Natural history programming’s need to innovate has always put it at the forefront of modern technology. But how are the genre’s filmmakers and commissioners reacting to the advances in AI and what do they think it holds for the future?

Snort if you like, but Miki Mistrati says his new one-hour documentary If Pigs Could Talk is going to “kick off” when it launches to the international market at Mipcom this week.

Part of Seven.One Studios International’s slate of shows, the documentary special, produced by Denmark’s Snowman Productions for Germany’s ARD and NDR, Denmark’s DR, Switzerland’s RTS, Norway’s NRK and Sweden’s SVT, features not only pigs as the main protagonists but advanced AI technology.

“We’re giving the voice to the pigs – literally – and the AI is used to understand their communication and behaviour. In this way, I’m pushing the boundaries of traditional nature storytelling,” says Mistrati.

The multi-award-winning director and executive producer, whose previous work includes Mars Exposed (CBS News), The Chocolate War, Cadbury Exposed (Channel 4) and Stacey Dooley: Face to Face with the Bounty Hunters (BBC), would not describe himself as a nature documentary maker in the traditional sense – and he admits to being a novice at AI too.

But what appears to have set him apart from his peers, in this case, is that he spotted a compelling subject for the screen from a piece of AI research that others saw as only an interesting news story.

“I understood from the very beginning that this would be a film about artificial intelligence, because that would be a really important part of my narrative,” says Mistrati. “I could have chosen to just get all the results, but for me, it was much more important to get the viewers, the public, to understand what artificial intelligence and machine learning is about and what we can use it for.”

So is Mistrati’s AI-based nature doc the first of many that threaten to upend the natural history genre?

The likely answer to that is no – not yet anyway. For one thing, while AI is at the heart of Mistrati’s film, it didn’t help reduce the months of work and significant budget needed to allow the filmmaker to create a documentary set in the real world of pig farming. (In the original AI study, the data was taken from the more sterile environment of specially designed test centres.)

Moreover, according to David Allen, MD of Passion Planet, fascinating as this one-off documentary is, the AI science behind If Pigs Could Talk is part of “the next level of science research that we’re all over all the time, whether it’s AI-driven or the latest satellite.”

To underscore his point, Allen points to three award-winning “landmark series” Passion Pictures has been behind that have cutting-edge science at their core.

These include the 2015 series Earth: A New Wild for PBS and National Geographic, which used advanced techniques to show the world’s plains, mountains and oceans; 2020’s H2O: The Molecule That Made Us for PBS and BBC Four, which featured “scientists, natural history and geology” to tell the human story through our relationship with water; and 2023’s Evolution Earth, produced with PBS, Arte and Love Nature, which relied heavily on science to show how animals migrate and adapt their behaviour to keep pace “with a planet changing at super speed.”

Allen says Passion is currently working on a science-based nature documentary for Blue Ant exploring “the longest coastline on earth” and how it is changing due to climate change, and has another in development about “our relationship with food and the environment.”

At Wildbear Entertainment in New Zealand, executive producer and general manager Craig Meade says devouring science papers is the order of the day for him and his colleagues when “looking for an edge that will let us tell a new story.” But he sees more opportunities to apply AI “outside of nature than I see inside of nature.”

Meade is a writer and producer of international science and natural history TV content, including Big Ice, a four-part series capturing the behavioural changes in polar wildlife in response to climate change, and the blue-chip nature series Big Pacific. He is currently working in the world of archaeology and ancient history, where “they’re finding ruins with satellite imagery and AI is scanning it, looking for rectilinear shapes.”

He believes these kinds of findings are more accessible over a longer series than decoding the language of whales, for example. “You’d get away with an hour, but humanity, by the time it’s seen 20 minutes of it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. What else is on?’ Not to be negative, but that’s the reality of life,” he says.

Dr Martha Holmes, chief creative officer of natural history and adventure at ITV Studios-owned Plimsoll, is excited by the opportunities presented by AI to decode animal language, and points to a scientific study of bats that has unearthed extraordinarily complex communication patterns within this community of nocturnal creatures. “Through AI, they found out all sorts of things – that bats talk to each other differently depending on the sexes, that female bats use baby speak to baby bats. It’s just extraordinary,” she says.

Plimsoll is the producer of shows including A Real Bug’s Life for National Geographic, which was recently commissioned for a second season and is available on Disney+. Described by its makers as “the most ambitious and innovative natural history series to ever be made,” the show, nevertheless, barely involved AI. In fact, Holmes says that apart from using the technology “a little bit in development to tweak pictures and things,” Plimsoll does not use the tech in any of its programming.

