The UK’s British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is working with Amazon Web Services to investigate how it can use artificial intelligence solutions in content classification.
The project is using AWS’s cloud services that support AI technologies, and complements the BBFC’s existing classification and compliance processes.
Partly funded by Innovate UK, the BBFC is developing a prototype for a bespoke AI tool that will identify and tag content issues, and is working with the AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab and AWS Professional Services teams.
AWS has provided its machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to develop the multimodal tool.
During the alpha testing phase, the tool is currently achieving 80 per cent accuracy when identifying content issues, said the BBFC. Initial statistics also highlight the potential for the tool to bring large-scale efficiencies to compliance teams by delivering possible time-savings of 60 per cent.
Additionally, the BBFC is building a separate tool to determine and assign international age ratings, which can be used in conjunction with the tagging tool. The scalable solution aims to enable distributors and streaming services to obtain age ratings and content advice for multiple territories in a streamlined and cost-effective way. Both of these tools share the ultimate goal of driving down the cost of classification in the future, said the BBFC.
Both tools are being employed alongside the BBFC’s human compliance officers.
“With the exponential growth of online content over the last few years, we’re investing in these new products and the development of scalable solutions to improve our service by making the guidance we provide even more useful to families,” said David Austin, chief executive of the BBFC.
“Although in its infancy, we’re confident that this project will bring added value to the wider industry by bringing down the cost of classification in the future. We’re pleased to be working with AWS to help make this a reality.”
