BBC announced its plans to bridge the powers of AI to journalism but denounced the data scraping process of AI companies without consent.
BBC Steps Towards Innovation
BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan discussed BBC's agenda to embrace new technologies such as AI. However, he also emphasized that the company's values will always be put first.
For the next few months, BBC will spearhead projects that will explore the use of generative AI. The projects will tackle how both BBC and AI can work to align their principles and values together. In addition, these projects will include journalism research and production, content discovery and archive, and personalized experiences.
"We believe Gen AI could provide a significant opportunity for the BBC to deepen and amplify our mission, enabling us to deliver more value to our audiences and to society," Talfan explained. Likewise, the company also promised that it will always prioritize talent and creativity citing that "no technology can replicate or replace human creativity."
BBC Safeguards Interests in Content Creation
While BBC openly supported AI-powered journalism, the broadcasting company remained firm on its stand to block out the scraping of BBC's data without the company's permission in order to train AI models.
BBC also called for a "more structured and sustainable approach" with the AI companies. As of writing, BBC has already taken steps to block web crawlers from OpenAI and Common Crawl from accessing BBC websites.
