Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has invested in Bay Area startup Fable, the company behind Showrunner, a new AI-powered service pitched as the "Netflix of AI" that allows anyone to generate television episodes with just a few keywords, Bloomberg reports.
Showrunner launched publicly on Wednesday and is currently available through Fable's Discord channel. According to Bloomberg, the platform promises to put "a studio at your fingertips," allowing users to create animated shows either from original ideas or from existing templates of well-known programs.
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South Park AI Episodes Drew Millions of Views Without Rights
Fable co-founder and CEO Edward Saatchi told Variety he is "in talks" with Disney (NYSE:DIS) and other studios about licensing partnerships. However, the company's past approach to intellectual property has already raised concerns.
Saatchi is a co-founder of Oculus Story Studio, launched in 2014 as part of Oculus VR, the virtual reality company acquired by Meta (NASDAQ:META) for $2 billion. The studio produced several virtual reality projects, including the Emmy Award-winning "Henry." According to Variety, Meta closed the division in 2017 after limited market adoption of VR entertainment.
Saatchi told Variety that early testers have shown strong interest in using Showrunner to appear as characters within the episodes they create. He said the team did not originally design the platform for that purpose, but many users have been eager to place themselves and their friends into fictional settings while creating stories that reflect their own experiences.
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Two years ago, Saatchi tested the technology by producing nine AI-generated "South Park" episodes without securing rights from the show's creators, Bloomberg says. He said he reached out to assure them the content was not for commercial use, but the videos still amassed over 80 million views online.
Critics Question Whether Audiences Want AI-Generated TV
While Fable frames Showrunner as a creator-first tool that removes "agents" and "studio gatekeepers," critics argue that those filters exist for a reason, often to highlight skilled storytellers and keep subpar content from dominating screens.
Bloomberg compared the platform to self-publishing in books, noting that it is empowering for authors, but rarely read outside their own circles. Past examples of generative AI have often produced distorted imagery and flawed anatomy, leading many viewers to find the results unappealing, Bloomberg says.
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Saatchi envisions "two-way entertainment" where audiences who enjoy a season of a show can "make new episodes with a few words and become characters with a photo." According to Bloomberg, critics see this as a shift from storytelling toward self-involvement, arguing that much of the value in art comes from experiencing a creator's singular vision.
"Our relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next five years," Saatchi told Variety.
Amazon's Backing May Signal a Larger Creative Shift
Amazon's investment aligns it with a future where AI-generated content could rival or replace work by human writers, animators, and directors. According to Bloomberg, critics warn that such technology risks devaluing professional storytelling while flooding streaming platforms with amateur-generated material.
Whether Showrunner will attract a long-term user base or see limited adoption is not yet known, Bloomberg says. Amazon's investment places it within ongoing industry discussions about how emerging technologies may influence the future of entertainment.
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