British film board turns to AI to help spot bad language, sex and violence

Partnership with Amazon’s cloud computing division aims to save time and money classifying content

Assigning an age rating to a film can be a surprisingly arduous task: from graphic violence to 10 hours of paint drying, it’s hard work to watch every film for objectionable content. And that’s before the rise of streaming video potentially increases that workload many times over.

So it’s no surprise that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which classifies films in the UK, is turning to artificial intelligence to try to lighten the load. A new partnership with Amazon’s cloud computing division seeks to teach an AI model to identify and tag “content issues” such as bad language, dangerous behaviour, sex and violence, to save time when classifying a film or other video content.