After two years of hype, Showrunner, the so-called 'Netflix of AI' is finally here to lay waste to the entertainment industry and replace such costly and frivolous crafts as writing, acting, effects and editing with AI slop. Obviously, I had to try it out.
With funding from Amazon's venture capital arm, the Alexa Fund, Showrunner is a product of the San-Francisco start-up Fable led by Edward Saatchi. Its aim is to allow anyone to create their own television series using AI. Launched publicly today following a closed alpha testing, it's free to use (for now). To my horror, I found it fairly entertaining... for a few minutes.
"Netflix is cooked food", I saw one person write in the group chat on the Discord channel while I was trying Showrunner out. Hmm... really?
For now, the AI video generator is pretty limited. There's only one 'series' or animation style available – the 'tech satire' dubbed Exit Valley. For now, you can only generate scenes with Showrunner on Discord via a public chat channel, like in the early days of the AI image generator Midjourney before it launched its own site last year.
There's a lot of hand-holding, with options to choose from a very limited selection of characters and scenes, although you'll be able to use text prompts to create your own. You then use a text prompt to describe the scenario and the gist of the dialogue that you want to generate. But the delivery and personality of the output appears to be very much the work of the AI model, which has a sense of humour so deadpan that it's often hard to tell where the jokes are supposed to be.
Exit Valley might sound like a narcissistic theme for Showrunner's first outing, but it's a smart choice. Encouraging us to mock AI bros makes it less easy to completely hate the project, and the fact that the output is obviously satire may help avoid potential lawsuits for defamation if not copyright from celebs. More animation styles are on the way.
Short scenes of a few seconds can take up to five minutes to generate. Since the videos are generated in the public chat channel, you can browse others while you wait. Some of the characters are more recognisable are others.
In one test prompt, I asked Showrunner to generate a video in which Sam Altman of OpenAI sought to console a distraught Tom Cruise, who was crying because AI was going to take his job. I wouldn't recognise either of the characters that were generated, although the AI did get Cruise's foul mouth right if reports of his tirades from the set of Mission: Impossible 7 are to be believed.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are more recognisable. Unsurprisingly, they appear to be the most popular characters to use. At the time I tried it, there were only 20 characters readily available, and who they are might say something about the people using the platform. While many match the tech theme, there are a few odd guest appearances (Boris Johnson and TS Elliot?). The only women were Kim Kardashian, the biotech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati
Is Netflix cooked? I found the AI's clunky sense of humour momentarily fascinating, but the lack of laughs quickly became tiresome, and the ability to closely control the output seems limited. Ultimately, it's fun for five minutes of novelty, and I can see some people loving it for making short satirical memes, but then what?
While it's free to use and download videos for now, Showrunner eventually plans to charge $10-$20 a month for credits. That might wash with content creators. I can see social media channels springing up based on Showrunner-generated material.
But are individual consumers going to cancel their Netflix subscriptions in favour of generating their own bad AI skits? Even once the variety of animation styles expands, watching an AI bot interpret your own ideas is hardly entertainment.
My other doubt about that is more existential. What happens to the social element of shared experiences if everyone's generating their own content that nobody else wants to watch because they can make their own? We could see a further atomisation of culture with people retreating into their own personal world of entertainment.
If you try Showrunner out, let me know in the comments what you think of it. For more AI video news, see Adobe's Unfinished Creator Film campaign, which it wants you to remix.
