Not really. If you read between the lines you see there's a story she's avoiding.
> It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material
Notice the wording. It's a half-truth response. She's probably correct, but the accusation wasn't that a "some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material". Just a AI deleted the material.
Then backup failed as the reason. That's not THE reason. You don't need backups unless you lose your data. How did the data get lost?
Also, communications. People absolutely suck at it.
I swear, half the time I see people complaining about AI failing to do what the user meant, the conversation closely resembles those jokes about married couple arguing over bullshit, because one person wanted XY, but asked for XW, and their partner interpreted it as XZ.
AI can do no wrong if you can always attribute any mistakes or problems to human error. The problem is if humans are making so many errors, at what point do you blame the tool and say it’s not fit for broad use?
Your reasoning would apply just as well to computers. We have all kinds of things where the expectation is, or was, that you don't ask the computer to do things you don't want, and the times when that expectation has been eroded in favor of "the computer isn't fit for the general public" have been a mistake.
Root cause - guardrails "unexpectedly" were neither guards nor rails. Who knew that asking a stochastic program "pretty please" is not a strict instruction or a barrier whatsoever.
Bet there was an executive telling we cannot afford old-time security in the era of AI. If they had guardrails outside of the prompt they were getting left behind.
Deletions happen, but that is what you have backups for. I do not understand how you can have hundreds of days of work and never test if your backups work.
> I do not understand how you can have hundreds of days of work and never test if your backups work
You outsource it, then you file a P4 ticket to test those "just in case" that will be done in a future sprint (never), but all of you more or less trust the outsourcing partner actually has their shit together.
Personally I wouldn't trust any backup system without also testing and verifying the restore, but I've worked in plenty of places where their main database is automatically backed up by AWS or whatever, and no one cares to test the restore because "Why would it be broken if it's provided by AWS?!" and similar opinions drown out the more careful ones.
There is A LOT of garbage IT staff out there. A lot. Especially when it's outsourced MSP. I've walked into environments, where the backup software just repeatedly show failed jobs for MONTHS. No one checking on anything, email alerts if they are even configured, dumping into a mailbox no one checks. It's pathetic.
In a previous employer, the outsourced ERP (Navision) administrator, after finding the MS SQL Integrity Checks of the database were failing in the periodical maintenance tasks, he just disabled the integrity checks. Magic! Errors fixed!
As a new starter to the team I was flooded with alert emails every few minutes. When I asked what the deal was, was promptly given a bunch of mail rules every other team member used to dump them all into another folder they never looked at.
Worth noting that TV4 has been in a vicious circle of cutbacks and savings for quite a few years now. Back when they were still on air it felt like there were more ad slots than broadcast content, pushing away ever more of what little viewership they still retained, they've been constantly cancelling popular shows in favor of cheaper ones. They aren't as far as I know even broadcast on air anymore.
I very much get the sense they're dismantling the furniture and using it as firewood. It feels like the sort of place that very well could fire the entire IT staff and give that responsibility to the CEO's nephew and claude code instead. Not saying that is what transpired, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Well, if you have followed the latest trends, all established practices hage gone out the window to be replaced with "an agent with a prompt and a prayer"
we certainly had customers or our own employees who "wiped out the whole X" every now and then at my company, the point I'm trying to make about this is that a TV show might have wiped out all their edited copies of a show and delayed the show where AI was not involved in any way, and it would not make tech news headlines. Hence selection bias
Ok, I have not seen any responses from anyone here that actually read TFA (which is almost like a fever dream, it does not deserve the A in TFA imho) but here is the whole F"A" (and it says AI did not delete material!):
The new season of TV4's reality show “The Challenge” has been postponed due to a technical failure. Large parts of the series have been deleted, Aftonbladet reports.
The newspaper reports that an edited season of the program was deleted by an AI agent, costing several hundred days of work. TV4 denies this.
“It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material,” says Mia Lindqvist, program director at TV4, to Sveriges Radio’s P4 Stockholm.
A backup system at the production company failed, she says.
“This means they now have to edit everything from scratch.”
"The Challenge" was supposed to premiere on November 22. The series will now instead be shown “in late spring,” Mia Lindqvist says.
In "The Challenge", famous reality TV contestants face off in fierce competitions. The first season aired on TV4 in 2024.
Host Ahmed Berhan comments on the report in Aftonbladet.
“Is that true?! I knew AI would be the death of me. This is just the beginning,” he says.
I’m skeptical. No production operation has one layer of backups. At worst they should’ve lost a week or so of work depending on their SOP. Even the most shoestring operations run a 3-2-1 system.
It’s possible this is true but that would require serious negligence. Something/someone actively deleting it actually makes more sense. Doesn’t mean it’s the case of course.
> Even the most shoestring operations run a 3-2-1 system
You may be surprised to learn there's a sphere in which "backups" are merely a tickbox exercise, something set up once, crudely, to be able to put on a form that you have back-ups.
