New Showrunner AI shows how animators and writers will soon be obsolete

quote:

---

Fable, a San Francisco startup running a big project dubbed The Simulation, has released Showrunner AI technology, dubbed SHOW-1, which can generate new episodes of TV shows with you as the star.

It’s another big step for generative AI, which has been on a tear for the last six months. And the timing is interesting, considering both writers and actors are on strike in Hollywood.

The company, which under Fable won two Emmys and a Peabody award, has released a research paper outlining the potential of its AI Showrunner Agents, which can write, produce, direct, cast, edit, voice, and animate episodes of TV.

“Essentially, what the AI Showrunner does is create episodes of South Park for you. All of this is created by the AI Showrunner,” said Fable CEO Edward Saatchi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Not just the dialogue. It animates, it does the voices, it does the editing. For the TV episodes, AI Showrunner can just generate episodes, or the user can create a prompt and create TV episodes based on a two-sentence prompt. People said AI can’t tell a story. Well, it can.”

Saatchi’s team has also released AI episodes of South Park as an example of the technology’s power.

“This paper is just the beginning – imagine a world where fans can put themselves in their favorite shows, create new episodes and compete to create the best episodes ever made or a world where creators can use the AI Showrunner to make their own original shows,” Saatchi said.

Saatchi cast himself in an episode of South Park, where Saatchi has a Fatal Attraction-style affair with Cartman. Another episode, dubbed Westland Chronicles, was generated entirely based on a simple text prompt that Saatchi wrote. In Westland Chronicles researchers from ‘Bizney’ research attempt to use AI to entertain America’s children, with disastrous results that cause a national scandal for a corporate entertainment studio and lead to Writers Guild of America (WGA) retaliation.

Regarding the rights to South Park episodes, Saatchi said, “We aren’t releasing the Showrunner commercially and aren’t in talks with the South Park people (though we are with several studios as well as creators to make original IP). But we used South Park only so that people have a comparison point between a super high-quality human show and an AI show. We will be announcing several original IP Simulations with attached AI TV shows later this year — a space exploration sci-fi simulation, a satire of Silicon Valley simulation and a detective simulation.”

The show with Saatchi in it is certainly hilarious to Saatchi. And another one he created with me in it is also hilarious to me.

“Not only do I want to be able to create new episodes of shows that I love, I’d like to be in shows that I love. I’d like to be in Star Trek as an ensign or I’d like to be in South Park,” Saatchi said.

And the team also created an episode starring me, based on a similar text prompt, with my permission. Since the company doesn’t plan to release these episodes for profit, it doesn’t expect any trouble from the owners of South Park.

---