Netflix's guidance tells producers to keep AI out of the final cut. A Netflix documentary carries 17 minutes of it.

Netflix used AI-generated material in about 300 titles so far this year.

It told shareholders. It has not told viewers.

The figure appeared in the company’s second-quarter earnings letter on 16 July, which said the technology now runs through every level of production, from concept and pre-visualisation to post-production and release.

A year earlier, Netflix had confirmed generative AI in exactly one title, the Argentine series The Eternaut.

The letter named three: the Indian sports thriller Glory, the Brazilian football miniseries Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri, and The American Experiment, a docuseries on the American Revolution carrying 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage.

Netflix said the tools built complex sequences including enlarged crowds and battle scenes, and that some productions would have had to drop key shots without them.

Co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said those 17 minutes were produced “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options”, and that it still takes great artists to make something great.

Netflix also publishes rules for the companies that make its shows, and they are more cautious than the letter.

The guidance gives production partners five guiding principles. The fourth is that AI-generated material is “temporary and not part of the final deliverables”.

Seventeen minutes of a finished documentary is not temporary.

The document allows for it. Anything AI-generated that reaches the final cut must be flagged early, and may need written approval and rights clearance first.

Written approval is also required to generate main characters, key visual elements or central settings, to replicate a performer’s voice or likeness, or for any use that would replace work normally done by union members.

Every one of those routes ends in the same place: “your Netflix contact”.

Netflix writes the rule and Netflix grants the exemption.

There is no external reviewer, no public register, and nothing in the guidance requiring anyone to tell the audience.

The rules defer to guild requirements where they apply.

American performers won new limits on synthetic performers in the television agreement ratified in June. Australian performers have no ratified equivalent, and MEAA has been negotiating AI consent and compensation into the industry standard screen agreements with Screen Producers Australia.

Netflix has written a detailed framework for who has to be told, and the audience is not on it.