ohOne of the key strategies of streaming services is to keep you in front of a screen for as long as possible. As soon as an episode of a show you’re watching ends, the next one automatically appears. But this approach has its limits. After all, when a series ends, Netflix will try to automatically play another series it thinks you’ll like, but it has a terrible success rate. Maybe the tone of the suggested show is wrong, or maybe it’s too exhausting to throw into the sea of exposition that a new show brings. Maybe it’s too shocking to be taken out of one world and thrown straight into another with no room to breathe.
Do you know what would solve that? If Netflix gave you the opportunity to automatically create a new episode of the show you were already watching. You would stay there forever, right? Would be wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, you will be delighted to know that this glorious technology already exists.
This week, a company called Fable Studio announced the release of showrunner, the world’s first AI-generated streaming service. With just a few words, Showrunner promises to allow viewers to write, voice and animate their own television episodes.
Users who sign up for Showrunner’s waitlist will eventually be able to watch 10 animated shows. One of them, Ikiru Shinu, is classified as a dark horror anime. Another, Sim Francisco, is an anthology show about the people who live in the titular city. And then there’s Exit Valley, a South Park-style Silicon Valley satire. Users can watch the episodes or create their own by typing prompts that will be generated into scenes that can be stitched together into full episodes. For example, you can presumably watch Exit Valley and then write “The characters in your entertainment industry satire learn that they are part of an AI-generated content campaign designed specifically to destroy the entertainment industry, and the satire blows their heads off.” “, and that’s what the next episode will be.
The service is not entirely unprecedented. Last year, Fable released an AI-generated South Park episode that, if you didn’t look too closely, was pretty convincing. Of course, the moment you started paying attention, everything became some kind of living nightmare. The jokes were bad, the voices were wrong, and everyone spoke with the empty intonation of someone who had recently been brainwashed into murdering you in your sleep. But it’s still early. As we have seen with each successive release of ChatGPT, AI can improve at a frightening rate. Before long, Fable might spawn a really good South Park episode, and then we’ll all be in trouble.
Clearly, this could go one of two ways. The big fear—what basically caused all the Hollywood strikes last year—is that, even if Showrunner doesn’t become a mainstream hit, the entertainment industry is going to co-opt this technology wholesale. It will be slow at first: perhaps a studio will use it to generate cinematic plots, which can then be refined by whatever human experts are on hand. But gradually that could disappear, until the entertainment industry is made up of three or four executives writing AI messages like ‘Dinosaur attacks girl with big tits’ and pocketing all the revenue.
However, based on current evidence, that’s not likely to happen yet. As it looks now, Showrunner has the unmistakable air of newness. Initially, a flood of people will use it to make a bunch of low-quality videos that will turn the platform into an inexplicably less human TikTok or a Quibi that’s not so embarrassing to say out loud. My theory is that everyone will create their own episodes at first and try to share them, but no one else will see them because they’re watching episodes they generated themselves, and then everyone will get bored because what’s the point of making something just for yourself? The bar for creation has been set too low. People will lose interest quickly.
And this could be a good thing. Lord knows the film industry needs all the help it can get right now. Maybe Showrunner exists as a reminder that robots are even worse than us at creating things. If that doesn’t push us back into the mainstream, nothing will.