Have you ever watched a TV show and wished you could make it yourself? Of course, that wish is easier said than done; there are many moving parts that go into the production of any level of TV show. But to make that dream a little easier to achieve, Fable Studio has announced Showrunner AI, a new tool that allows anyone to produce their own TV series, episodically.
Showrunner is technically the world's first AI-generated streaming service, and for now it's only available as part of a waitlist, but will eventually give users access to 10 animated shows that have been created using the service. Users can either watch episodes that have already been created, or they can use prompts to generate scenes and string them together to essentially create a complete episode that they've directed.
Of course, the release of something like Showrunner AI inevitably raises concerns that AI will replace us all — a sentiment that even the godfather of AI shares to some degree. But things aren't quite as dire as that, which we'll get into a bit more later.
So far, Fable has released three series: “Living Death,” which Fable calls a dark horror anime; “Sim Francisco,” an anthology set in the city of the same name and following its inhabitants; and “Exit Valley,” which appears to be a satire set in and heavily inspired by Silicon Valley.
Of course, the release of this new AI tool isn't entirely unexpected: a lot of very interesting and surprising things have already come out of OpenAI's Sora model, and Fable came out last year with South ParkIf you’ve been paying attention at all, you know the show fell apart pretty quickly, but as we can see with every new release of ChatGPT, AI is advancing rapidly.
So what does showrunner AI mean for the future of human-produced TV? Will it replace human creators? To be honest, nothing at this point. Sure, these AI tools have a novelty that wows people at first, but AI can't replicate the human creativity that makes real TV shows and other creative media worthwhile.
There's also the fact that all AI is trained on existing content; it can't come up with new ideas on its own, like humans can. So, on the one hand it might make things easier, and on the other hand this technology could be really cool once it's made available to the public. But for now, this is just a glimpse of a somewhat promising, yet somewhat quirky, AI tool, and we'll only see how it works in practice once it has had time to mature.
