After a fierce backlash from fans in response to an announcement that AI-generated marketing copy would be used to promote upcoming “Doctor Who” media, the BBC quietly pulled the article touting those efforts from publication, leaving behind only a version of the page cached by Google as evidence of its existence — along with dozens of media reports that had quoted it.
The proposed program, according to the BBC, would have sent human-written headlines to push notifications, email, and in-site elements of the BBC website, but the copy contained in the bodies of these promotions would be generated by an LLM before being reviewed by humans, then test sampled out to users to determine which generated text was most effective. In addition, any AI-generated content was intended to be labeled as such. Nonetheless, the specter of any AI, no matter how supervised by humans, drew ire from the show’s large and passionate fanbase.
Fans took particular umbrage at the BBC’s claim that “‘Doctor Who’ lends itself thematically to AI.” Jesse Earl, a popular YouTube creator whose content focuses on science-fiction analysis, wrote on X, “The only way Doctor Who “thematically lends itself to AI” is if you’re aware that AI is the Cybermen –- a force trying to turn humans into simple mindless automatons single mindedly focused on turning others into mindless automatons…” Indeed, it seems that fans took these enemies to heart, and now they fear the dystopian possibilities of AI might mutate from science fiction to fact.
As of this writing, the BBC has not issued a follow-up statement regarding whether it still plans to use AI to promote “Doctor Who.”
