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While obviously it can veer off into the morbid and obscene, anyone remember "dramatic reenactment" labels on true crime TV in the 90s? (maybe before too)
But I do think there's a space for communicating with impactful re-enactment and tasteful "redaction" (censor blurs, keeping things off scene, or jumping forward allowing implication to tell the story).
As with all laws, and rules, the enforcement story will tell what the policy actually means.
I'm pretty sure none of those network TV dramatic reenactments had a 2-year-old actor talking about how their grandmother stuffed them in an oven. I think that would have caused a bit of a stir.
I think it's something about recreating a likeness of a victim. A paid actor may look similar to a victim, but not exactly. Their image will evoke a totally different emotion from the victim's friends and family.
The generated girl was white, the actual victim black. Also - after skimming another article - it seems that the child was killed with a knife first and only then was the body put into the oven, maybe in the hope to get rid of the body. This is more like loosely based on a true story then an accurate retelling of events. Also age and name are slightly altered.
Does that matter? What did you think YouTube has in mind when they say "realistically simulate"? Sometimes you can see a trend coming early on, and isn't YouTube responding to what people will probably do in the future?
> I think it's something about recreating a likeness of a victim.
I'm pretty sure that's what the person you are replying to was commenting on.
If you're just continuing the discussion and talking about whether or not the policy is a good move on YouTube's part, fair enough. But it kind of reads like you're shifting the goal post.
My opinion is that I'm honestly not sure if it "matters" or not. YouTube has every right to make their content policies according to whatever drives them, be it business forces or their own values. As an adult consumer of YouTube I would personally prefer if there were a "as long as it is legal" policy, but I get why YouTube may have reasons to adopt different policies and it's not up to me. I recognize their right to do what they think is best with their business and product.
The discussion, as I understood it, was about contrasting dramatic reenactments using actors with using digital recreations (i.e. "what makes these two techniques different?"). danbruc was talking about how the digital recreation in the news recently was inaccurate. I was questioning if that mattered, since I wasn't so much contrasting paid actors with that specific case but instead with what new technology now allows and what YouTube is probably trying to prevent with their policy.
I was specifically replying to the following part.
A paid actor may look similar to a victim, but not exactly. Their image will evoke a totally different emotion from the victim's friends and family.
In that specific case the digital recreation - if you can even call it that - was quite off and far from depicting what the real victim looked like. It would certainly have been possible to do an reenactment which more closely matched what the actual victim looked like. Therefore I think any argument along the lines that an exact digital recreation might evoke feelings that a reenactment could not does - at least in this specific case - not apply.
Otherwise I have really no opinion on the entire matter. Putting children into an oven is certainly in the range of things that you could find in horror movies. Context of course matters and also the presentation and intention and target audience, but I just do not know anything besides skimming three articles about this phenomenon to properly judge this.
I hate to say this, but just three months ago children that I knew were burned alive. And a baby was found burned in an oven, apparently stuffed in there such that the heating element mark was visible on its body.
These things happen not only in horror movies. They happen today, in real life.
i'm sorry to hear that, and i am well aware that they happen today in real life, but what we were discussing in this subthread is not to what extent they are real, but rather to what extent fictional depiction of them is seen as socially acceptable
I have to say I think it's more stemming from the court of public opinion's reaction to inappropriate content for kids[1] and also laws that protect kids online.
What if they are careful to make a fake kid who looks nothing like the original (other than kind of looking like a kid of that age and kind of looking like the same race)? There are dramatic re-enactments. I don't want to see this, but should it be banned? Is it okay if it was done with live actors? What about if they were on "to catch a thief"? What if it was a real drama or a play. What if you wanted to block a shakespeare play that had kids killed in it that was a historical event? Is it only for ai actors?
This is a hard thing to figure out. I'm against true crime repros that are disgusting and pandering, but that's completely personal and ambiguous.
Well, to be clear, such videos are not “banned,” but merely not within the scope of the coherent speech product YouTube seeks to produce. This is, of course, their right single the platform belongs to them.
You can make such videos all day long, but you would have to deliver them yourself, which is consistent with how free speech works in America.
> Well, to be clear, such videos are not “banned,”
They're "banned" on youtube, which many people would argue is a monopoly. Certainly banning specific types of content on the largest and most popular video platform will have a massive impact on how many people will ever see that kind of content
I don't think it's unreasonable to raise concerns about censorship on platforms that have a disproportionate impact on what most people will or won't see.
Anyone who would argue that YouTube is a monopoly would probably also argue that Burger King and McDonald’s are monopolies. I agree that refusing to distribute snuff porn on YouTube probably has deleterious effects in the audience for that content.
