Amazon has invested in Fable, a company that wants to be the “Netflix of AI” through its Showrunner interactive streaming platform.
And Fable’s Showrunner is launching today with first original AI show Exit Valley, which comes from the two-time Primetime Emmy winning team at Fable. The ex-Pixar and Oculus team made the viral South Park AI episodes — and it caught Amazon’s attention.
“I’m really, finally happy about this. We’ve done rounds in the past, but this is so encouraging. We’re also announcing Exit Valley, which is the AI TV show,” said Fable CEO Edward Saatchi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “You can go in and start making scenes and episodes. It does kind of stick to what I’ve worked on my whole career, which is like that space in between games and movies.”
Showrunner received 80 million views for its South Park AI episodes. And so today it is launching its Netflix of AI streaming service today, Saatchi said.
“Showrunner is a Netflix of AI. The next big streaming services – Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, Prime etc won’t be purely passive, you will be at home, describe the show you’d like to watch and within a minute or two start watching,” Saatchi said. “Finish a show that you enjoy and make new episodes, and even put yourself and your friends in episodes – fighting aliens, in your favorite sitcom and solving crimes.”
For San Francisco-based Fable, this shift to AI movies has been an evolution. South Park and Exit Valley came out of experiments with AI, which came out of the AI character that Fable created, Lucy, a young girl who had her own personality. Lucy came out of Emmy-winning VR experiences like Wolves in the Walls and Henry that Fable created for the Meta Quest headsets.
Yet Lucy didn’t feel real because she didn’t have the family, and the world, to flesh out her simulation, Saatchi said.
“Lucy was our beginning with AI characters, and as we moved more and more into trying to simulate her life with AI communities. And now, with Sim Francisco, which powers Exit Valley, there are different little worlds that are continuing that.”
Showrunner director Philipp Maas, who built the initial version of Showrunner that powered the AI South Park episodes, said in a statement, “Soon everyone will be able to create their own hit show or become a showrunner for someone else’s show that they like.”
Showrunner is powered by Fable’s AI model SHOW-2: Fable released a research paper on how they built the SHOW-1 model and AI Showrunner Agents that can write, produce, direct, cast, edit, voice and animate episodes of TV.
“Our South Park episodes were a research project that took on a life of their own, seeing the huge desire of people to make their own episodes of TV, we’ve built Showrunner as a Netflix of AI to power original works of art that can stand the test of time, and to let people bring their stories to life,” said Saatchi.
The streaming platform’s first big show is the AI TV show, Exit Valley, which is a Family Guy-style TV comedy set in Sim Francisco. It satirizes the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others.
“AI is going to make a group of technologists into the richest humans to ever live, it’s only fair to give folks the ability to use AI against them through satire – satire is the age old tool of the powerless against the powerful,” Saatchi said.
Users can upload themselves and their friends as characters and make episodes satirizing the days news.
“Instead of the idea that AI is going to disrupt Hollywood by making cheaper VFX or cheaper animated movies, we think it’s going to disrupt it by making movies and shows playable,” Saatchi said. “It will be almost as big a shift as the shift from cinema to television, from cinema to VHS, from cinema to DVD.”
He added, “AI is at the next stage where you can create the next episode. You can cast yourself in it. You can click a button and watch a scene. You put yourself in and it’ll generate a new scene with you and remix it. It’s something that is more two way, between the audience and the filmmaker. AI movies and AI TV shows are a new medium which is innate interactive, remixable and multiplayer.”
Exit Valley the show is targeting a deal with a major streamer by the end of the year including interactive features.
Saatchi said, “Everyone in AI talks about the Toy Story of AI as an exciting moment – but when you press all they really mean is a cheaper Toy Story – we can do so much more with AI. The Toy Story of AI isn’t some cheap animated movie that saves money, the Toy Story of AI is playable – you will go to the cinema on a Friday and by Sunday there will be millions of scenes thousands of new stories, you will be able to be a character – all monetizable by the IP holder – movies and shows are going to become playable with AI.”
Fable is talking with all the major studios, including Disney. In the future, Saatchi sees moving from a world of OpenAI, Runway etc releasing video models to, for example, a ‘Star Wars’ model, directed by a Dave Filoni (the holder of the lore at Star Wars) that would let people subscribe to generate within the storyworld of Star Wars – a whole new revenue stream for IP holders.
Saatchi said, “You might describe the scene in a really detailed way. Or you might just click the plus button for the AI to decide. We think the holodeck is a great example where you could just give a one-sentence description and it’s going to give you an incredible experience. Or you could go into great detail and try to create a holodeck experience. We think it’s both, but we also think it’s OK to be open that this isn’t just a tool in the toolbox of a great artist. This isn’t just a pencil, because pencils don’t write by themselves. AI, is creative by itself, and that’s OK. It’s interesting, and something Andy Warhol would have found totally fascinating.”
He said that entertainers and creators shouldn’t be thinking about it in “purely defensive terms.”
Saatchi imagines that fans could create great art like Star Wars movie creators and have their creations come out on the same day as the next Star Wars movie, using the models that are used in the movie. You could create new scenes and with AI could create millions of scenes.
Saatchi knows some of the AI work makes people uncomfortable. It’s not, however, just a tech toolbox. It’s creative too, and that’s the attraction for him.
“It’s about creating a relationship with the audience,” he said. “The Netflix of AI signals a shift in the relationship between audience and filmmaker. I think the opportunity is to give away the means of production alongside your movie and make it like a playable story. I think that will ultimately be the change that AI brings, rather than just cheaper VFX.”
Ultimately, that also means sharing some of the wealth with the audience, particularly the creators who help make it successful or those who take the imagination and creativity of the IP into new and unexpected directions.
Saatchi was encouraged to hear that Roblox has cut deals with some game makers so that Roblox players can quickly get a license for games like Sega’s Like A Dragon in a matter of hours and quickly be able to build their own user-generated content games based on the license.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This is not the direction anyone else is going in, right? People have become convinced that that AI is good for memes, or AI video is good for memes. Or for VFX artists. I would say they’re missing the much bigger opportunity to consumers, where each model is worked on with the same care and love, creatively and the same narrow IP focus as a movie. So we would imagine something that’s in between Runway, Bioshock and Star Wars.”
He added, “Let’s say a new John Wick movie comes out. By Sunday, using the John Wick model, there are 30 million new John Wick scenes. There are 3,000 new John Wick movies.”
“In the game world of modding, the idea that Dota 2 surpassed Warcraft III is not threatening to Warcraft III. The idea of modding is is really entrenched in gaming and doesn’t really exist in movies. And so I think this would be a big and exciting shift, bringing more ideas from games into cinema.”
Using AI to make movies that are cheaper or have better 3D isn’t that exciting, given how far 3D has already advanced. But making movies that are playable could be an interesting source of innovation, Saatchi said. Over time, creating Pixar-style movie-game hybrids could get a lot more interesting, he said.
Saatchi said the team is focused on safety so that people are not allowed to use AI to post things that are illegal or outside social norms. On the other hand, Exit Valley is comedy akin to South Park, and so it has to be somewhat open.
There are 10,000 people in the alpha test now and 100,000 on the waitlist.
It’s a big day for Fable. Sadly, Fable cofounder Pete Billington, co-creator of films like Pixar’s Up, recently passed away and isn’t there for the big moment. Rest in peace.
Users can sign up at SHOWRUNNER.XYZ.