Slipping ratings, a revolving door of lead actors, and nothing quite hitting like that old school David Tennant run. It’s dog days for “Doctor Who” fans, whose lives aren’t likely to be made any better by the prospect of AI creeping into the show.
While speaking at the Royal Television Society conference in London, BBC director Matt Brittin extolled the amazing efficiency of using AI to crank out footage — before raising the possibility of using it on one of the British broadcaster’s most beloved series.
“Everyone’s got the ability in their hands — or six billion people have — to create content at the standard of a Hollywood studio,” Brittin said, as quoted by Variety.
“Somebody sent me a 50-minute episode of ‘Doctor Who’ that was AI-generated the other day. It’s pretty good,” he continued. “I mean, it’s not going to replace humans, and we’ll come on to that. So everyone’s a creator.”
Brittin, it’s worth noting, was president of Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations at Google — a major purveyor of AI tech — before joining the BBC.
You have to wonder what Brittin’s idea of “pretty good” is. Attempts at using AI to crank out a movie or short film have invariably produced low grade slop. While the tech can sometimes create realistic images or scenes in isolation, cobbling together disparate, screensaver-worthy images together doesn’t constitute an episode of hit television.
There’s a reason that filmmakers and other artists have turned their noses up at AI, along with the small matter of the tech threatening to drive them out of their jobs, and the fact that it was trained on their artwork and performances without permission. The ones that do use it get are often lampooned as hacks, has-beens or sellouts.
And for “Doctor Who,” a show that’s sputtering along on its 41st season and is currently on hiatus as it searches for new ideas, the last thing it needs at this creatively critical impasse is the injection of a tool that recycles old ideas without direction and rigidly conforms to bland aesthetics.
Though Brittin insisted that AI isn’t going to “replace humans,” he could barely disguise his belief that it soon will.
“Not all the creativity is bad,” he said of AI. “In some cases it’s not perfect but look at what you can do and that’s changing all the time,” he added, per Deadline.
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