During a speech to the Royal Television Society, BBC director-general Tim Davie said the BBC intends to “proactively” deploy artificial intelligence but will do so “on our terms”.
Davie added that the corporation’s use of AI will “never compromise creative control”, but it intends to launch tools that help the broadcaster “build relevance”.
“We are now working with a number of major tech companies on BBC-specific pilots [and] we will be deploying the most promising ones in coming months,” he added.
Davie stated that the broadcaster’s ambition for AI is “significant”, adding that it intends to employ fact-checking across sources, as well as reformatting technology to take the BBC’s best content across media and languages.
“Supporting this, we are developing unique ethical algorithms that dramatically increase personalisation but are not simply driven by the narrowing of an individual’s recommendations,” said Davie.
As part of his speech, the director-general also revealed the broadcaster intends to continue moving “significant amounts” of content production, editorial leadership, and decision-making, away from London. More than 60 per cent of TV production will be outside London by 2026, he added.
Addressing issues around the BBC’s funding, Davie revealed the broadcaster intends to move its content spend “towards streaming value and away from broadcast-only output”.
“We will deliver more value for younger audiences by focusing all our commissioning, marketing and social media activity on BBC iPlayer rather than through BBC Three’s linear channel.”
