79 pointsby tobr5 hours ago22 comments
  • teekert25 minutes ago
    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.
  • SkipperCat3 hours ago
    AI promised me global human extinction but all I got was a deleted reality TV show...
    • chiian hour ago
      may be it's trying to do some good by deleting these shows.
    • iugtmkbdfil83438 minutes ago
      You gotta learn to walk before you run oO
  • Roark662 hours ago
    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.
    • marginalia_nuan hour ago
      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.

    • hobo123an hour ago
      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.

    • matthewfcarlson2 hours ago
      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.
    • shiandow2 hours ago
      Wouldn't surprise me if the editing process involves a lot of files on cheap storage with little to no backup.
    • overcast2 hours ago
      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.
      • tecleandoran hour ago
        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!
      • cube0027 minutes ago
        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.
    • thewhitetulip24 minutes ago
      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"
    • segmondy2 hours ago
      what do you need backup for, when you regen everything in 5 seconds with AI. perhaps they replaced backup with AI too.
    • embedding-shape2 hours ago
      > 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.

  • PcChip3 hours ago
    The submission title says it happened, but the company denies it
    • bita_nidir21 minutes ago
      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?

    • SiempreViernes3 hours ago
      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...

      • embedding-shape3 hours ago
        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.

        • Springtime2 hours ago
          > “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'.

        • graemep26 minutes ago
          So a non-malicious agent made an error or misinterpreted instructions, which is what I would have expected.
        • shaky-carrousel2 hours ago
          And they needed the backup because...?
          • jve2 hours ago
            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...

            • wongarsu16 minutes ago
              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

            • dpoloncsak2 hours ago
              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.

              • lanstin26 minutes ago
                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!)
          • 2 hours ago
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  • gingersnap40 minutes ago
    Most positive impact of AI yet
  • f646993e074382f2 hours ago
    It's been a long time since I had a website throw a pop-under at me, but here we are.
  • sdcfgy2 hours ago
    If AI agent deleted it or not, it's a human's fault. Really want to see the root-cause analysis here.
    • Ekaros2 hours ago
      My guess on root cause: They did not actually test restore from backups.

      So most likely nothing new under the sun.

    • Yizahi2 hours ago
      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.
  • varjag29 minutes ago
    I bet this "AI agent" has a name and it's not Claude.
  • tamimio12 minutes ago
    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 :)
  • Telaneo2 hours ago
    Can't even pirate things before companies recklessly decimate their archives these days, apparently.
  • pessimizer2 hours ago
    You can do anything with AI except sandbox it by default, have it keep backups, have it generate readable code with reasonable abstractions, etc...
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  • latentsea2 hours ago
    "I need you to cleanup the footage"... "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! No! No! No! No!"

    Intent. Ain't it a bitch?

    • TeMPOraLan hour ago
      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.

    • throw_m2393392 hours ago
      "See, it's sentient! It misinterpreted my prompt!".
      • TeMPOraLan hour ago
        I bet my wife thinks that of me sometimes :).
  • zzzeek2 hours ago
    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

    • hobo12344 minutes ago
      Maybe the problem is that AI did the "backup" and now didn't remember how to restore.
    • vatsachak25 minutes ago
      The issue is that no matter how well trained the AI is, this has happened.

      With humans, training usually precludes this

  • redasadki3 hours ago
    Welcome to Q4 2026. Wait until you see 2027!
    • embedding-shape3 hours ago
      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
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