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.
A backup shouldn't be considered working until a restore (plus checksum of the complete file tree) has been successfully tested.
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.
> 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...
> “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.
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'.
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...
This doesn't take away from your point, though.
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
> 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?
So most likely nothing new under the sun.
And no way to reject all
Noped out of there in seconds.
"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.
Intent. Ain't it a bitch?
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.
/sarcasm
With humans, training usually precludes this
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.
A backup system at the production company failed, she says. "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.
1. AI agent deletes the primary copy 2. Backup system fails (when did they last test the restoration process?), so they have no copies
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-re...
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