Have you ever watched a TV show and wished you could make one yourself? Of course, making a wish like that come true is a lot easier said than done. There are a lot of moving parts involved in creating a TV show of any caliber. Now, though, Fable Studio wants to make that dream a little easier to obtain with the reveal of Showrunner AI, a new tool that lets anyone generate their very own TV series episode by episode.
Showrunner is technically the world’s first AI-generated streaming service, and so far, it’s only available as part of a waitlist, which will eventually get you access to 10 animated shows created using the service. Users will be able to watch the episodes that have already been created, or they can use prompts to generate scenes that can then be stitched together to create full episodes they’ve essentially directed.
Of course, the release of something like Showrunner AI is sure to spark the concerns that AI is going to replace us all, a sentiment that even the Godfather of AI has shared in some ways. But things aren’t quite that dire, which is something we’ll discuss a bit more in a moment.
So far, Fable has revealed three of the series it’ll showcase. One is called Ikiru Shinu, and Fable calls the show dark horror anime. The other two include Sim Francisco, an anthology based in a city sharing the same name, which follows people living there. Then there is Exit Valley, which looks to be a satire based around Silicon Valley that was heavily inspired by Silicon Valley.
The release of this new AI tool isn’t entirely unexpected, of course. We’ve already seen a lot of really interesting and mind-blowing stuff from OpenAI’s Sora model. And Fable teased its AI video generation capabilities last year when it created an episode of South Park. If you paid any attention at all, the show really fell apart quite quickly, but as we’ve seen with each new ChatGPT release, AI is improving at a rapid rate.
So, what does Showrunner AI mean for the future of human-created TV shows? Is this going to replace human creators? At the moment, it isn’t really going to change anything, let’s be honest here. Sure, AI tools like this have a sense of novelty to them that wows people at first, but AI isn’t quite capable of recreating that human creativity that makes real TV shows and other creative media worthwhile.
There’s also the fact that all AI is trained on already existing content. It can’t think up new ideas on its own like humans can. So, sure, it might make things easier on one hand, and the tech could be really cool when it comes out for a full public release. But right now, it’s just another drop in the hat of somewhat promising but also somewhat gimmicky AI tools that we’ll have to wait to see how they really work after they’ve had some time to mature.
