Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did 'uses AI images of killer' (2024)

Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did appears to have used AI-generated or manipulated images of the killer daughter.

Jennifer Pan, then 24, paid two hitmen $10,000 to sneak into her family home in Toronto and murder her mother Bich Ha and father Huei Hann in November 2010.

Her father survived the fake home invasion and fled to a neighbor's house, triggering a police investigation that exposed her crimes.

Pan was jailed for life with parole after 25 years, but her murder conviction, and those of the hitmen, was quashed and she faces a retrial.

Her story is now being retold in the popular Netflix series - but fans and internet sleuths have honed in a problematic image that's included.

The documentary shows three photos of Pan in a red dress looking excited and having a good time at a party or celebration.

But little more than a cursory glance reveals odd features in the images, many of which are classic signs of the use of AI.

It's unclear who was behind the image. Netflix is yet to address the claims.

Nowhere in the documentary, even the fine print of the credits, is the use of AI disclosed.

One of the photos even appears on promotions for the documentary as one half of a split screen between a happy, smiling Pan and her mugshot.

Presented in this way, her misshapen, unnaturally long front tooth is so glaringly obvious that once you spot it, it is all you see.

Pan's ears also look oddly shaped and her earrings don't match.

Pan in another photo has her mouth open excitedly and is flashing two V for victory signs with her hands - only drawing attention to another glaring error.

AI has notorious problems creating hands, often missing fingers or making the hands look more like claws than human.

Pan's left hand looks particularly deformed in the photo, with only the two fingers sticking up looking like they are real and the rest missing or blending with the hand.

Her right hand is believable at a glance, but her little finger is mangled and there is an unrealistic fold down the middle of her palm.

Other issues with the photo include her nose appearing to lack nostrils, her left cheek looking fake, her shoulder being out of place, bizarre folds around her armpit, and items in the background looking like they don't belong.

A third photo of Pan sticking out her tongue has fewer signs of AI, but isn't perfect either.

Whether the images were generated from scratch using other photos of Pan as a guide, or only manipulated with AI, is not yet known.

One photographer theorized that the images were based on real photos, but were altered with AI to make them clear enough for TV.

'I suspect documentary makers may have attempted to enhance old low-resolution images using AI-powered upscaling or photo restoration software to try to make them look clearer on a TV screen,' he wrote for Creative Bloq.

'The problem is that even the best AI software can only take a poor quality images so far, and such programs tend to over sharpen certain lines, resulting in strange artifacts.'

Netflix is yet to comment but one of the producers,Jeremy Grimaldi, denied the documentary used AI to edit the photos.

'Any filmmaker will use different tools, like Photoshop, in films,' he told the Toronto Star.

'The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her. The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source.'

However, tech publication Futurism was not convinced by his explanation as the classic AI errors extended beyond the background.

'Grimaldi's comments are extremely vague on a core point: exactly what 'photo editing software' did the team use to "anonymize" the images, and did they involve AI?' it wrote.

'When he says the foreground is "exactly her", does that include her mangled fingers and teeth?'

What did Jennifer Pan do?

Jennifer, who was a first-generation Canadian, had excelled both as a student and as an ice skater in her formative years, according to school friends who previously spoke toToronto Life.

However, she later stoppeddedicating herself to her studies whenshe was 'snubbed' for a valedictorian award for her eighth grade class.

Her grades began to slide to the point where she was averaging 70 per cent in all of her classes except music by the first year of high school - but she kept her parents in the dark.

Karen Ho, who went to the same elementary school as Jennifer, told the outlet thatHann was the 'classic tiger dad' who gave up everything to move to the US and labored at a tool manufacturing job so that his two children could have a better life.

Like many immigrant parents, he expected his children to perform at the top of their class so that they could get into the best colleges that would lead them to high-paid careers.

Afraid for her parents to find out that she was slipping, Jennifer decided to forge her report cards to show straight As using old progress reports, scissors, glue and a copy machine.

For the most part, Jennifer was actually getting Bs which was 'respectable for most kids but unacceptable in her strict household,' according to Ho.

Her grades were good enough to get her into Ryerson University on early admission, and she told her parents that she would spend two years there studying science before transferring to the more prestigious University of Toronto to study pharmacology like her father had always wanted.

However, in her last semester Jennifer failed calculus, which kept her from graduating and Ryerson withdrew their admission offer.

