Reading through these comments it seems that many lemmings have wildly optimistic ideals about ethics in the "true crime" genre of documentaries.
Even for sincere documentarians, presenting unvarnished history accurately and completely is an impossibility. For the bad-faith actors, you'd be amazed at how much is outright staged or otherwise faked. The only rule is that it be entertaining.
As far as "true crime", the question of "should we even make this" is pretty ethically fraught. True crime is cheap, popular, and stuffed to the brim with hacks and bad faith actors.
"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."
They shouldn't be in a documentary period. A documentary is meant to be factual and historical so nothing fake should be injected into it.
Just to play devil's advocate, does that mean any "artist rendering" shouldn't be in a documentary? Documentaries have had drawings, with a disclaimer that it is an artist rendering, for as long as I can remember. Or what about when they hire actors to do a "dramatization" of what happened, how is this different?
They are different because they are clearly not real images or video. The fact that we can generate images of whatever we want that are near if not impossible to discern as fake by the naked eye, means that they shouldn't be in there at all.
