviously infringing material without targeted prompting, it’s also an active, continuous thief.
- bjt 11mo ago
  It's partly about Netflix getting sued by someone claiming infringement, but also partly (maybe mostly) about Netflix maintaining their right to sue others for infringement. The scenario looks like this: * Be Netflix. Own some movie or series where the main elements (plot, characters, setting) were GenAI-created. * See someone else using your plot/characters/setting in their own for-profit works. * Try suing that someone else for copyright infringement. * Get laughed out of court because the US Copyright Office has already said that GenAI is not copyrightable. [1] [1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

hexage1814 11mo ago

>GenAI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances This is 100% a lie. Studios will use this to replace humans. In fact, the idea is for the technology – AI in general – to be so good you don't need humans anywhere in the pipeline. Like, the best thing a human could produce would only be as good as the average output of their model, except the model would be far cheaper and faster. And... that's okay, honestly. I mean, it's a capitalism problem. I believe with all my strength that this automation is fundamentally different from the ones from back in the day. There won't be new jobs. But the solution was never to ban technology

yorwba 11mo ago
The part you quote is part of the list of conditions for an if-statement, so how could it be a lie?
- hexage1814 11mo ago
  The issue wasn't if they said that thing or not; companies say a lot of things which are fundamentally a lie, things to keep up appearances – which are oftentimes not enforced. It's like companies arguing they believe in fair pay while using Chinese sweatshops or whatever. In this case, for instance, Netflix still has a relation with their partners that they don't want to damage at this moment, and we are not at the point of AI being able to generate a whole feature length film indistinguishable from a traditional one . Also, they might be apprehensive regarding legal risks and the copyrightability at this exact moment; big companies' lawyers are usually pretty conservative regarding taking any "risks," so they probably want to wait for the dust to settle down as far as legal precedents and the like. Anyway, the issue here is: "Does that statement actually reflect what Netflix truly think and that they actually believe GenAI shouldn't be used to replace or generate new talent performances?" Because they believe in the sanctity of human authorship or whatever? And the answer is: no, no, hell no, absolutely no. That is a lie.
  - doodaddy 11mo ago
    I’m inclined to agree. The goalposts will move once the time is right. I’ve already personally witnessed it happening; a company sells their AI-whatever strictly along the lines of staff augmentation and a force multiplier for employees. Not a year later and the marketing has shifted to cost optimization, efficiency, and better “uptime” over real employees.

OldGreenYodaGPT 11mo ago

Netflix is basically strangling the creative potential of GenAI before it can even breathe. Their new “guidelines” read like a corporate legal panic document, not a policy for innovation. Every use case needs escalation, approval, or a lawyer’s blessing. That’s not how creativity works. The irony is rich they built their empire on disrupting old Hollywood gatekeeping, and now they’re recreating it in AI form. Instead of letting creators experiment freely with these tools, Netflix wants control over every brushstroke of ai creativity

rimbo789 11mo ago
Thankfully GenAI has no creative potential so we aren’t losing much. I do agree Netflix wants to crush creators.

HardCodedBias 11mo ago

I suspect that if GenAI starts to make content which can grab people's attention, and do it cheaply, then Netflix will become far more accommodating very quickly. They do not want to be disrupted.

aurareturn 11mo ago
They're already disrupted. Just look at early 20s people. They don't watch shows/movies. They only watch short form videos. Short form videos will mostly be created using GenAI tools as early as 2026.

neonmagenta 11mo ago

Having spent some time in post-production, this reads more like a “please don’t get us sued”

captainkrtek 11mo ago

This reads like a reasonable policy. More broadly speaking re: AI content: Sure, boomers scrolling facebook will continue to enjoy their AI slop baby and animal videos, but I think the fact that the term "AI slop" has become so commonplace reflects a bias (generally) against AI-generated content. Each time I scroll LinkedIn and I see some obviously AI produced images, with garbled text, etc. it immediately turns me off to whatever the content was associated with the image. I'd be very disappointed to see the arts, including film making, shift away from the core of human expression. “You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” - Joanna Maciejewka

zer00eyz 11mo ago
The problem with AI slop isnt the AI part. It's that not every one has the talent to produce something of quality. If you give a professional passionate chef, the same ingredients for a full meal, as your average home cook the results will NOT be the same by a far stretch. Much of "AI slop" is to content what Macdonald's is to food. Its technically edible but not high quality
- captainkrtek 11mo ago
  That’s an interesting way to put it, which asks the bigger question of (perhaps?): Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists? The people doing as such do not have the talent they desire, nor did they do anything to upskill themselves. Its a short cut to an illusion of competency.
  - zer00eyz 11mo ago
    > Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists? Change the statement to: Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “photographer”, flooding society with low-quality photos using cell phones, never having to learn to develop film, or use focus, or understand lenses... Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “painter”, flooding society with low-quality paintings because acrylics are cheap, the old masters made their own paint after all... Why does it matter how it was created? It wasn't Bob Ross's "Joy of Making Incredible Art", it was simply the "Joy of Painting". And people do enjoy content that, for lack of a better word, is disposable. Look at the "short dramas" or "vertical dramas" industry that is making money hand over fist. The content isnt high brow, but people enjoy it all the same. > AI trained on the work product of actual artists? Should we teach people how to play guitar without using the songs of other artists? Should those artists be compensated for inspiring others? Some of this is an artifact of our ability to sell reproductions (and I would argue that the economics were all around distribution). There is a long (possibly decades) conversation that were going to have on this topic.

