Amazon is convinced that AI is the future of TV, and who can blame them? With AI you don’t have to worry about pesky things like writers, directors, actors, and other creative folk, you can just pop a few sentences into a machine and out spurts some content.
Sure, the content might be bland, tasteless, regurgitated trash, but in the most technical sense of the word, it is indeed content. Amazon is currently pushing ahead with this future by investing in Fable, which is about to launch Showrunner, an AI service billed as the “Netflix of AI” that lets users input a prompt and then generates scenes or episodes using new ideas of existing IP.
For example, in the future, you might wonder what it’d be like to watch an episode of Game of Thrones featuring Spider-Man. Tap that in, wait a few minutes, and you’ll have some kind of narrative showing Peter Parker struggling to fit into Westeros. On paper, the tech sounds at minimum interesting if ethically awful, but check out an example of what the service actually produces.
This is, incredibly, an example of what the Fable itself is using to promote Showrunner. This is Exit Valley, described as “a ‘Family Guy’-style TV comedy set in ‘Sim Francisco’ satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al.”
lmao i looked up a video someone made with this service. yeah man let me bet a couple hundred million on this https://t.co/tMQ3YRz7AP pic.twitter.com/lMsvhNRMx2
— aLec robBins (@alecrobbins) July 30, 2025
… no thanks
Credit to them, I didn’t think crudely animated cartoons could land in the uncanny valley, but here we are. The voices are soulless and empty, aside from the Elon Musk impression, but as he already sounded soulless and empty, it’d be difficult to tell.
You could argue that this is new tech and some awkwardness in its early years is inevitable. But, even if this were to be much more polished, I just can’t imagine getting emotionally invested in a story written by a robot. The reason why all-time hits like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men are so beloved is that they have a strong and noticeable authorial voice, with the creator using the stories as a vehicle to communicate ideas of philosophies they care about.
Whatever this garbage is feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of comedy, studded with lines that fit the pattern of a joke, but without actually being funny. Here’s hoping this tech dies on the vine, or the future of TV is going to be awful.
Published: Jul 31, 2025 08:46 am