As it promotes the newest season of its long-running popular show Doctor Who, the BBC learns that that is one fan base that is not to be messed with. The broadcaster was forced to roll back its plans to use artificial intelligence to craft its promotional content for the show after some serious backlash.
The BBC first announced its plans to use AI to promote the series earlier this month, with Head of Media Inventory David Housden saying, “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. There’s a rich variety of content in the Whoniverse collection on iPlayer to test and learn with, and Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI, which is a bonus.”
Fans immediately let the company know they were not happy with this decision, but the BBC went ahead with a trial to produce two marketing emails and mobile push notifications using a GenAI model. The content was checked and edited by a human team member before it was released. Fans, still unhappy with the use of AI, responded by filing official complaints. The BBC got the message and issued a statement saying it has “no plans to do this again to promote Doctor Who.”
