Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Content Creation

At History Hit we believe that using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance our content creates an important educational utility. We use it on free to access products, such as this website and our social media profiles, to enhance the user experience.

Some of our audience may prefer an audio or visual experience to written text. Our articles are written by professional human editors and then sometimes converted into video or audio files using AI tools. AI presented audio and video files are then edited by our company staff.

For video AI presentation, we use an application called Synthesia.io. We comply with their ethics policy and History Hit is a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative. We do not use video presented by AI on our subscription video on demand channel.

Diversity selection of AI presenters

We are conscious of ethical issues presented by our use of synthetic media, particularly regarding the diversity of presenting talent.

Using AI is not a solution to address the lack of diversity in real life presenting talent, but it does give us the ability to present our historical content with a greater range of identities than traditionally represented. We are however aware that use of AI could further limit the opportunities for people who have been traditionally marginalised. To address this and encourage further diversity in our content creation, including article writing and video production, 10% of all revenue generated from AI presented videos will be reinvested in a fund to encourage content creation by writers from underrepresented and marginalised backgrounds.

In selecting the AI presenters and narration we consider the ethnic diversity and gender balance of the United Kingdom. The statistics are available at Diversityuk.org and Gov.uk.

Our diversity policy is to publish AI presented videos in sets of 10, with a 50/50 gender split and 80% of the AI presenters being represented as white and 20% of the AI presenters will be represented from different ethnic groups based on UK census data. We also consider audience makeup of a specific article and subject matter when selecting the narration voice and ethnicity of an AI presenter of a specific video, which accompanies the article. However, this is always considered in the context of the 80% white and 20% of different ethnic group representation.

We predominantly use British accents on our AI generated videos, but there are some cases where we will use another English speaking nationality where appropriate (for instance, a US accent when the subject matter is about American history or the audience for an article is predominantly American).

The use of AI in content presentation is an emerging area. We will adapt our policy from time to time as we look to improve and raise our ambitions to create a more inclusive industry and better audience experience. We welcome feedback on the use of AI related to identity and representation at suggestions@historyhit.com.