AI Takes Center Stage as British Film Board Utilizes Technology to Identify Offensive Language, Sexual Content, and Violence . Assigning an age rating to a film can prove surprisingly arduous, as it entails watching every film for objectionable content, from graphic violence to 10 hours of paint drying. The workload could potentially increase manifold with the rise of streaming video.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), responsible for classifying films in the UK, is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to lighten the load. A new partnership with Amazon’s cloud computing division aims to teach an AI model to identify and tag “content issues” such as bad language, dangerous behavior, sex, and violence. This approach saves time during the classification process of films and other video content.
The AI system does not replace the work of its professional compliance officers, British Film Board emphasizes. Additional officers have recently been hired. Instead, it streamlines the process, reducing the workload by up to 60%.
David Austin Statement
David Austin, the board’s chief executive, stated, “With the exponential growth of online content over the last few years, we’re investing in these new products and the development of scalable solutions to improve our service by making the guidance we provide even more useful to families. Although in its infancy, we’re confident that this project will bring added value to the wider industry by reducing the cost of classification in the future.”
Certain aspects of the classification system, such as identifying bad language, lend themselves well to automation. Recent advancements in machine vision technology have made categories like nudity more feasible to detect. However, some categories that the BBFC needs to address, such as dangerous behavior or sexual violence, prove more challenging to teach an AI system to identify.
The subsequent phase of the project will involve training AI systems to determine and assign international age ratings in conjunction with the tagging tool. Ultimately, the goal is for streaming services to obtain age ratings for their content across multiple territories simultaneously, with the aim of reducing the cost of classification in the future.