The backlash was immediate, but it didn’t stop the BBC from using text generated by LLMs—and purportedly checked and copy-edited by a human before approval—in two marketing emails and mobile push notifications to advertise Doctor Who. But now, the corporation will stop the experimentation entirely after a wave of official complaints pushed them to offer a response to concerned audiences.
There’s nothing wrong with using an LLM to help you brainstorm or write a draft of something. But, the end product needs to be original, or it will be obvious. Tools are tools. You don’t stop copy editing because a computer can check your spelling and grammar, so you can’t let “AI” have the final say.
Their mistake was thinking AI would be a good thing to mention.
The best way to handle LLMs is to treat them like an intern. They’re useful and can get a lot of work done, but you need to double check their work.
AI just helps people with their heads up their asses make bigger mistakes faster
Well said.
BBC from using text generated by LLMs—and purportedly checked and copy-edited by a human before approval—in two marketing emails and mobile push notifications to advertise Doctor Who.
If they’re telling the truth then I don’t really get what’s wrong about that particular use
They weren’t just being cheap, they wanted to take human-written ads, auto-generate a million variations to send to individual people, then feed the ones that got clicks back in to train an AI clickbait generator. It also means the variations would be functionally watermarked so if anybody posted part of their text on Reddit or something the BBC could track who they sent that variation to.
Catgacating! Cartchy tuns!
A pasadise of sweet teats!
Given how bad the show’s writing has been for years and the declining in viewership in the Chibnell era, I’m actually surprised the BBC actually reversed course for once.
it’s crazy to me how bad the writing got. I just did a full rewatch to prep for Ncuti and it falls off a fucking cliff
I think that might make for interesting tv… one or more of the characters have dialog and action written by ai, and they have to deduce which are machines.
There is no mention of the quality of the marketing.
If it was made by an LLM, checked and it was at the quality of a human then what’s the issue?
Backlash over marketing…emails and texts? Y’all are trolling me, right?
People are so dumb they make me actually side with a fucking company. Luddites used to be fun to make fun of until people started actually listening to them.
The luddites were a labor movement. They fought for the rights of skilled workers to make a living.
Somehow you have fallen for the myth that machines make art.
Nah, they were lunatics who thought machines would replace them. Guess what, machines are everywhere and people still have a job.
Large-language models and computer tools in general are different to traditional machines, to be fair. For every spinning Jenny that you make, you need people to make it, people to service it, and people to operate it. These people all have jobs now. For every piece of software you make, you only need the one team who originally develops it. From then, it can be replicated endlessly with no extra human input. You also only need one set of people to “service” it (bug fixes, updates etc.) for the entire world, rather than one per factory or workplace
(Also, I disagree with your premise and your assumption that jobs = good, but you probably don’t want to hear about it and I don’t want to type an essay :) )
I can actually agree that jobs = good is not a good metric, it’s just what luddites thought and I didn’t want to be inaccurate.
The rest of your comment I disagree with, I work in software development and it’s simply not true. AI transforms the work people do, it doesn’t replace it, software in general doesn’t replace work, only transforms it.
