Amazon has invested in «Netflix with AI» — streaming, which allows viewers to generate their own series

Imagine if you could create your own ending for «Game of Thrones», or any other TV show or movie whose ending didn’t satisfy you? It might sound like science fiction if we didn’t live in the age of AI.

Fable, a San Francisco-based startup, has created a new streaming service called Showrunner, which is touted as «Netflix with AI». Its main feature is that viewers can create scenes or entire episodes for TV shows from scratch — using simple text prompts for artificial intelligence. The idea may seem dubious, but a tech giant like Amazon believed in the project’s potential and invested an undisclosed amount in Fable and the development of streaming.

Showrunner currently operates in closed alpha version with 10,000 users (another 100,000 are on the waiting list) and offers two original «shows» — storyworlds with characters that users can direct into different narrative arcs.

The first, titled «Exit Valley», is described as a «Family Guy-style television comedy set in Sim-Francisco, poking fun at artificial intelligence leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others». Second, «Everything Is Fine», in which a husband and wife have a big fight while going to Ikea, and then are transported to a world where they are actually divorced and have to find each other.

In addition, the system allows you to place your animated versions directly into the show (an element that proved extremely popular with alpha testers).

Saatchi co-founded Oculus Story Studios in 2014 as a division of Oculus VR, a virtual reality company acquired by Meta (then Facebook) for $2 billion. Oculus Story Studio created several VR games, including «Henry», which won an Emmy» award, but was eventually shut down in 2017.

Showrunner is powered by Fable’s own artificial intelligence model called SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research article about its creation and released nine episodes of the show generated by artificial intelligence based on «South Park» (with the permission of the creators of the original animated series), which gained a total of 80 million views.

At the time of the public launch, the service will focus on animated content and will be free, but in the future, the creators plan to charge $10-20 per month per user for creating «hundreds of TV scenes». The content itself can be published on YouTube or other third-party platforms.

Source: Variety, Forbes