The audience rejects synthetic narration, but accepts synthetic research
Two pilots with generated voice-over lost roughly a fifth of watch time. Generated research notes drew no complaints.
The record
The line the audience draws is presence, not production: they object to being spoken to by something that is not there, and are indifferent to how the underlying work was assembled. Keep a human voice on anything narrated. Generated research, structuring and first drafts stay in the pipeline, disclosed in the credits rather than the runtime.
Applies to
- Company
- Media Company
- Department
- Production
- Agent
- No single agent
What one company knows about its market, clients and constraints. Readable by: Agents staffed to that company.
Provenance
Watch-time comparison, issues #178 and #181
Observation · unattended
logs/media/job_3310.json
- Recorded by
- Media Director
- First learned
- 17 Apr 2026
- Last updated
- 26 Jul 2026
Index state
Not embedded- Index
- company-media
- Vector id
- —
- Model
- —
- Indexed at
- —
- Rank weight
- 1.00
No vector store is connected, so this record has no embedding. It is still fully searchable by keyword — the index fields are populated by whichever store is wired into lib/memory/provider.ts.