But it is unreasonable and against the core free market principles of our capitalist society for you to be too concerned about what I publish with my web site. I have a first amendment right and you can’t force me, my company, or my property to carry speech.
Which isn’t to say you can’t be concerned about lack of visibility for content that’s banned by big platforms. You can. You probably should! But compelled private speech is not the answer, which is why you will, for example, frequently get pushback against the idea that this is even censorship. (I’m pedantic, but not enough so to adopt that view).
Forensic Files, on the Headline News Network - though they seem to have given up on the 'News' part of their programming recently, shows crime reenactments with narration and comments from people related to the episode's incident in question.
It's also cool to see the rightsholder (Cineflix?) of Mayday/Air Crash Investigation put everything up on YouTube for free as well. (https://www.youtube.com/@MaydayAirDisaster)
> That should be done without appropriating the voice and image of the deceased without permission.
I disagree. If I were in charge, I would encourage factually correct reenactments and ban fake news.
An example is the long time Hollyweird trend of replacing ugly historical figures with beautiful keading people. Bonnie Parker (likely a relative of mine) was not a hottie. Pretending she was distorts the story. Ugly girls who are prodigies live different lives than pretty girls.
The current fashion of replacing people of one race with people of another race distorts history. If you want a black leading lady, there are many stories to chose from.
We really ought to start thinking about better privacy rights for the dead. Seems like it would make sense to tie it to the privacy of the next of kin, or something similar, but splitting privacy rights amongst multiple people can get weird.
I mean it is a bit strange that copyright is protected decades after someone died, but privacy is pretty much gone the moment someone breathes their last.
The decision is out of sensitivity for the victim’s family, and the examples are videos recreating the events of their murder. I think you’ll be fine recreating Shirley Temple…
There's also a great Adult Swim Infomercial satirizing this idea, "Live Forever As you Are Now with Alan Resnick"[1]. Apparently it came out the same year as that Black Mirror episode (2013) !
I think Inside No. 9 also had an episode on this theme. It’s a seriously underrated show and practically unknown. It sort of occupies a middle ground between Black Mirror’s dark satire and Resnick’s absurdist realism, now that I think of it.
I think every camera manufacturer should implement auto blur on photos (legislate it).
Then an opt-in system unblurs the faces of the people that approve.
(Or just replace the faces with AI random faces instead of blur)
Point being, society has fallen into an opt-out system naturally - But I don't think there is good reason for it to be a necessary thing for the common good. I want privacy, and the tech is there to do it.
Manufacturers are meddling with raw images for proof of non-tampering, and if the horse has bolted there then I want my proposal above folded in at the same level.
fwiw, some facial recognition systems, especially ones coming out of Asia where masks are far more common, are pretty good at identifying people with masks on.
An elastomeric respirator worn with a hood (on the outside, don't break the seal) and dark sunglasses might work well enough in the US. Need to do something about gait though.
That’s uh - that’s just straight up censorship though.
Like I get that it’s a gross practice that can be used exploitatively, but… using AI to create media that depicts a murdered child telling the story of their own death is a compelling work of art.
"True Crime" as a genre is littered with unscrupulous hosts. But not all of it is in the gutter. In fact, some of it produces a public good. I admit I am attracted to these stories and try to choose carefully. If I may - two recommendations:
"My Only Story" - an adult man notices with horror that the man who secretly raped him as a school boy in South Africa is still working as a teacher. He quits his job and starts a podcast about how grooming works and how the school system is letting pupils down. All the while he is trying to expose this man for who he is without being sued - so he has to dance around the man's name. It is riveting. The story unfolds live as he finds more and more fellow students who were victimized willing to go on the record. This leads to naming names.
"The Root Of Evil" which features (in part) a retired Los Angeles homicide detective who believes his surgeon father was behind the famous Black Dahlia murder. He brings receipts. An astonishing amount of historical material is unearthed including cassette tape audio from the 70's.
Story telling is such an integral part of the social experience. Like everything it can be corrupted by greed and bad incentives. Not every True Crime podcast falls into this trap.
> "True Crime" as a genre is littered with unscrupulous hosts. But not all of it is in the gutter. In fact, some of it produces a public good.
True crime has a similar problem to, say, commerical fishing. Some of the early stuff was quite good, because the first shows to do it had their pick of complex and narratively satisfying events to be based on. But once the low-hanging fruit was plucked, subsequent shows had no choice but to begin trawling, in the same way that fishermen do when populations run thin. The demand for true crime has considerably outpaced the supply, and hence why newer shows essentially can't not be bad and dangerous: they have to either invent predators out of thin air or otherwise make mountains out of molehills.
