Edward Saatchi isn’t totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi’s San Francisco-based start-up.
The amount of Amazon’s funding in Fable isn’t being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the “Netflix of AI”: a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes — or entire episodes — of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.
Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms.
Saatchi’s hypothesis is that AI — instead of simply being a tool for cheaper special effects — represents a new entertainment medium, one that more closely resembles video games.
Using AI purely as a VFX tool is “a little sad,” said Saatchi, Fable’s CEO and co-founder. “The ‘Toy Story of AI’ isn’t just going to be a cheap ‘Toy Story.’ Our idea is that ‘Toy Story of AI’ would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney.” Saatchi said Fable is in talks about a partnership with Disney, among other Hollywood studios, about licensing IP for the Showrunner platform.
“Hollywood streaming services are about to become two-way entertainment: audiences watching a season of a show [and] loving it will now be able to make new episodes with a few words and become characters with a photo,” Saatchi said. “Our relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next five years.”
That said, Saatchi expressed some doubt about whether people really want to be their own showrunners. “Maybe nobody wants this and it won’t work,” he said.
Saatchi previously co-founded Oculus Story Studios, formed in 2014 as a division of Oculus VR, the virtual-reality company acquired by Meta (then Facebook) for $2 billion. Oculus Story Studio produced several VR titles, including the Emmy-winning “Henry.” But as a category, VR entertainment didn’t materialize — and Meta shut down Story Studio in 2017.
“In 2014, we said, ‘Everything will take off when this happens,’” Saatchi said, like when sales of VR headsets passed a certain milestone. “And it didn’t work.” In 2019, Saatchi led the formation of Fable Studio, which pivoted away from VR to the current model of AI-fueled playable stories. (A separate company called Fable is a cybersecurity start-up focused on AI-generated security training.)
Fable’s Showrunner public launch features two original “shows” — story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first 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.” The other is “Everything Is Fine,” in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight — whereupon they’re transported to a world where they’re separated and have to find each other.
The Showrunner system lets users insert themselves into a TV show’s world, too, which has proven to be a popular use-case among the alpha testers, Saatchi said. “People are interested in putting themselves and their friends into these stories. That was a surprise,” he said. “We didn’t design it with that in mind. People want to be in fictional worlds and also want to tell stories about themselves.”
Showrunner is powered by Fable’s proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on “South Park.” The episodes, made without the permission of the “South Park” creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the “South Park” team, who were reassured the IP wasn’t being deployed commercially.)
A still from Fable’s “South Park” AI research project
“It has been incredibly exciting to see how Showrunner ignites creativity in people,” said Jacob Madden, Fable’s head of technology and co-creator of Showrunner. “The platform allows showrunners to experiment with their stories in real-time, constantly iterating and refining their vision. Showrunner redefines what a TV show can be and I cannot wait to see what stories emerge next.”
While Saatchi is bullish on the technology, he conceded that a major weakness of Showrunner and AI in general for entertainment is that it’s more suited to episodic content rather than, say, an epic 60-episode arc a la “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones.”
“Today AI can’t sustain a story beyond one episode,” Saatchi said. “What AI is strongest at is deeply episodic shows with characters largely resetting every episode — sitcoms, police procedurals, space exploration.”
According to Saatchi, Fable’s AI model includes “guardrails” to block offensive or illegal behavior, including protections against copyright infringement. (Last month, Disney and NBCUniversal were the first major Hollywood studios to file an AI-related copyright lawsuit, against start-up Midjourney.) In addition to those protections, Saatchi said Showrunner has “guardrails around the story”: For example, the system can evaluate whether a specific character would “really be doing this.”
Out of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the “knife fight” among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. “If you’re competing with Google, are you going to win?” Saatchi said. “Our goal is to have the most creative models,” he said.
Fable, which has 15 employees, is based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Previous investors in the company include Day One Ventures, 8VC and Greycroft. More info is available on the company’s website at showrunner.xyz.
