BBC to explore generative AI in journalism but will block OpenAI web crawler

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has said it will explore the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism but will not replace human talent or allow OpenAI to scrape its content.

A blog post by Rhodri Talfan Davies, BBC’s Director of Nations, said on Thursday that BBC was looking to explore how generative AI could help both journalists and news readers. In the coming months, the news company plans to try out generative AI in areas such as news reporting and production, discovering content, maintaining archives, and creating personalised experiences.

OpenAI defends alleged use of novels in training data sets for “innovation”

However, BBC also acknowledged the issues caused by the new technology which exploded in popularity this year due to chatbots like ChatGPT and text-to-image generators like Midjourney. These challenges included copyright problems, misinformation, potential bias, and legal or ethical risks.

“For example, we do not believe the current ‘scraping’ of BBC data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the public interest and we want to agree a more structured and sustainable approach with technology companies. That’s why we have taken steps to prevent web crawlers like those from Open AI and Common Crawl from accessing BBC websites,” said BBC in the post.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

The news company promised to act in the public interest when adopting AI and said it will ensure transparency. It plans to publicly identify AI-powered content and use humans to monitor processes involving generative AI. BBC also said it would not replace human talent.

“We will always prioritise talent and creativity - No technology can replicate or replace human creativity. We will always prioritise and prize authentic, human storytelling by reporters, writers and broadcasters who are the best in their fields. We will work with them to explore how they could use Generative AI to help them push new boundaries,” said BBC in the blog post.