True crime fans were immediately charmed by Netflix’s Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam when it hit the streaming service on July 24, But their reactions seem to be less about the scam and more about the way the filmmakers want to tell the story.
The three-part docuseries, which ranked second on Netflix’s top 10 most-watched TV series worldwide for the week of July 22-28, follows the rise and fall of Lou Pearlman, best known for discovering and managing ‘90s boy bands Backstreet Boys, NSync, O-Town, Take 5 and solo acts Aaron Carter and Brooke Hogan.
But beneath the surface of his very public and successful career in talent management, Pearlman was also involved in a $300 million pyramid scheme and was arrested in 2007. He was charged with conspiracy, money laundering and making false statements and sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he died in 2016.
Typically, documentaries use archive footage and photographs to paint a picture of the subject. In addition, interviews are conducted with people who knew the subject or, in the case of historical documentaries, studied it. Dirty doll Co-executive producer Michael Johnson told Netflix’s Tudum that the filmmakers had a “vast archive” to draw from, including Pearlman’s personal files and stories in his 2003 biography, Bands, brands, and billions: my top 10 rules to take any company platinum.
But the filmmakers went one step further. About three minutes into the first episode, there’s a shot of Pearlman sitting in his office, with a framed gold record in the background. Then there’s a disclaimer: “This footage has been digitally enhanced to [Pearlman’s] voice and sync his lips.”
It’s an actual clip of Pearlman, but injected with AI to manipulate his mouth and body movements to match those of a voice actor reading from Pearlman’s book. The AI version of Pearlman appears several times and helps narrate the series. The producers hired experts from MIT Media Lab, Pinscreen, and Resemble AI to alter the footage.
“We were excited to push the boundaries with new technology to help us tell this incredible story,” Johnson told Tudum. “We wanted to use this new technology in the most ethical way possible as an additive storytelling tool.”
Some viewers disagreed, calling the move “weird and unnecessary” and “super distracting” for X.
“Using AI for Lou’s voice makes me watch Netflix with a sideways glance,” wrote one viewer on X. “This is dangerous. They’re trying to normalize another way to sneak this in.”
Jürgen Schmidhuber, widely regarded as a pioneer in AI research, told Yahoo Entertainment that he understood the filmmakers were uncomfortable with the way Pearlman was manipulated, but that he didn’t think it was much different from actors reenacting scenes from other documentaries.
“Many previous documentaries about famous deaths, like Napoleon, have used human actors to illustrate what was happening and everyone knew it was just an actor,” he said. “Why should AI actors be any different, as long as they are clearly labeled as such?”
But the central concern that viewers who watched the series on social media voiced echoes one of the most pressing concerns about AI in general: Fact and fiction are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish. People are particularly concerned about AI being introduced into media that are perceived to be more trustworthy than, say, social media — like documentaries and even Google searches.
Netflix did not respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment.
Netflix is clearly labeling Pearlman’s narration as AI in every episode — a step in the right direction after the backlash the streamer received after being accused of using unlabeled AI in the 2024 documentary What Jennifer did. Executive producer Jeremy Grimaldi insisted that the photos that were alleged to have been digitally altered, What Jennifer Did were authentic, but said the background was anonymized. Netflix did not publicly comment on the allegations when the documentary was released in April.
Legally, Pearlman is not allowed to be manipulated for the documentary, but there are ways around that, Vivek Jayaram, the founder of Jayaram Law, told Yahoo Entertainment.
“If the documentary is made with permission from [Pearlman’s] Estate (if applicable), they may have licensed his posthumous publicity rights to them,” Jayaram said. “If he died in a state without posthumous publicity rights (including likenesses [and] voice), after which those rights died with him.”
Johnson told Tudum that the filmmakers had “safeguarded Lou’s rights to life” and “used only words written by Lou himself.”
“With the AI spread throughout the series, the viewer experiences the difference between Lou’s reality and the reality that the rest of the world experienced,” Johnson explained. “This contrast is essential to understanding Lou as a person and as a cunning con artist.”
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