The development and adoption of AI across the broadcast industry is exciting for some and frankly terrifying for others. Kevin Emmott asks the producers of the Virtually Parkinson podcast how its AI creation not only aims to maintain ethical integrity but advocates responsible development across the creative sector
Nothing splits opinion like AI, especially when the AI in question is one of Britain’s best-loved broadcasters. Announced in late 2024, the Virtually Parkinson podcast was divisive from the start. Produced by Deep Fusion Films, commissioned by Night Train Digital, and with Michael Parkinson’s son Mike at the centre of the production team, the AI-powered podcast has generated unprecedented coverage and sparked emotional debate.
The series of eight live and unscripted conversations with an AI version of Sir Michael Parkinson opened on January 13th with American singer-songwriter Jason Derulo, but the furore surrounding the project started months before the show was even recorded. And when the episode finally aired, things didn’t get much better, with a comments section described by Virtually Parkinson’s producer and Deep Fusion Films co-founder Benjamin Field as “where love goes to die.”
“A lot of that was from people not paying attention to what was going on,” says Field. “It was people reacting to the memory of Sir Michael Parkinson and the idea of what they think is going on in their own heads; and that is totally fair.”
He’s not wrong: under the surface, there’s a lot going on, and Virtually Parkinson isn’t simply about an AI Michael Parkinson interviewing interesting people. It can be taken on that level, and every interview can be treated as such, but the reality is much more nuanced. Virtually Parkinson is a window into the development of AI and acts as a work in progress in real-time, an exploration of how AI can be adopted in a responsible, transparent and – above all – commercially viable way.
Meat Puppets
The founders of Deep Fusion are no strangers to controversy. Field first met business partner Jamie Anderson over “a disappointing curry” in 2018 at Mipcom in Cannes, and within months the pair were working on a documentary about Anderson’s father. Produced by the Format Factory and Anderson Entertainment (and the cover story in TVBEurope’s November 2021 issue!), Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted matched archive audio recordings of sci-fi legend Gerry Anderson with AI-generated deepfake footage of him to bring the audio to life. While pushing the boundaries of filmmaking, the exercise laid the foundations of everything the duo have created since.
“Very early on in that discussion, we agreed that if we were going to do this, we couldn’t change Dad’s words,” says Anderson. “Because we were creating visuals that never existed, it had to be rooted and grounded in what is true and authentic and real. I really like that angle, and that sealed the deal for me in terms of working with Ben.
“But we were still met with an audience reaction that was mixed at best. We were accused of ghoulish activity and digital meat puppetry, but the output was sufficiently strong that both one of Dad’s long-time colleagues and my sister thought the deepfake footage was real. It was a pretty good outcome.”
Keeping it real
Following the broadcast of A Life Uncharted, Field became the face of AI and media pretty much overnight.
“I was approached by Pact and Equity and spent around 18 months helping put together a framework for the ethical, responsible and legal use of AI in media,” says Field. “That is when we set up Deep Fusion; if we’ve written all the policy, then we should know how to create content that adheres to those policies.”
Virtually Parkinson made this a reality and the company’s transparent approach encouraged Mike Parkinson Jr to ask if it could create something where his Dad introduced his old archive clips and talked about them.
“I’ve been very outspoken about people who have used AI to put words in somebody’s mouth, so that felt hypocritical,” says Field. “At the time we were building an interactive AI model, which for an interviewee is an interesting experience because they don’t get micro-expressions, visual cues or any sign that there is an understanding of what is being said, and as a team, we thought it would be interesting to explore that. And Virtual Parkinson was born.
“In the early stages of development we had various creative conversations about the format and decided if a question could have been formulated differently, we could adapt the model. But the point is to explore the tech and so we have to be honest about it; trust with our audience is key. Without it your audience doesn’t know what to believe, and if you’re working in a factual space and you’re lying to them, what’s the point? We have to be honest about the process and be clear that this is a relationship between the AI, the producers, the guest, and the audience.”
Behind the curtain
While a lot of work was done to make it sound like Parkinson – and it does, right down to his gentle Yorkshire lilt and anecdotal delivery – it’s not the voice that makes Virtually Parkinson such a groundbreaking project. “The voice is only as good as we think it can be subjectively, but the evolution of the AI model is the most important bit,” says Anderson. “It’s about the content of the conversation and the context in which the AI approaches and then responds to it. With the AI we’re aiming to strike a balance between the best qualities of a human interviewer and the unstructured approach that Virtually Parkinson has.”
The podcast’s interview format develops this by examining what the AI deems as interesting and how it behaves with a live guest, followed by a debrief with the whole production team that drills down not only into the application of the technology, but specifically where it didn’t work, openly discussing its failings in post-interview podcasts. While Field admits that the idea of creating a custom GPT is not particularly revolutionary, it is Deep Fusion’s capacity to openly adapt the model through its proprietary Squawk software that gets the most buy-in from listeners.
“Christian Darkin is our head of creative AI and the Squawk software he built allows various APIs to talk to each other in one piece of software,” says Field. “All the APIs are interchangeable, which gives us the ability to work with a wide variety of options to adapt whatever we need to deliver the best result. We’re all learning at the same time and we are on the same journey as our listeners; if we were lying or manipulating the interviews in some way, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting.”
Along for the ride
The stats back this up. While the interviews get solid numbers, most people skip through to the debriefs and the comments section has much more love. This transparency also gives the project a legitimacy beyond the AI interview format, and according to Field is essential for the development of AI as a whole.
In fact, it is a call to arms for the entire UK creative sector. “At the moment there is so much public misconception around AI that in order for it to be adopted and seamlessly integrated there needs to be more transparency around production, whether that’s around the software, the algorithms are the licensing of the training data,” he says. “The UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan recommends that we should be making data no more difficult to obtain than it is in the EU, but the EU has an opt-out plan. There is no opt out plan that works for creatives; how are we ever going to know who is training what on our data? It’s completely unworkable.”
“The UK creative sector has an opportunity to be at the forefront of ethical AI. Right now, it feels like it isn’t doing that, and that seems like a wasted opportunity. We undertook a tour of US studios following the writer’s strike and we were told that while they can’t use AI in production, because of the legislation and copyright protections we have in place in the UK, they could buy it from us. The UK creative sector is the second largest sector in the UK, and it seems we’re now looking to decimate that in order to appease the tech companies; it’s a long-term loss for the creative sector and all for a short-term win elsewhere. It’s the reason why truth and transparency has to be front and centre of AI development. Unethical and unlicensed data scraping is not a requirement to make a successful business; we’ve proven with Virtually Parkinson that licensing and transparency definitely has a commercial benefit.”
However you feel about the format, Virtually Parkinson is asking all the right questions about the adoption of AI and how it should be ethically developed across the broadcast industry. And it feels totally appropriate that it is Sir Michael Parkinson’s voice that is asking those questions.
This article originally appeared in the April issue of TVBEurope, available to download here.
