“From dial testing to focus grouping to ‘My kids didn’t like it,’ a certain species of TV executives have long ceded their greenlighting decisions to a range of third-party safety nets that protect them from actually making the choices themselves,” Shapiro says. Media veteran and producer Evan Shapiro, who just headlined at MIPTV, says outsourcing accountability is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood. In other words, what gets bought and when. It’s another thing entirely when data in the form of artificial intelligence, or proprietary algorithms, shape the decisions around what human audiences are exposed to. “It’s one thing if human-made films are competing in the market against robot-made films. “The danger is less about AI in the creation of documentary, the actual production, and more in the curation of it,” says Amit Dey, executive vp nonfiction at MRC, which has untitled Sly Stone and Rudy Giuliani documentaries in the works. It is the top-down, AI-powered platforming of art, which we’re already seeing across the media landscape - algorithms deciding, on a global scale, which stories to tell and how - and it is especially insidious in the realm of nonfiction.

But the greatest threat to broader culture posed by ambient machinery isn’t the bottom-up, AI-generated art populating social media (think: Wes Anderson Directs Star Wars). The stakes are high, and creative careers hang in the balance. The Writers Guild is right to push for protections against AI, but nowhere are these protections more urgent than in the documentary and nonfiction space, where I have worked both as a producer and a writer. Conor McGregor Attempts Unlikely UFC Comeback in Netflix's 'McGregor Forever' Trailer

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