legitster 11mo ago

I know that people get very up in arms about AI in creative industries - but I feel like people don't necessarily understand that even in creative industries there is a LOT of monotonous, exploitative grunt work. For every person who gets to make creative decision, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose sole purpose is slavish adherence to those decisions. Miyazaki gets to design his beautiful characters - but the task of getting those characters to screen must be carried out by massive team of illustrators for whom "creative liberty" is a liability to their career. (And this example is only for the creative aspects of film-making. There is a lot of normal corporate and logistical stuff that never even affects what you see) That's not to say I'm looking forward to the wave of lazy AI-infused slop that is heading our way. But I also don't necessarily agree with the grandstanding that AI is inherently anti-creative or only destructive. I reserve the right to be open-minded. The irony is that movies and TV themselves represented a cheaper, industrialized and commoditized alternative to theater. And theater is still around and just as good as it ever was.

lawlessone 11mo ago
What happens to the illustrators now?
- chemotaxis 11mo ago
  They get to frolic on a farm upstate. I'm curious if the parent poster thinks this is unique to film production, because I think you can make the same argument for pretty much any trade. Software engineering is 1% brilliance and 99% grunt work. This doesn't make that software engineers are going to enjoy a world where 99% of their job goes away. Further, I'm not sure the customers will, because the fact that human labor is comparatively expensive puts some checks and balances in place. If content generation is free, the incentive is to produce higher-volume but lower-quality output, and it's a race to the bottom. In the same way, when content-farming and rage-baiting became a way to make money, all the mainstream "news" publishers converged on that.
  - jaccola 11mo ago

deepsquirrelnet 11mo ago

One of the issues with using LLMs in content generation is that instruction tuning causes mode collapse. For example, if you ask an LLM to generate a random number between 1 and 10, it might pick something like 7 80% of the time. Base models do not exhibit the same behavior. “Creative Output” has an entirely different meaning when you start to think about them in the way they actually work.

orbital-decay 11mo ago
Creativity is a really ill-defined term, but generally it has a lot more to do with abstract thinking and understanding subtlety and nuance than with mode collapse. Mode collapse affects variation, which is probably a part of of creativity for some definitions of it, but they aren't the same at all.

deleted 11mo ago

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marcus_holmes 11mo ago

It's interesting that they don't explicitly state the fact that AI-generated content cannot be copyrighted. They seem to dance around that. The provision against generating a major character is about respect for talent and so on, rather than the fact that that would make the major character public domain and therefore able to be used by anyone for anything. I wonder if we're going to see a push back by media companies around copyright over AI-generated content. Though I don't see how; copyright is explicitly an artificial legal protection of human works.

exasperaited 11mo ago

Worth reading alongside: Equity’s GDPR FAQ. https://www.equity.org.uk/advice-and-support/know-your-rights/personal-data-performances-and-gdpr https://www.equity.org.uk/advice-and-support/know-your-right... Common-sense, practical, and covers a lot of the shifting ground around an artist’s ability to withdraw consent under GDPR and the ways they can properly use this to prevent their likenesses being used to train their digital replacements. (Equity is the UK equivalent of the AEA and SAG-AFTRA combined)

Luker88 11mo ago

I see a big one missing: * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it. Make sure any AI content gets substantially changed by humans, so that the result can be copyrighted. More importantly: don't brag and shut up about which parts are fully AI generated. Otherwise: public domain.

jMyles 11mo ago
> * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it. Simpler yet - and inevitable, on sufficiently long time scales - is to dispense entirely with the notion of intellectual property and treat _all_ content this way.
- port11 11mo ago
  This would remove the incentive to generate content, no? Copyright duration could be much shorter, but I think artists, writers, etc. would prefer the continuing protection of their work. (And I'm pro-copyright reform.)
  - atrus 11mo ago
    It's true, before copyright existed, no one made any art at all, and they certainly weren't paid for it. Thanks to copyright, the large majority of artists have been well and fairly compensated for their work.
    - port11 11mo ago
      Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…
      - jMyles 11mo ago

Havoc 11mo ago

Is be very surprised if Netflix doesn’t go all in on slop given their recent catalogue

nottorp 11mo ago

So they admit it. They don’t make movies they produce content.

natia_kurdadze 11mo ago

wow this is actually really solid from netflix like it doesn’t just hype up ai but sets real boundaries too i like how they focus on consent and data safety instead of just “use ai for everything” feels like they actually understand the risks around creative work and performers kinda refreshing to see a big studio taking the responsible route

deleted 11mo ago

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buellerbueller 11mo ago

Driving up energy costs for all, to generate AI slop and put workers in their place!