There needs to be like a 30-year moratorium on true crime, to let the "fish stocks" replenish.
There is a huge series covering abducted/missing women. I forget the name right now. They barely scratched the surface. There is no way you could cover them all as the number keeps growing so fast.
As with so many things: the thing itself is not the issue. The problem is the thing started to make money/gain traffic and then everyone and their mother has to jump in and start making derivative versions of it until it's saturated beyond comprehension, none of it makes any money, and they run off to find the next damn thing to rip off.
Something like 5 years ago, a "TV show" in Brazil did just that. It was one of those shows that showed the daily police operations, think COPS but "brazilian style", things go hardcore real easy down here. Anyway, it turned out that when the TV producers weren't getting enough of their daily dose of ultra violence to show to the audience, they would go out to the local drug dealers and ask for an eventual brutal murder, or series of murders, to entice the interest of the audience. It seems to have been going on for years before an insider tipped the police about it. Evil has no limits.
I always thought that aspect was the creepiest part of the Scream movies.
Imagine surviving a serial killer, and knowing there are good odds you're going to die at the hands of another copycat killer before you die of old age.
To some extent, those sorts of motifs are a dramatization and personification of death itself. A very real threat that's usually rather immaterial and conceptual, cast as something you can see and touch. And that can chase you down an alley.
Nothing got you today. But something might have! And something definitely will sooner or later. It's always lurking, it doesn't rest, it's relentless in its mission, and it can strike at any time. If it hasn't taken someone you love, just wait, it will—in fact, it'll take everyone you love, eventually, if you stick around long enough.
You see similar use of the unstoppable-killer with marked victims (achieved via copycats and other trickery in Scream, but it's the same idea) for the purpose of representing other fears, traumas, or threats that have a degree of universality and don't tend to entirely go away, as in It Follows. You see this whole thing made perhaps a bit too on-the-nose in works like Final Destination—which is why, I think, you can have endless unstoppable-knife-guy movies and they may retain some appeal, but a little bit of a "cute" very-literal twist on the formula like Final Destination goes a long way; the world only needs so much of that, much as a joke that subverts a particular standard joke-form only works once or twice before it stops being amusing.
The fun thing about the Scream series, when the movies remember it, is that the killer's emulating this fictional trope of an unstoppable and possibly-supernatural-but-not-omnipotent killer on purpose, in "real life", which is good fodder for creative narrative, twists, and well-earned winks at the camera. The movies are meta not because they've arbitrarily chosen to be (though they do choose to lean into it, of course) but because they aren't about these kinds of fictional unstoppable-personification-of-death killers directly, but about "real people" doing the unstoppable-personification-of-death thing in "real life", in imitation of film (even in the first one, before the idea of copycats hunting the survivors entered the picture, there's a particular thing done in order to imitate not just a human knife-wielding killer, but specifically this kind of wholly fictional, unkillable death-dealer).
Actually, as with Final Destination, this is another thing the world only needs so much of, for similar reasons—I'm not sure the market would support a much greater rate of release for this kind of film than we already see. It's not as immediately-played-out, though, less of a one trick pony.
There's something to be said for advances in storytelling/graphics/quality. The AI reanimation may be too far, but there are other useful storytelling tools.
Don't forget Robert Durst of The Jinx – an American real estate heir got away with murder for decades. The Jinx was a true crime documentary for which Durst, for some reason, agreed to be interviewed. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but at some point throughout the interviewing Durst gave himself away and the evidence accrued within the documentary ended up being used to finally put him behind bars for life.
I disagree. AI is becoming an increasingly important tool for telling stories, and making it harder to tell stories about true crimes and dead children is not a good thing. We need our full range of tools to think about and communicate about these horrors, as much as for anything else.
So true. I've never really been able to understand the visceral nature of a childs death in my 40+ years on this earth. Until now, the horrors could never be adequately told, let alone shown by complete amateurs. Luckily we now have notAnExploiter420 to reanimate your dead child to show their well researched hot take and for monetary gain!
Yes, i.e. I am thinking of a story that would make a nice children's book, with some keywords (forest, cave, fire, marshmallows, squirrel, etc.) It would be GREAT if I can get some AI machine (currently using Midjourney) to describe a scene, to find an image that would 'improve' the story.
I understand that others above mention "the law", but until the makers of laws react (globally) to prevent from this sh*t happening, we have to use basic human decency.
Also, we don't need to make movies for people who don't want movies to be made. And yes that is a thin line (i.e. we MUST make movies about the holocaust so we never forget - and not listen to people who want this avoided). But the tragedy of a family is a whole different game (and it requires a human with a soul to tell them apart - apparently).
