BBC Will Stop Using AI For ‘Doctor Who’ Promotion After Receiving Complaints

The BBC has “no plans” to use AI again to promote Doctor Who after receiving complaints from viewers.

The BBC’s marketing teams used the tech “as part of a small trial” to help draft some text for two promotional emails and mobile notifications, according to its complaints website, which was intended to highlight Doctor Who programming on the BBC.

But the corporation received complaints over the reports that it was using generative AI, it added.

“We followed all BBC editorial compliance processes and the final text was verified and signed-off by a member of the marketing team before it was sent,” the BBC said. “We have no plans to do this again to promote Doctor Who.”

The BBC didn’t say how many complaints it received but they are likely to be quite few in number.

The decision to stop promoting via generative AI represents a u-turn from BBC Head of Media Inventory David Housden’s attitude to the technology when the marketing push was announced earlier this month.

Housden had said that “generative AI offers a great opportunity to speed up making the extra assets to get more experiments live for more content that we are trying to promote,” and didn’t mention that this would be the only time the BBC uses the technology for Doctor Who promotion.

AI has been a hot button topic in the TV industry of late. In the UK, where Doctor Who is made, producer trade body Pact recently issued principles for the use of AI in UK production.

Over the weekend, OpenAI headed to Hollywood to show the potential of its revolutionary Sora software to studios. The topic also generated much chatter at last week’s Series Mania confab.

Doctor Who will launch in May on the BBC and, for the first time, Disney+. A new trailer was unveiled last week.