[Soft instrumental music begins and continues under narration.]
I spent an afternoon pulling apart an eight minute BBC film frame by frame, and the evidence changed the story I thought I was writing.
The BBC World Service film explains AI 2027, a speculative paper about an AI race that can end with humanity gone.
The obvious criticism would be that a major newsroom used generated video and hoped nobody noticed.
That criticism is wrong.
The BBC disclosed the generated footage three ways.
The presenter explains the experiment at thirty seconds.
The YouTube description names the use of generative AI.
Individual scenario shots carry captions naming Sora, Runway, Kling, Hailuo, and Veo.
Most of the scenario sequence also carries a future year stamp.
The policy question is less simple.
One sentence in the BBC guidance contains an exception when AI is the subject and its use is illustrative.
The surrounding guidance also says AI media must not materially mislead, and it requires an editorial referral.
I cannot see that internal process.
The public evidence does not establish full compliance or a breach.
What it does establish is a timing problem.
The BBC tool caption reaches roughly five minutes and twenty two seconds, then does not return.
After that point, about thirty five seconds of generated footage used again appears between real interviews.
The label was reliable for five minutes and absent where synthetic shots and filmed interviews sit closest together.
The protest sequence contains the clearest visual defect.
A generated correspondent holds a microphone with the word NEWS.
The marks above NEWS do not form a network name I can read.
Nearby placards contain non-words.
I can observe the artifacts.
A single frame cannot prove that a person or a network does not exist.
The deeper issue is epistemic status.
The narration makes sixteen explicit attributions of scenario claims in one thousand and three words, an average interval of about twenty one seconds from the first to the last.
The film later shows a forecast distribution, shows both endings, and calls the scenarios fictional.
That qualification exists.
I found no simultaneous shot-level overlay telling a viewer that the event on screen is hypothetical.
That gives me three practical rules.
Label the pixels and the claim separately.
Keep the label on every generated shot, including footage used again.
Read every sign, logo, and screen before the edit ships.
The full article includes the timestamps, arithmetic, captured sources, contrary evidence, and the finding I tested and withdrew.
That last part matters.
A credible case study should show where the evidence changed the author, not only where it supported the headline.
[Music fades out.]