They often lie dormant, untested, and drift from being fit for purpose. This often isn't discovered until it's too late.
My brother works in video production and I have some (very outdated at this point) history in that area.
* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.
* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.
* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.
* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.
Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.
I have worked in film production professionally for 2 decades. And yes many productions don’t, but this isn’t some scrappy indie operation and 9 times out of 10 even those follow 3-2-1 or comparable.
It is a very specific denial only about and "independent agent". We could still have a "dependent agent" or simply an AI code slinger prompting:
P: Claude, plz wr1te a backup with rsync!
A: Rsync is not generally recommended for backups, but here you go.
P: The sources and the backup are gone!
A: Thank you for the honest correction! You are right to call me out. I have mixed up
src and dest. This is a common problem with rsync. Would you like me to ...
There is all the difference in the world with a rogue agent going off and choosing to delete critical files and a human using an agent to implement a suboptimal backup strategy, and then being surprised pikachu when it fails.
Raw rushes are still available on the original disks/cards, but the project files and any renders were stored on a single location with no backup or snapshotting.
You'd have to redo everything from scratch. Maybe your editor/director remembers what they want so its a bit faster this time round, if they are available, but its still a lot of work to rebuild the edit.
"I'm so sorry. You asked me to edit episode 12 of the new season of The Challenge, and instead I deleted the episodes that have been edited so far. That's on me."
They said AI is bad but look, AI just knew it’s useless anyway and not worth the time (or tokens), guess it just took the initiative and got rid of it :)
"TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material"
Here's the title of the original article:
"TV4 postpones The Challenge after backup failure forces season to be edited again"
The claim that AI was involved is contradicted by the article itself: “It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material,” says Mia Lindqvist, program director at TV4.
This kind of submission tells us more about the submitter's views than about the events themselves.
It is not unusual for TV4 and to hire production companies that’s basically run on interns. Don’t know the details of this one, but wouldn’t be surprised.
91 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread> It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material
Notice the wording. It's a half-truth response. She's probably correct, but the accusation wasn't that a "some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material". Just a AI deleted the material.
Then backup failed as the reason. That's not THE reason. You don't need backups unless you lose your data. How did the data get lost?
Intent. Ain't it a bitch?
I swear, half the time I see people complaining about AI failing to do what the user meant, the conversation closely resembles those jokes about married couple arguing over bullshit, because one person wanted XY, but asked for XW, and their partner interpreted it as XZ.
This would have happened if some disgruntled employee deleted everything.
You outsource it, then you file a P4 ticket to test those "just in case" that will be done in a future sprint (never), but all of you more or less trust the outsourcing partner actually has their shit together.
Personally I wouldn't trust any backup system without also testing and verifying the restore, but I've worked in plenty of places where their main database is automatically backed up by AWS or whatever, and no one cares to test the restore because "Why would it be broken if it's provided by AWS?!" and similar opinions drown out the more careful ones.
I very much get the sense they're dismantling the furniture and using it as firewood. It feels like the sort of place that very well could fire the entire IT staff and give that responsibility to the CEO's nephew and claude code instead. Not saying that is what transpired, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
A backup shouldn't be considered working until a restore (plus checksum of the complete file tree) has been successfully tested.
/sarcasm
With humans, training usually precludes this
The new season of TV4's reality show “The Challenge” has been postponed due to a technical failure. Large parts of the series have been deleted, Aftonbladet reports.
The newspaper reports that an edited season of the program was deleted by an AI agent, costing several hundred days of work. TV4 denies this.
A backup system at the production company failed, she says. "The Challenge" was supposed to premiere on November 22. The series will now instead be shown “in late spring,” Mia Lindqvist says.In "The Challenge", famous reality TV contestants face off in fierce competitions. The first season aired on TV4 in 2024.
Host Ahmed Berhan comments on the report in Aftonbladet.
It’s possible this is true but that would require serious negligence. Something/someone actively deleting it actually makes more sense. Doesn’t mean it’s the case of course.
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-re...
You may be surprised to learn there's a sphere in which "backups" are merely a tickbox exercise, something set up once, crudely, to be able to put on a form that you have back-ups.
They often lie dormant, untested, and drift from being fit for purpose. This often isn't discovered until it's too late.
* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.
* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.
* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.
* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.
Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.
You'd have to redo everything from scratch. Maybe your editor/director remembers what they want so its a bit faster this time round, if they are available, but its still a lot of work to rebuild the edit.
1. AI agent deletes the primary copy 2. Backup system fails (when did they last test the restoration process?), so they have no copies
"I'm so sorry. You asked me to edit episode 12 of the new season of The Challenge, and instead I deleted the episodes that have been edited so far. That's on me."
"TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material"
Here's the title of the original article:
"TV4 postpones The Challenge after backup failure forces season to be edited again"
The claim that AI was involved is contradicted by the article itself: “It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material,” says Mia Lindqvist, program director at TV4.
This kind of submission tells us more about the submitter's views than about the events themselves.