Instead of fessing up, the student continued to go about as if nothing was wrong. She accepted her father's offer of a new laptop, started buying used biology and physics textbooks and even pretended to attend freshman week in September.

As for questions about how she was paying for college, Jennifer doctored papers saying she had received a loan and told her parents she had won a $3,000 scholarship.

When classes started, Jennifer took public transport downtown every day, where instead of attending lectures, she would go to public libraries and take notes on topics she thought she would be learning in her first-year science classes.

And it was a pretense that Jennifer kept up for two whole years.

Her father started asking about transferring to the University of Toronto and she again fed her parents a lie by saying she had been accepted.

She convinced them to let her stay with a friend downtown a few days of the week when in fact she was living at her high school sweetheart's house.

Another two years passed, and it was time for Jennifer to 'graduate' from University of Toronto.

This time, she and boyfriend Daniel Wong found someone to forge a straight-A college transcript.

She then told her parents that because of over-crowding at the school, each student was only allowed one guest at graduation, so she gave her ticket to a friend, not wanting to make one of her parents feel left out.

But her near-decade of deceit eventually came crashing down when she told her parents that she had gotten a volunteer job working in the blood-testing lab at SickKids hospital.

Her father grew suspicious after he noticed she had neither a uniform nor a key card to get into the building.

Hann decided to take matters into his own hands and one day insisted on dropping her off at work before having his wife tail Jennifer inside the hospital where she was nowhere to be found.

The next morning, he then called the friend that Jennifer was supposed to be living with and found out that she never stayed there.

Ultimately, the Pans confronted their daughter and she conceded that she had never attended the University of Toronto and had been staying at her boyfriend's house.

Hann felt betrayed and had initially banished his daughter from the house before his wife convinced him to let her stay with a strict set of ground rules.

For the first two weeks, Jennifer was banned from using her computer and cellphone and after that time was up her parents had to be in her presence when using them.

Forbidden from seeing her boyfriend, their relationship began to fall apart and Wong started seeing someone new.

Jennifer was left furious but, after briefly rekindling things with Wong, they schemed to have both her parents killed so the young couple could move in together and collecta $500,000 inheritance.

Wong introduced Jennifer to one of the hit men, Lenford Crawford, who agreed to do the hit for $10,000.

But Wong soon decided to return to his other girlfriend and asked Jennifer if she still wanted to go through with the hit, to which she replied: 'I want it for me.'

What were Jennifer Pan's crimes?

On November 8, 2010, Jennifer's mother had been watching TV and her father was sleeping in his room.

It was at this point that she is said to have texted the killers and signaled for them to come into the house.

Crawford and his associates David Mylvaganam and Eric Carty walked in through the unlocked front door - each bearing their own gun.

The intruders dragged Hann out of his room and down into the living room, while pretending to be staging a home invasion by tying Jennifer's hands to a bannister.

The group stole some money hidden around the home and then led the parents to the basem*nt where each was shot multiple times.

Her mother died of a point-blank gunshot wound. Her father was shot in the face - but miraculously survived.

The killers fled andJennifer pulled out a cellphone from her waistband to call 911.

She sounded panicked and out of breath as she told the operator: 'Help me, please. I need help. I don't know where my parents are.

'Some people broke into our house and stole all this money. I could hear my parents yelling. Please send help.'

Police found splatters of blood trailed throughout the house as one investigator branded it as 'something we had never seen before.'

When Hann woke up from a medically-induced three-day coma, he told investigators details of the home invasion that put the eye of suspicion on Jennifer.

He said that he saw his daughter talking to one of the men 'like a friend' and that her arms were not tied behind her back while she was being led around the house.

What did Jennifer Pan say in police interviews?

Investigators bought the then 24-year-old in for questioning where Pan lied to police with an elaborate cover story.

In footage from the interview, she could be seen sitting in an interrogation room in a gray sweater with her hair swept in front of her shoulder in a braid.

She began by recounting her version of events in a very softly spoken voice.

'Suddenly, I just heard my mom calling for my dad to come down and that's when I lowered the volume on my TV,' Pan started.

'I could hear the voices weren't any voices I was very familiar with and so I was scared and I couldn't move. I just sat in my room for a while.

'And then I thought I heard them all leave the top floor and I peered out of my bedroom door and a guy was there and he came at me and had string in his hands.

