The Director General of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has called on the European Union to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) and take steps to better ensure that public broadcaster content does not get sidelined on commercial platforms.
Noel Curran, the EBU’s Director General, made the appeal in a joint op-ed with Thibaut Bruttin, Director General of Reporters Without Borders. They emphasized that AI-assisted search poses a serious risk to the accessibility of reliable news and information. The EBU is the organization that represents public broadcasters across Europe.
This call for AI guardrails follows a report the EBU compiled in collaboration with the BBC, which examined how AI systems like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity respond to questions about news and current affairs. The findings were striking: nearly 50% of AI-generated answers contained at least one significant issue. A third of the responses had problems with sourcing, and one in five suffered from what the EBU called “major accuracy issues,” including hallucinated or outdated information.
It is worth noting that the BBC is currently facing a crisis after editing controversies surrounding a current affairs program about former U.S. President Donald Trump. This situation has led to the resignation of the BBC’s head of news and Director General, alongside threats of legal action by President Trump against the UK public broadcaster. However, both the report and the op-ed were published before these recent developments.
“Access to news is shifting once again with the rise of AI assistants,” Curran and Bruttin write in their piece titled *No Facts? No Freedom.* They acknowledge that while AI offers exciting opportunities for innovation, AI-assisted search has a troubling potential to undermine audiences’ access to accurate information.
The duo also urge governments within the European Union to take responsibility for ensuring that public broadcaster content remains sufficiently visible on connected devices. They highlight the dominance of global players across connected TVs, remote controls, and voice assistants.
“Pre-programmed buttons and apps promoting the same international streaming giants reveal how commercial deals shape what European audiences watch and hear,” Curran and Bruttin note.
Both experts argue that the twin threats of AI compromising access to verified information and public broadcaster content being marginalized jeopardize democratic societies. They state, “Free and democratic societies depend on a shared foundation of verifiable facts. When commercial deals, profit-driven algorithms, and unchecked AI systems dictate what citizens see, believe, and share, that foundation crumbles.”
Their call for AI regulation and greater prominence of public broadcaster content comes ahead of an upcoming European Commission initiative. The Commission is set to present its so-called “European Democracy Shield,” a strategy aimed at countering external disinformation and foreign interference in European democracy by authoritarian regimes and other adversaries.
https://deadline.com/2025/11/ebu-european-broadcasting-ai-assisted-search-regulation-bbc-1236613774/
