Syeda Irtizaali, Netflix’s recently appointed U.K. director of unscripted, told an audience at SXSW London on Tuesday she doesn’t want to use AI in unscripted television.
Describing Netflix as a “tech-forward company,” she said that she was “very relaxed about people using AI as a tool to bring ideas in,” describing AI as a “really brilliant tool,” adding “we should be using it.”
However, she sounded a note of caution. “I think where we have to be careful is where we use it on camera and in show. I’ll never say never, but I don’t really want to use AI in unscripted television.”
She continued, “There’s one particularly interesting thing I think about the landscape now as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal, which is it’s hard now to tell what is fake and what is real, and it will become harder. I therefore think that unscripted television, which is all about real people in real situations going through real journeys, suddenly becomes even more important, because this is content that you can trust is real, and these are real people going through these real reactions, or whatever the journeys are. I think that makes us more potent in an AI world than less.
“I think being real has always been our watchword, and those real people in your stories become really, really interesting when you’re in a sort of a mishmash of a multimedia world where you can’t tell what’s going on, and perhaps there is less rigor in other platforms, where things are happening and you don’t know what is real and what isn’t.”
