Netflix Paints Its Picture With AI

May 3
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. "It was just god awful. And there's a ton of these shows."
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. “It was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows.”

From Ryan Broderick, podcaster at The Content Mines and author of the highly entertaining Garbage Day newsletter:

2019. The show Daybreak came out. It is horrible. It is what radicalized chuds on YouTube think of all Netflix shows. It’s, like, a perfomatively woke, algorithmically generated, teen-not-comedy thing about what it would be like to live in a high school that was in the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of… thing. And it was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows. Where you’re like — you can just see the robot going, ‘This genre’s performing well and this genre’s performing well. Let’s combine them.’

Ryan Broderick
“The Facebookification of Netflix”
The Content Mines

Broderick paints a damning picture of how Netflix managed to become its own echo chamber. The machine learns what it’s programmed to do, the business green-lights the results. Soon, the system itself is flooded with an AI-generated list of shows that all seem to get canceled before a third season.

In related news, this is what artificial intelligence creates when I tell it to paint a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”:

I asked AI to paint me a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”

It’s a questionable result. When you give questionable art to consumers who have, sight unseen, already paid for it, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.