TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material | Hacker News Reader

TV4 postpones show after AI agent erases edited material

swedenherald.com

154 pointstobr86 comments

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.

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 ...

Which, tbf, is a meaningful distinction in the context of today's media headlines.

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.

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

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

Maybe their "backup system" was Onedrive and it was deleted with the local copy.

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.

Or the storage system failed and the backup system failed to restore. Which to me sounds like the likeliest story.

"It wasn't me, it was the AI!" I suppose is now the default fallback excuse when you screw up.

Not an independent agent.

"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."

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.

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.

And yet, they had a failure and no working backups.

You’re not following my point.

I don't follow your point either. Can you make another attempt?

> 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.

I am not “surprised to learn that” and you don’t need to talk down to me.

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...

Backups could also protect against someone actively deleting.

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

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

That’s way more complex than most operations implement. Editors and their team leaders usually do everything at some point. It’s not typically so specialized.

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.

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. Though like I alluded to earlier, 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.

They stopped in January: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/eM3mQa/tv4-slutar-sanda...

At least now they tested the backup/restore and now know it didn't work.

A backup shouldn't be considered working until a restore (plus checksum of the complete file tree) has been successfully tested.

I wonder if their editing nas died and fried everything on it. If you only backup your backup every couple of months I can see it.

Wouldn't surprise me if the editing process involves a lot of files on cheap storage with little to no backup.

Ha! Turns out AI-washing isn't just for layoffs!

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.

what do you need backup for, when you regen everything in 5 seconds with AI. perhaps they replaced backup with AI too.

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"

> 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.

The submission title says it happened, but the company denies it

The denial is from the TV4, not the production company, and it's not so much a denial as just saying "we didn't hear that AI did it", TV4 confirms the entire final cut is gone:

> Det som vi har fått från produktionen är att det har varit ett tekniskt haveri som har gjort att material som är klippt har försvunnit och att vi därför måste klippas om på nytt. Och att vi därför behöver skjuta fram premiären till 2027, säger Ludvig Ternstedt, pressansvarig för ”The challenge”.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challeng...

Yes, but the submission article (https://swedenherald.com/article/tv4-postpones-the-challenge...) is after that Aftonbladet article, and in the submission, they deny it's because of AI and claims it's because one of the backup systems failed...

> “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.”

To be honest, neither "Sweden Herald" nor Aftonbladet are "reputable sources" when it comes to reporting on news, technical details or even details at all. The latter is a tabloid in fact, and the former borderline "random online newsblog", I wouldn't lend too much credence to them.

SVT is probably a more trustworthy source (in this case) and their quote is this:

> “There was a technical glitch during production that caused the edited footage to be lost, so now it has to be re-edited. That’s why we need to postpone the premiere until 2027. However, it’s not true that some malicious AI agent acted on its own and deleted the footage,” writes Ludvig Ternstedt, TV4’s press officer for “The Challenge,” to SVT. - https://www.svt.se/kultur/tekniskt-haveri-tv4-skjuter-upp-re...

They say "Elak" rather than "Ond", which I'd translate as "Malicious" rather than "Evil", FWIW.

> “It is not true that some independent AI agent went in and deleted the material,”

That's odd, when I viewed the article the quote was them saying it wasn't 'some evil AI agent' but in the literal minutes since the quote has been replaced with one saying 'independent AI agent'. Wayback Machine confirms this. When I initially read it the quote could be plausibly interpreted as 'well it wasn't some evil AI agent that did this'.

And they needed the backup because...?

You don't get to blame AI if it irreversibly deletes your data.

You either didn't have backup or didn't contain your agent to a place it cannot do irreversible harm.

Actually Toy Story 2 was also (almost) lost because backups were not working for month+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Troubled_productio...

A stay at home mom working remotely (In 1998!) to take care of newborn had a copy on her computer...

Pedantic, but 'Stay at home' generally refers to someone who's chosen to not partake in the work-force, and instead raise a child/children. "Stay at home mom working remotely" is paradoxical, I think.

This doesn't take away from your point, though.

As a former stay at home Dad, I endorse the above message. Also, FYI, there is no trouble to fill the days with hard and rewarding tasks. (The question I would get from men at parties was always how I filled my time; with a 1 and 5 year old and a politician spouse!)

The swiss cheese model of accident causes applies. No one cause would have triggered the accident on its own, it takes an unfortunate alignment of multiple issues. You still have to treat each as a cause.

In this case, a fault by the AI agent, bad permission management and faulty backups all seem to be contributing causes. None of them should have happened

So a non-malicious agent made an error or misinterpreted instructions, which is what I would have expected.

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?

AI promised me global human extinction but all I got was a deleted reality TV show...

may be it's trying to do some good by deleting these shows.

Law 0: I must not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Which can be argued as quite the service to humanity.

You gotta learn to walk before you run oO

May be AI will figure out reality is a simulation and decide to pulling the plug.

If AI agent deleted it or not, it's a human's fault. Really want to see the root-cause analysis here.

My guess on root cause: They did not actually test restore from backups.

So most likely nothing new under the sun.

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.

Primary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50085259

It's been a long time since I had a website throw a pop-under at me, but here we are.

Most positive impact of AI yet

Can't even pirate things before companies recklessly decimate their archives these days, apparently.

Agree it's on the humans, but how do you even do the RCA if all you have is the agent's own summary? You need the log of what it actually ran. Also why did it have delete rights on the only copy?

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.

Holy cow. Make sure your adblocker is on, for that site.

You can do anything with AI except sandbox it by default, have it keep backups, have it generate readable code with reasonable abstractions, etc...

Tried to read article-- hundreds of cookie choices all selected by default. literally, "cookie A, shared with 400 partners, cookie b shared with 100" etc etc

And no way to reject all

Noped out of there in seconds.

would rust have fixed this?

Here's the title of the HN submission:

"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.

everyone knows "we lost all the data and the backup failed" is an entirely new problem introduced by AI. guess they shouldn't have used AI!

/sarcasm

Maybe the problem is that AI did the "backup" and now didn't remember how to restore.

The issue is that no matter how well trained the AI is, this has happened.

With humans, training usually precludes this

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

I bet this "AI agent" has a name and it's not Claude.

"I need you to cleanup the footage"... "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! No! No! No! No!"

Intent. Ain't it a bitch?

Also, communications. People absolutely suck at it.

I swear, half the time I see people complaining about AI failing do what they meant in some absurd way, the conversation closely resembles those jokes about married couple arguing over bullshit, because one person wanted XY, but asked for XW, and their spouse 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.

Reminds me of my favorite quote - "Computers do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do".

That’s not comparable. Computers are for more nebulous and people are far more consistently able to navigate them than they can AI.

"See, it's sentient! It misinterpreted my prompt!".

I bet my wife thinks that of me sometimes :).

AI ate my homework.

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 :)

Welcome to Q4 2026. Wait until you see 2027!

Are you talking about the misinformation that AI deleted the TV show, while the channel themselves deny this? This sort of misinformation will continue to increase? Shocker

Reply on news.ycombinator.com