Netflix Doc ‘What Jennifer Did’ Uses AI Images to Create False Historical Record

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.

Already have an account? Sign in