Company to Release AI Content-Creation Video Platform

­You’ve seen the nightmare-fuel videos with missing limbs and janky animation. And despite these initial missteps, you’ve probably a vague sense of dread that AI will eventually replace flesh-and-blood actors and content creators. Well, if Fable Studio’s Showrunner is any indication, we’ve got a long, long way to go.

Fable Studio first went viral back in 2023 when it released an unofficial, AI-generated South Park episode. The tools could loosely emulate South Park’s look and even the voices, but even for a 5-minute tech demo that recreated a famously- shoddy animation style, it…wasn’t great.

A year later, the studio released a limited version of Showrunner, i.e., the Netflix of AI” (according to the company). “Maybe you finish all of the episodes of a show you’re watching and you click the button to make another episode. You can say what it should be about or you can let the AI make it itself,” said Fable Studio chief executive Edward Saatchi.

The platform featured an assortment of in-house AI content, and for those with a creative itch – who didn’t want to bother learning traditional filmmaking and/or content creation – it allowed for user-generated videos.

Because AI still struggles to reliably mimic human characters, the platform was mostly animation. A popular in-house video dubbed Exit Valley (done in a similar style as South Park) allegedly satirizes Silicon Valley, and even accounting for all of AI’s quirks and limitation, it’s trash, with a bare minimum of animation and robotic voice acting.

While the journey is different, the result isn’t all that different from those unlicensed videos of popular IPs that have infested YouTube in recent years – like the horrifying Caillou knock-offs or bizarro world Peppa Pig content.

All of this just sounds like a more low-rent, streamlined version of Newgrounds, the early ‘00s content creation hub that ruled the nascent years of social media, but there’s reason for hope (or fear, depending on your interpretation).

For one, Fable Studio has the backing of Amazon, and if The Rings of Power proved anything, it’s that the retail/entertainment juggernaut isn’t afraid to throw unfathomable riches at potentially bad ideas.

And AI is slowly, incrementally getting better to the point where faux content creation – videos, music, and voices – will be absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing, and in a Tweet, the company claimed that, “the future is a mix of game & movie.”

I'm not sure Fable Studio has actually seen The Truman Show and grasped its underlying lessons....

Then again, in that same Tweet, they showed an astonishing lack of self-awareness by seemingly promoting a future of “Simulations powering 1000s of Truman Shows populated by interactive AI characters.” AI or not, that’s a terrifying prospect.