BBC Boss Matt Brittin Says He Has Seen A ‘Doctor Who’ Episode Entirely Generated By AI: “It Was Pretty Good”

An artificial intelligence-generated episode of Doctor Who was “pretty good,” according to BBC Director General Matt Brittin.

Brittin, who used to run Google EMEA, revealed that somebody had recently sent him a 50-minute ep of the BBC’s long-running sci-fi franchise, which was completely AI-generated, and today he refused to slam it.

“Pretty good” was Brittin’s verdict of the ep of the show that has been running on the BBC for six decades and will return with a new creative team in a couple of years’ time. “I mean it’s not going to replace humans but we’ll come on to that,” he countered.

Speaking at the RTS London Convention, Brittin echoed Amazon international boss Kelly Day in throwing his weight behind the power of AI. Day just said AI “brings down costs meaning more stories can be made, more diverse voices can get heard and more creative risks get taken.”

“Everyone’s [now] got the ability to create content almost at the standard of a Hollywood studio,” he said. “In some cases it’s not perfect but look at what you can do and that’s changing all the time.

Brittin’s keynote with BBC presenter Kirsty Young came a few days after he said he would allow a programme to be made and presented by AI “within guardrails.”

Artificial intelligence aside, Brittin’s talk came at a seriously difficult time for the BBC.

Amid a mega £500M ($662M) savings drive that is leading to hundreds of layoffs, channel closures are expected as soon as later this week, with youth-skewing BBC Three understood to be in the firing line.

Possibly hinting at a BBC Three linear channel closure, he reiterated that “if you look at on-demand consumption versus live consumption [on some of our services], you ask yourself, ‘Is that the best way to spend a license fee pound?’.”

More generally, Brittin said he is “having conversations with people whose jobs are at risk on a daily basis” and he “doesn’t underestimate” the difficulty of the situation.

“We are here for the same reasons that everyone else is,” he added. “We have to do consolidation.”

Brittin was speaking at the RTS Convention after the head honchos at Amazon and before Channel 4 boss Priya Dogra.