BBC Boss Watched a 50-Minute AI-Generated DOCTOR WHO Episode and Says It Was “Pretty Good”

AI just took a trip in the TARDIS, and apparently the results weren’t terrible. BBC director-general Matt Brittin revealed that someone recently sent him an entirely AI-generated, 50-minute episode ofDoctor Who. After watching it, Brittin came away with a surprisingly positive reaction, calling the episode “pretty good.”

Speaking with Kirsty Young at the Royal Television Society conference in London, Brittin talked about how rapidly generative AI is changing who can create professional-looking entertainment.

“Everyone’s got the ability in their hands — or six billion people have — to create content at the standard of a Hollywood studio,” said Brittin.

That’s when he brought up the AI-generated Doctor Who episode, saying: “Somebody sent me a 50-minute episode of Doctor Who that was AI-generated the other day. It’s pretty good.

“I mean, it’s not going to replace humans, and we’ll come on to that. So everyone’s a creator. Not all the creativity is bad.”

Brittin didn’t reveal who created the episode or explain exactly what he watched. We don’t know whether the AI production recreated existing Doctor Who actors, invented a new Doctor and companions, or cooked up something completely different.

Those details would certainly be interesting, especially considering Doctor Who has more than 60 years of characters, creatures, locations, and mythology for generative AI to pull from.

Brittin’s comments are also notable considering his background. He became BBC director-general earlier this year following an 18-year career at Google, and he admitted that he initially rejected the BBC job because he didn’t consider himself the obvious person to run the organization.

“They called me, and I said, ‘I can’t do the job, I’m not a program maker. I’m not a journalist.’” His perspective eventually changed. “And actually, I was persuaded that being an outsider, I might be able to do the job, but only with all of you,” he said, gesturing to an audience filled with senior television producers, commissioners, and executives.

Artificial intelligence has been one of the biggest subjects at this year’s Royal Television Society conference, hosted by Amazon under the theme “United in change, if not now when?”

Kelly Day, who heads international operations for Prime Video, also encouraged the television industry to work with the technology rather than ignore it, saying: “AI doesn’t replace imagination, it amplifies it.”

Whether audiences will eventually want to sit down and watch fully AI-generated episodes of their favorite shows is another question entirely.

Brittin isn’t suggesting AI is about to replace human writers, actors, directors, or production crews. What caught his attention was that an individual could already use these tools to create something resembling a complete television episode.