'He tied my arms back and said, 'I have a gun behind your back. Do what I say. If you do what I say then no one will get hurt. Where's the money? Show me where your money is.''

She explained: 'I had a bit of money put aside from when I was waitressing - cash. So I showed him where it was and he took it and put it in his pocket I think.

'And then they pushed me to my parents room and asked me where the money was there and I didn't really know.

'So they kind of like... one was right beside me blocking my way to the door while the other one has turned over the bed to find some more cash in my mom's bedside table.

'At which then they dragged me downstairs and made me kneel at the bottom telling me to lay face down on the floor while the other guy had a gun behind my head and asked my mom where her purse was.'

Pan continued reeling off her version of events and appeared to be choking back tears as she elaborated: 'My mom kept trying to get up and they kept telling her 'sit down' and so I didn't want her to get hurt so I told her 'mom, sit down.'

'They were trying to find her wallet and they kept pushing her down onto the chair.

'And then one of the gentlemen asked my father if he had money in his wallet and where his wallet was.

'So they took me - because I was next to the stairwell - they took me up the stairs to show them where my father's wallet was but I didn't know.

'They had turned the room upside down I didn't know where his pants were at that time and then they had taken me and they tied me to the top of the bannister just with one string.

'I could still move. I was afraid to because one guy had that gun so next thing I know I think I heard my parents going down the stairs and my mom was asking them for me to come with them. They wouldn't let me come with them.'

Pan then ramped up her performance by bursting into tears but managed to continue telling her fabricated story.

'The last things I heard them say was 'you lied, you lied to us, you lied to us' - and then I heard two pops.

'My mom screamed, I yelled out for her and then a couple more pops.'

She thrust her head into her hands as the investigator reached out to offer comfort, sliding a box of tissues across to Pan and telling her to take her time.

'I think I heard my mom say or moan or something and then they did one more before they left and then one of the guys said 'we have to go now, it's been too long' and then they ran out the door.

'I think once they were out the door I heard my dad come up the stairs and at that point I had my phone in my pocket - on me, behind me - that I had hidden there that they didn't know about.

'So when I thoughtthat I had heard them all leave and my dad ran up the stairs. I whipped out the phone and I called 911 but I still hadn't heard anything from my mom.

'All I could hear was my dad running on the street - moaning and making sounds. That's pretty much what I...'

The investigator interjected and asked her to elaborate further on what happened up until the police arrived.

Pan continued: 'I was just on the phone to the secretary or the operator and I begged her not to leave me alone. My dad was outside and I was yelling at him but he wouldn't come in.

'I don't know if he could hear me. He didn't come in. I think he went to look for help. I didn't get to see my dad at all before I left the hospital just now.'

The final question on the tape from the cop was: 'How did you get free?'

To which, Pan responded: 'The cop came and he snipped the two strings off for me. I was out asking them for so long. They said they couldn't untie me until they knew how to properly untie the strings.'

What happened to Jennifer Pan?Where is she now?

Pan later admitted tohiring the men to kill both her parents.

However, she claimed that her relationship with her dad mended and she called the murder-suicide plot off and had nothing to do with what happened.

Police did not believe her story and she was ultimately charged.

Pan, 28, was convicted of first-degree murder as well as attempted murder in December 2014.

She was found guilty alongside boyfriend Wong and two thugs she hired to help carry out her plot - Crawford and Mylvaganam.

All four got life sentences with no chance of parole for 25 years on the murder conviction and life for attempted murder with the sentences to be served concurrently.

Judge Cary Boswell said at the time that he handed down the maximum sentence for attempted murder because Hann only survived the 'crime of terrifying violence' through sheer luck.

'Each of the offenders knew that he or she was involved in a murder plot,' and understood the 'abject immorality' of it, Boswell said.

Pan's family members did not attend the trial but both herfather and brother sent written statements.

Hann wrote: 'When I lost my wife, I lost my daughter at the same time. On the day Bich died, I feel I died too.'

He said he could no longer work and had been unable to return to the family home since the attack - adding that it was also impossible to sell the house because the murder case was so widely known.

'I hope my daughter Jennifer thinks about what happened to her family and can become a good, honest person someday,' he added.

Pan's brother Felix said the murders would follow him the rest of his life.

Carty was tried later but wasconvicted of conspiracy to commit murder after co-operating with the Crown and admitting to the plot. He was given 18 years.

Following his sentencing he was fatally stabbed in prison.