The David Attenborough -narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to counter AI fakery and assure viewers it is “authentic”, its producers have said.

Nearly a decade after Blue Planet II shone a light on plastic pollution, and 25 years since the first Blue Planet aired, the hit BBC series is returning with more animal behaviour and cutting-edge technology, including the world’s first underwater CCTV camera – dubbed “stonefish” cam.

Since the first Blue Planet, TVs and cameras have evolved to give viewers sharper, higher definition pictures. But the combination of the rise in AI and the extraordinary sequences and fantastical creatures captured by BBC Studios’ natural history unit for this series led producers to include what they called more “organic” footage and less polished shots, to show that the animals were not AI-generated.

‘No gen AI was used in this series. Not a single frame,’ said the BBC’s specialist factual commissioning head, Jack Bootle.…