“My concern with natural history docs and wildlife shows is the authenticity, and that it’s believable and it’s true,” says the exec. “I don’t think we should blur those lines between what’s real and what’s not because I think people have to trust us.”

Like Plimsoll, the Natural History Unit (NHU) at BBC Studios, does not use AI to create its programming, but it does use it as it a tool to deal with large data sets, such as searching through thousands and thousands of clips. On example is Wing Watch, an AI-enhanced interactive wildlife stream that is an offshoot of the BBC’s Winterwatch programme.

Jonny Keeling, head of the NHU, explains: “AI is looking through all the footage that we have from all the cameras on bird boxes or on bird feeders, and it can identify which species there are. So as an audience member, you could be watching, say, on social media and you could request to just see the sparrows or just see the blackbirds. And it will identify which is the blackbird versus the sparrow and then give you all the feeds for all or all the images of what the blackbird has done. So you don’t have to watch all of it.”

Another way it can be used, says Keeling, is with live cameras where a live feed may be recording unnatural sounds such as a car engine. “We want the sounds of animals, we want an animal show, so it can help us to switch away from those live feeds,” he says, adding that when it comes to making shows “we still use the creativity of fantastic programme makers.”

So what about the commissioners? What is their position on AI?

Love Nature, which runs wildlife and nature linear and streaming channels around the world, follows the same policy on AI set out by its parent company, Blue Ant Media, according to Alison Barrat, its senior VP and head of content. “Blue Ant has a policy, which is that if we’re using AI, it should be as a tool rather than to replace talent. So our guiding principle is ‘tools over talent,’” she explains.

But while AI may not pose a threat to the world of the nature doc right now, there’s no question it is an issue that is pre-occupying a sector that requires heaps of money to produce the blue-chip, high-end wildlife series we’ve come to expect from the likes of the BBC, Netflix and Disney.

Keith Scholey is co-CEO and director at Silverback Films, producer of successful natural history films and series including Wild Isles (BBC), Our Planet and Our Planet II (Netflix) and David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (Netflix). He remembers warning the industry over 20 years ago, when the landmark series Walking with Dinosaurs was released, that one day the cost of recreating wildlife through animation would cost less than capturing it for real.

“We are at that moment,” he says. “I just saw something made by a graphics company that made me shudder. They’d gone to the Natural History Museum in London, filmed all of these stuffed animals on an iPhone and then put it through an AI programme. All those stuffed animals started to come to life and move. They looked really real, and this had taken them a couple of hours to make.”

Describing this as “the dark side of AI,” Scholey believes that “in two years’ time you’ll be able to create any wildlife sequence you want through AI that will look real. But the difference is that the sequence can be whatever you want. And it’ll be cheaper than going out and filming it.

“We’re going to hit this point with natural history and we’re going to have to make sure we’ve thought it through very, very carefully to make sure it has enough value for broadcasters to pay for it,” he says.

Plimsoll’s Holmes agrees, saying: “Everybody in our industry is thinking somebody could make an extraordinarily compelling film that’s completely made with a fake AI. For me – and I’m talking personally now – we have to stick on the side of truth and rigorous science and not tip over into fantasy.”

For Mistrati, the opportunities offered by AI leave him more optimistic than pessimistic about its applications, and he has high hopes about where If Pigs Could Talk can take us in the new world of communication between man and beast.

“Now we have a high, 96% accuracy of what pigs are telling us, imagine if we could translate human language into pig language? Can you say something in our language into your phone that would turn into a grunt? That opens us up to the possibility of understanding animals across the world. We will be Dr Doolittle, just in real life,” he says.

Natural history programming’s need to innovate has always put it at the forefront of modern technology. But how are the genre’s filmmakers and commissioners reacting to the advances in AI and what do they think it holds for the future?

Snort if you like, but Miki Mistrati says his new one-hour documentary If Pigs Could Talk is going to “kick off” when it launches to the international market at Mipcom this week.

Part of Seven.One Studios International’s slate of shows, the documentary special, produced by Denmark’s Snowman Productions for Germany’s ARD and NDR, Denmark’s DR, Switzerland’s RTS, Norway’s NRK and Sweden’s SVT, features not only pigs as the main protagonists but advanced AI technology.
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