What is one thing you hate about lost media hunting?

I know this one has come up a lot and I think I mentioned it too, but it's a bit frustrating sometimes when your key lead has very little or no online presence or viable contact information. If there is someone who knows them, it's anticipating a response that will likely never come.

A few years ago, I was trying to get in touch with Michael Mfume, the director of Ax'Em to get confirmation about the status of the original cut of the film and if it exists (and the reviews from those who claim to have seen it theatrically in Baltimore are legit) where it is now. It would be asking him to remember something that happened well over 30 years ago and chances are he probably wouldn't have a copy of it now. Since he has no social media that I could find back then, the closest shot I had was someone who worked with him on a documentary back in the 2000s and the two apparently kept in touch with one another as of 2-5 years prior to me messaging him.

Needless to say, I got no response and I got nothing back from the distributor when I tried to reach out on Linkedin.

I recently encountered this problem with a dude who used to be very active in a sports VHS community. He used to sell VHS tapes individually back in 2013. Unfortunately, he has shut his website down with a message of "I don't want to do this anymore" with no way of contacting him. While I respect that (he is fairly old and perhaps is experiencing health issues), it is a little frustrating knowing a huge lead is gone. The good news is that he's been interviewed in podcasts and such, but that's a stretch.

I don’t know if this was already said, but when they use AI in order to recreate the lost media everyone is looking for. While it can create an idea of the media it can also lead to misleadings, like when people made AI extended versions of EKT and SOME people genuinely thought the AI versions were the real thing

AI will never be a reliable source for finding media, EVER. Most AI are incompetent at that, heck some AI are incompetent at finding Waldo.

As someone who is against the use of AI even for a LOT of things, yes I will question it. Perhaps AI can do some jobs fine, but like the only ones I can think of are for shopping registers so to speak & even then, there will still need to be SOME sense of instructions on hand for it to follow so that the AI doesn't get things wrong.

I would say that ChatGPT is useful when providing very general advice for people who haven't ever done a lost media search. Granted most of that stuff is covered by our own guideline book, but having a chat assistant to go over general points helps.

Of course, I would never rely on AI tools to "find" lost media. That seems far to specific and out of scope for something like say ChatGPT. Let's give a hypothetical example - how would it be able to find "About Dressy Sally" aka Clockman based on the details we give it? Like would it look at websites, databases, etc?

Well, my biggest pet peeve is overconfident newer members of the community (likely children) and the antics they get up to, but ultimately I am glad that the Lost Media community is growing and the result of increased popularity is a net positive.

On the subject of ChatGPT: I am hoping and praying that people collectively gain a better understanding of what it actually is. A large language model. A text generator. As Google's search results have recently shown, it is absolutely zero percent useful as a source of factual information. And everyone expected that!