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.

▲ steve1977 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why would a failure of a backup system require editing everything again? Something must have gotten lost in translation here.

	▲	organsnyder 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Could be a combination of factors: 1. AI agent deletes the primary copy 2. Backup system fails (when did they last test the restoration process?), so they have no copies
	▲	iso1631 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

▲ 1234974 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 ...

	▲	root_axis 44 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Which, tbf, is a meaningful distinction in the context of today's media headlines.
	▲	ls612 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

▲ Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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munificent 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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xnorswap 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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benoau 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This famously happened to Toy Story 2 - but that's nearly 30 years ago it should require an incredible sequence of failures to achieve these days!

https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-re...

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actionfromafar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Backups could also protect against someone actively deleting.

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Forgeties79 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure but anyone with read/write access, editing/rendering access requirements, etc. is going to have a lot of permissions in most operations. Most editors (and many above the line) can access, move, delete, etc. footage and cuts. Locking them out of that is tricky if you want them to do their jobs. Doing screeners and alt versions would be a nightmare.

People lose footage but this is a bit odd for a major operation. Again incompetence is real and it’s a reasonable explanation as well. It’s just surprising

	▲	bathtub365 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would they be locked out? The state before their changes would just be backed up and could be rolled back to. It doesn’t need to intersect with their permissions at all. Crucially, they just don’t have write access to the backups

▲ Lagoon3384_SWE 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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