Streaming services want you to stay glued to the screen. They autoplay the next episode, but once a series ends, their suggestions often fall flat. It can be jarring or exhausting, yanking you into another show that doesn’t quite fit. What if, instead of moving on to something else, you could write a new episode of the same show? You’d never have to stop watching. And now that’s actually possible.
Fable Studio has launched Showrunner, the first AI-generated streaming service. It lets viewers write, voice and animate their own TV episodes with just a few words.
Those on the Showrunner waitlist will see ten animated shows: “Ikiru Shinu,” a dark horror anime; “Sim Francisco,” an anthology about city life; and “Exit Valley,” a Silicon Valley satire. You can watch those shows or create your own by writing prompts that the AI turns into scenes.
Last year Fable released an AI-generated South Park episode. It looked persuasive at first glance but fell apart upon closer inspection: bad jokes in wrong voices. But AI is getting better fast, and future attempts could be much stronger.
This could change entertainment forever. There’s a worry Hollywood will use AI to craft movie plots, effectively cutting out human writers altogether. Right now Showrunner feels more like a novelty — people are likely to flood it with low-quality videos, making for less-human TikTok or awkward Quibi.
My bet is people will initially make their own episodes but lose interest quickly — creating for yourself isn’t very satisfying, generally speaking — and this’ll remind us humans are still best at making entertainment and help steer us back toward traditional methods.
Source: theguardian
