Sense/Net performers can withdraw their recordings. They can’t find out what its crowd generator learned from them.
The Los Angeles studio lets performers pull a title from public access at any time. Performers who have done so say nobody could tell them whether footage of them was used to build Fullfield Ambient, the tool that fills its scenes with people who do not exist.
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LOS ANGELES — When she withdrew her title from Sense/Net last year, the performer said, the process was faster than she expected. She filled in a form, spoke to someone in performer relations, and within three weeks the first-person recording she had made in 2019 was gone from the studio’s catalogue. Her residuals were paid.
What she could not get was an answer to a second question: whether footage of her had been used to teach Fullfield Ambient how people walk.
Sense/Net, which makes immersive first-person recordings, introduced Ambient in 2023. It fills the world around a performer with generated passers-by, traffic and weather, so that no member of the public appears in a title without a release. The first version, the company said at the time, was trained on 1.9 million hours of first-person footage recorded by Sense/Net crews. The second, which since last April has been used on every new production, added “reference footage licensed from partners.”
The studio’s Consent Standard, in place since 2012, says it does not use a performer’s likeness, voice or body tracks to train its tools without a further consent. Since 2022, performers have been able to withdraw a released title from public access, which the company completes within 30 days.
The Overseen spoke to five performers who have recorded for Sense/Net, three of whom withdrew titles in 2024 or 2025. None could say whether they had given that further consent. Two said they had signed booking agreements on a tablet at the start of a capture day. All three who withdrew titles said they asked whether footage of them was in Ambient’s training library and received no answer specific to them.
In a statement, Sense/Net said no performer’s recordings had been used to train Ambient without consent and that withdrawing a title does not affect a performer’s other rights under the standard. It did not say how many performers have given consent for training, whether a withdrawal also removes footage from Ambient’s training library, or who its partners are.
The researcher who leads immersive media research at Frothly, a nonprofit research institute, spent ten years editing first-person recordings before joining it. “A performer can take a film back,” she said. “Nobody has yet shown me how you take your walk back out of a model that learned it.”