Repositioning standardisation: artificial intelligence and the recentring of professional value in television audiovisual documentation

Abstract The expansion of artificial intelligence in archives, documentation systems and media archives has intensified a transformation that cannot be understood solely as technical innovation or task automation. In television audiovisual documentation, this shift is particularly visible because of the convergence of high production volumes, time pressure, continuous editorial reuse, descriptive granularity and multiplatform circulation. Drawing on a critical-conceptual approach supported by documentary analysis and based on a comparative reading of recent academic literature, broadcaster-sector studies, and professional and institutional documents, this article examines the loss of sufficiency of standardisation as the exclusive centre of professional documentary value. The argument advanced is that standardisation remains indispensable as an infrastructure of consistency, interoperability and retrievability, but that professional value increasingly tends to be recentred around documentary judgement, contextualisation, provenance and traceability, access mediation, and the critical governance of automation and AI.