BBC Director-General Watched a ‘Pretty Good’ AI-Generated ‘Doctor Who’ Episode

BBC director-general Matt Brittin has revealed that he recently received a fully AI-generated, 50-minute episode of “Doctor Who” — and he thought it was “pretty good.”

“Somebody sent me a 50-minute episode of ‘Doctor Who’ that was AI-generated the other day. It’s pretty good,” Brittin said, speaking at the Royal Television Society conference in London. “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 offered no further details about the episode. He did not say whether it used existing actors or generated entirely new ones, nor who created it.

The comments came during an on-stage conversation with Kirsty Young at the convention, which Amazon is hosting this year under the theme “United in change, if not now when?” Brittin joined the BBC earlier this year after eighteen years at Google, and he used the appearance to reflect on his unusual path to the top of Britain’s public broadcaster.

He admitted he initially turned the job down. “They called me, and I said, ‘I can’t do the job, I’m not a program maker. I’m not a journalist,’” he told the audience of senior television producers, commissioners and executives.

“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 the room.

Brittin framed the AI-generated “Doctor Who” episode within a broader shift in who can make screen content. “Everyone’s got the ability in their hands — or six billion people have — to create content at the standard of a Hollywood studio,” he said.

His remarks stop short of any endorsement of AI replacing writers, actors or directors. The phrase “not going to replace humans” signals the line the BBC’s new leadership is drawing: AI-generated work may impress technically, but the corporation still sees human creators as irreplaceable.

AI has dominated the conversation at this year’s convention. At the opening, Prime Video international boss Kelly Day urged the industry to embrace the technology, saying, “AI doesn’t replace imagination, it amplifies it.”

The fact that a complete AI-generated episode of one of the BBC’s flagship dramas could land on the director-general’s desk — made without the corporation’s involvement, and judged “pretty good” by its own boss — points to the questions now facing broadcasters: who owns the characters, who is credited, and whether audiences will care who, or what, made the programme.