One of the key strategies of streaming services is to keep you in front of a screen for as long as possible. As soon as one episode of a show you’re watching ends, the next one pops up automatically. But this approach has its limits. After all, when a series ends, Netflix will try to autoplay another series that 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 be dumped into the sea of exposition that a new show brings. Maybe it’s just too jarring to be pulled out of one world and dumped straight into another without any space to breathe.
You know what would fix that? If Netflix gave you the chance to automatically create a new episode of the show you were already watching. You’d stay there forever, wouldn’t you? It would be wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, you will be thrilled to learn that this glorious technology now exists.
This week, a company called Fable Studio announced the launch of Showrunner, the world’s first AI-generated streaming service. With a prompt of just a few words, Showrunner promises to allow viewers to write, voice and animate their own television episodes.
Users who sign up for the Showrunner waitlist will eventually get to see 10 animated shows. One of them, Ikiru Shinu, is billed as a dark horror anime. Another, Sim Francisco, is an anthology show about people living in the titular city. And then there’s Exit Valley, a South Park-style Silicon Valley satire. Users can watch the episodes, or make their own by writing 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 type ‘The characters in his entertainment industry satire learn that they are part of an AI-generated content drive designed specifically to destroy the entertainment industry, and the satire explodes their heads’, and that’s what the next episode will be.
The service isn’t entirely without precedent. Last year Fable released an AI-generated episode of South Park that, if you weren’t watching very closely, came off as fairly convincing. Of course, the moment you did start paying attention, the whole thing became a kind of living nightmare. The jokes were bad, the voices were wrong and everyone spoke with the blank intonation of someone who’d recently been brainwashed into murdering you in your sleep. But it’s early days. As we’ve seen with each successive ChatGPT release, AI can improve at a frightening pace. Before long, Fable might be able to generate a South Park episode that is actually good, and then we’re all in trouble.
Clearly this could go one of two ways. The big fear – the thing that basically caused all of the Hollywood strikes last year – is that, even if Showrunner doesn’t become a mainstream success, the entertainment industry is nevertheless going to co-opt this technology wholesale. It will be slow at first: maybe a studio will use it to generate movie plots, which can then be finessed by the human experts it has to hand. But gradually that could fall away, until the entertainment industry consists of three or four executives writing AI prompts like ‘Dinosaur attacks girl with big boobs’ and keeping all the revenue for themselves.
However, based on current evidence, that isn’t likely to happen just yet. The way it looks now, Showrunner has the unmistakable air of novelty. A flood of people will initially 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 isn’t quite as embarrassing to say out loud. My theory is that everyone will create their own episodes at first, and try to share them, but nobody else will watch because they’re watching episodes that 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 fast.
And this might be a good thing. God knows the movie industry needs all the help it can get right now. Maybe Showrunner exists as a reminder that the robots are even worse at making stuff than we are. If that doesn’t nudge us back to the mainstream, nothing will.