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TV shows including The Pitt and a Game of Thrones spinoff have received age ratings in the UK after the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) deployed AI to help flag contentious scenes.
The BBFC developed a tool to identify content that triggers compliance issues, such as violence, nudity and bad language. The flagged scenes were then passed over to BBFC staff for human review.
The BBFC announced on Wednesday that the technology had made its debut, classifying the UK catalogue of HBO Max, the Netflix rival whose shows include the award-winning medical drama.
As a result, all the HBO Max titles were assigned BBFC age ratings – with The Pitt receiving a 15 rating and the Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms receiving an overall rating of 18, although most of its episodes were rated 15 – for the platform’s UK launch last month.
BBFC ratings range from U, which means content is suitable for all ages, to the adults-only rating of 18, which typically applies to content with scenes containing material such as strong sex and violence.
David Austin, the BBFC chief executive, said the AI tool had been built especially for HBO and described it as “a major step forward in how we support families to make safe and informed viewing decisions”.
“It helps direct the compliance officer to the right place to do their work, which is the most contentious moment. It does a lot of the heavy lifting,” he said.
Austin added that in initial testing the AI tool had been too cautious, at one point mistakenly flagging an on-screen splash of red paint as human blood.
“That’s why it’s always crucial for an expert compliance officer to make the final classifications,” said Austin.
The organisation awards ratings for film and DVD releases but streaming services are not required to submit their content to the BBFC, although Netflix, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video all use the BBFC system. Some longstanding HBO classics, such as The Sopranos and The Wire, have already been rated and assessed by BBFC employees without the help of AI but the organisation said the majority of HBO Max’s UK catalogue – including The Sympathizer and Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo – had been rated with the help of the technology.
The BBFC system, which is trained on the regulator’s guidelines, was fed the HBO Max content and produced a time-coded report that a human compliance officer then reviewed, watching and vetting the relevant scenes. The BBFC said the content vetted by the classification tool was not used for further AI model training or retraining.
The BBFC said it had completed the classification of HBO Max’s entire catalogue in six months, a process that normally would have required 1,570 working days – or more than four years – of viewing from a compliance officer. The organisation said the final age ratings and content advice remained the sole responsibility of BBFC staff.
