Lab members Anna Schjøtt Hansen and Hannes Cools are involved in two complementing research projects in collaboration with the BBC. The first project focussed on transparency practices, while the second focussed on decision-making practices around AI development and use at the broadcaster. The aim of this project is to contribute to the understanding and practice of responsible AI at the BBC, which contributes to the overarching goal of the AI, Media and Democracy Lab by providing valuable insights that can help the media sector in their efforts to use and develop AI responsibly.
The first project is titled ‘Towards Responsible Recommender Systems at BBC?’ and was aimed at further evaluating how transparency is understood, how it is translated in practice across teams, and what its main challenges are. The following overarching research question (RQ) was therefore formulated: How can the MLEP transparency principles at BBC be effectively translated and operationalized across teams?
The second project is titled ‘Exploring AI design processes and decisions as moments of responsible intervention’ and aims to explore this gap in the context of the BBC via an ethnographic enquiry into the ways in which responsible decision-making unfolds in practice – an area of study that currently remains underexplored. To do so, the project follows and observes ongoing projects in the ‘Personalisation Team’ with the aim to explore the overarching question of: How could responsible AI practices guided by the MLEP principles or editorial values be better integrated into the design process of AI systems within the BBC?
The project has been disseminated at:
- A BBC event: ‘Responsible AI at the BBC: Constructing collaborative research agendas’ (February 19, 2024).
- Presentation Media City Bergen: ‘Unraveling the Principles-to-Practices Gap of Transparency and Explainability at the BBC’ (March 13, 2024).
- Presentation during an internal meeting with stakeholders at the BBC (March 21, online).
- Paper presented at EASST 4S conference titled ‘Abstracting to ‘see’ the particularities: visualization tools as techniques of knowing AI systems in the making’ (July 15-19, Amsterdam).
- Manuscript under review (New Media and Society) with the title: ‘Navigating the Responsible AI Landscape: Unraveling the Principles-to-Practices Gap of Transparency and Explainability at the BBC’.
- Will be presented at the ECREA conference in the panel ‘News automation: From democratic principles to socio-material practices’ (September 27, Ljubljana).
More information on this project will follow.
Researchers
