A new Netflix true crime documentary is accused of using photographs of a woman that were generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence.
“What Jennifer Did” features several photos of Jennifer Pan, a Canadian woman involved in a murder-for-hire plot to kill her parents. The images show Pan dancing and flashing peace signs in a red halter dress.
But there’s something bizarre about two of the photos, as Futurist noted when pointing out the woman’s peculiar fingers, hands and teeth — human features that AI notoriously struggles to render accurately.
Executive producer Jeremy Grimaldi insisted in an interview with the Toronto Star that the photos are genuine.
“Any filmmaker will use different tools, like Photoshop, in films,” he told the Star. “The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her. The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source.”
In one picture, both of Pan’s hands are misshapen. Her right hand appears to be missing a pinky finger and crisscrossed by strange brown lines. The fingers forming the peace sign are the only recognizable digits of her left hand.
In a second image, one of Pan’s two front teeth seems unusually long while the other recedes into her gums — noticeably different from her smile in a third image, which doesn’t show signs of being altered.
“Jennifer was bubbly, happy, confident and very genuine,” a high school friend says in the documentary over a slideshow of the pictures.
The photos of the vivacious woman in a cocktail dress provide a sharp contrast to Pan’s appearance and timid demeanor in a video of her first interview at a police station. There, she wears plain, baggy clothes and glasses, her long hair pulled back in a messy braid.
Grimaldi’s 2016 book about the case, “A Daughter’s Deadly Deception: The Jennifer Pan Story,” includes a number of photographs, but none that show Pan wearing the red dress in the disputed images. Grimaldi did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
HuffPost also reached out to Netflix and a representative for director Jenny Popplewell, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
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Eugen Boglaru is an AI aficionado covering the fascinating and rapidly advancing field of Artificial Intelligence. From machine learning breakthroughs to ethical considerations, Eugen provides readers with a deep dive into the world of AI, demystifying complex concepts and exploring the transformative impact of intelligent technologies.
