AI at the BBC – an update

Today, we’ve announced a fantastic week of programming to help our audiences get to grips with AI. The BBC’s AI Unpacked Week will run from the 2-8 March and will bring together content across TV, BBC iPlayer, Radio, BBC Sounds and our website.

This covers three big themes:

• The big questions around AI -including a brilliant new documentary with Professor Hannah Fry and a special EastEnders storyline
• What AI means for you - including practical guides to using AI from Bitesize and how families can use AI safely at home
• AI and the future of work - including programming from BBC Panorama; our Radio 4 programme The Artificial Human; and a live event with the Science Museum.

You can read more about all our plans here: BBC set to launch AI Unpacked

To coincide with this, we’ve published updated research on how people use AI and their views on how, when and where this technology should and could be used.

This study, undertaken with IPSOS UK, builds on one conducted in 2023. We used the outcomes of the first study to help inform how we use AI at the BBC and some of the pilots that we’ve been conducting. But with the technology moving so quickly, we wanted to see how audience expectations have changed.

The key findings show:

• For many, AI is now a part of everyday life. One in three surveyed (35%) use it weekly - up from one in ten since 2023. And 60% of monthly users say their usage has increased in the last year.
• While younger audiences are the biggest users of AI, with 55% using it weekly; the biggest increase in use over the last year has been amongst those aged 55+ (a 250% increase) followed by those aged 45-54 (a 220% increase).
• As AI usage has grown, how people feel about has changed; people recognise the benefits of AI- saving time, cutting down admin, helping with learning and helping to unleash creativity, but at the same time there is also ongoing concern about AI chipping away at what makes us human.
• The use of AI in media remains a key concern. In areas like news, culture and storytelling, audiences expect a human touch and worry that if AI takes too strong a role, it could undermine trust, replace human creativity, and distort what’s real. In particular, AI remains highly contentious in news, fuelling fears of misinformation and loss of trust.

You can read the full report here: Generative AI and Audiences

In addition to this, we want to delve deeper into how people think AI will affect their lives – and how they feel about it.

That’s why, today we’re also announcing a collaboration on exciting new research into AI with the Accelerator Fellowship Programme of the Institute for Ethics In AI, part of the University of Oxford. The collaboration will look in detail at the critical issue of trust in AI. It will explore how young people use AI to make sense of the world around them; the extent to which they trust AI as a source of information and the issues and opportunities this creates. The findings will help shape how the BBC continues to support audiences across the UK to navigate AI.

Like all new technology, AI brings exciting possibilities but also challenges. Research like this will ensure the BBC continues to place our audiences’ needs at the heart of all our innovation with AI.

We continue to focus on deploying AI where it can add real value – and have expanded some of our early pilots. This includes our Style Assist tool, which we now use within some of our newsrooms across the UK. It helps journalists reformat stories from the Local Democracy Reporter Scheme; creating revised drafts of stories that adhere to BBC style and tone. All stories are reviewed by a senior BBC journalist and once approved, published on the BBC News website and app. Style Assist has started to help journalists reduce the time they spend reversioning LDRS stories.

We are expanding our My Club Daily pilot. It uses AI tools to create bespoke audio bulletins of the latest news for fans of football clubs. You can find out more here. After a successful first pilot we are now scaling this work to enable us to cover more clubs so more football fans can keep up with the action from their teams.

We are also exploring a new range of pilots. These include a small trial to see how we can use synthetic voice to make more BBC content available for those with accessibility needs.

Exciting times – and more to come. Thanks for reading.