A furious political leader who shouts a message of hate to a worship audience. A child crying for his family's massacre. Demacred men in prison uniforms, hungry to the edge of death due to their identities. As each sentence reads, specific images appear in your mind, chamuscadas in your memory and our collective conscience through documentaries and textbooks, media and visits to the museum.
We understand the meaning of important historical images such as these, images that we must learn to move forward, in large part because they captured something true about the world when we were not close to see it with our own eyes.
As archival producers for documentaries and co -director of the archive producers alliance, we are deeply concerned about what could happen when we can no longer trust that such images reflect reality. And we are not the only ones: before The Oscar this yearVariety reported that the Motion Film Academy is considering demanding the contestants to reveal the use of generative.
While this dissemination can be important for films, it is clearly crucial for documentaries. In the spring of 2023, we begin to see synthetic images and audio used in the historical documentaries we were working on. Without standards established for transparency, we fear that this mixture of real and unreal can compromise the genre of non -fiction and the indispensable role it plays in our shared history.
In February 2024, Operai provided its new text platform to video, Sora, with a clip called “Historical images of California during the gold fever.” The video was convincing: a fluid transmission full of the promise of wealth. A blue sky and rolling hills. A prosperous city. Men on horseback. It seemed a western one where the good boy wins and heads at sunset. He looked authentic, But it was false.
Operai presented “historical images of California during the gold fever” to demonstrate how Sora, officially released in December 2024, creates videos based on user indications using AI that “understands and simulates reality.” But that clip is not reality. It is a casual mixture of real images and imagined by Hollywood, along with the historical prejudices of the industry and archives. Sora, like other generative AI programs such as Runway and Luma Dream Machine, scrapes the internet content and other digital material. As a result, these platforms are simply recycling the limitations of online media and, without a doubt, amplify biases. However, seeing it, we understand how an audience could be deceived. The cinema is powerful that way.
Some in the world of cinema have complied with the arrival of generative tools with open arms. We and others see it as something deeply worrying on the horizon. If our faith in the veracity of the images is shattered, powerful and important films could lose their affirmation about the truth, even if they do not use material generated by AI.
Transparency, something similar to food labeling that informs consumers about what enters the things they eat could be a small step forward. But no regulation of the dissemination of AI seems to be on the next hill, comes to rescue us.
The generative companies of AI promise a world where anyone can create audiovisual material. This is deeply worrying when applied to representations of history. The proliferation of synthetic images makes the work of documentaries and researchers, safeguarding the integrity of the primary source material, digging through the archives, presenting the story with precision, even more urgent. It is human work that cannot be replicated or replaced. One only needs to look at the documentary “Sugarcane” nominated for this year's Oscar to see the power of careful research, precise file images and a well -informed personal narrative to expose hidden stories, in this case about the abuse of children of the first nations in Canadian residential schools.
The speed with which new AI models are being launched and new content occurs makes technology impossible to ignore. While it may be fun to use these tools to imagine and try, what the results are not a true documentation work, of humans with witnesses. It's just a remix.
In response, we need a literacy of the robust media for our industry and the general public. In the Alliance of Archive Producers, we have published a set of guidelines, backed by more than 50 industry organizations, for the responsible use of the generative AI in documentary cinema, the practices that our colleagues are beginning to integrate into their work. We have also made a call for case studies on the use of AI in the documentary film. Our goal is to help the film industry to ensure that the documentaries deserve that title and that the collective memory it informs will be protected.
We are not living in a western classic; No one comes to save us from the threat of an unregulated generative AI. We must work individually and together to preserve the integrity and different perspectives of our real history. The precise visual records not only document what happened in the past, but also help us to understand it, learn their details and, perhaps the most important thing in this historical moment, believe he.
When we can no longer witness the ups and downs of what came before, the future we share can also be little more than a casual remix.
Rachel Antell, Stephanie Jenkins and Jennifer Petruccelli are co -director of the archive producers alliance.
