As one of the cofounders behind Oculus Story Studio, Edward Saatchi knows how hard it can be to sell people on new tech that bills itself as revolutionary. Even though Story Studio snagged an Emmy for one of its three animated features, a general lack of public interest in VR movies led Meta to shutter Oculus Story Studio back in 2017. The VR era has come and gone, but Saatchi is confident that Showrunner, his new pivot to generative AI that just received an influx of cash from Amazon, can succeed.
Unlike a lot of other gen AI-centric entertainment outfits focused on deploying the technology in ways that audiences aren’t necessarily meant to see, Saatchi and his team at studio Fable developed Showrunner with the intention of people using the platform to generate content tailored to their specific desires. Currently, Showrunner lives on a Discord server where users can generate short animated videos by selecting characters and art styles from a list, and then writing prompts dictating what those characters say and how they interact with the environments around them.
After being told that you want to see Elon Musk and Sam Altman standing in an office break room and having a conversation about turning homelessness into a software as a service, Showrunner will generate a clip that mostly fits that description. Showrunner’s clips are all styled to match the aesthetics of one of the platform’s preset shows, like Exit Valley, a cartoon that appears to be a cross between Silicon Valley and Family Guy. The characters’ awkward, AI-generated voices are meant to sound like the real people they are based on. And they tend to be animated with an odd stiffness that makes it clear how much of Showrunner’s output is automated by machines rather than crafted by experienced human artists.
For now, the service is free, but Fable intends to start charging subscribers somewhere between $10–$20 per month at some point in the future. And while Showrunner is currently limited to generating output based on its own catalog of original programming, other studios like Disney have reportedly expressed interest in licensing their IP to the platform.
When I spoke with Saatchi recently, he admitted to being a bit too high on his own supply during his time with Oculus and deeply humbled when that version of the company ultimately came to an end. That whiplash left him reconsidering what consumers really want out of their entertainment, and it convinced him that the answers lie in gen AI.
”You have no idea how arrogant we were right after Meta acquired Oculus, but I remember being in meetings across Hollywood to show off our ideas, and we were just like, ‘You guys are done; we’re taking over,’” Saatchi told me. “But our net impact on the industry was zero in the end, and our revenue from VR movies was probably $10.”
To Saatchi’s mind, the big issue with VR was that it kept users in a kind of limbo where they were expected to be both passive and interactive depending on which scenes they were watching. Alternating between those two modes of engagement, Saatchi told me, was part of Oculus’ plan to make its projects feel like crosses between traditional movies and video games. But Saatchi’s own disinterest in watching VR movies was a clear sign to him that the technology was a dead end he should move on from in favor of something more dynamic.
Saatchi’s interest in gen AI was actually sparked by a technical roadblock he and his collaborators ran into while developing a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2003 children’s book, Wolves in the Walls. In both tellings of the story, a young girl named Lucy lives in constant fear of the wolves living in the walls of her house, while her family insists that the creatures aren’t real. Saatchi and his team wanted their version of Lucy to be able to have fluent conversations with players / viewers as she guided them through the various rooms in her house. But the character was limited to reciting canned bits of dialogue rather than responding with context-specific speech.
This hurdle got Saatchi thinking more seriously about how he might be able to build Lucy as a complex “digital being” capable of having complicated interactions with people. That concept put Saatchi on a path to working with a team from OpenAI to see if it was possible. It wasn’t, not really. But the experience of building a slightly more robust Lucy character convinced Saatchi that generative AI could be the key to creating a new kind of entertainment experience.
“We made Lucy into a character that you can talk to and video chat with,” Saatchi said. “But what we quickly realized is that if you want to make a character truly live — which became our big goal — then you have to build a simulation of their world. They can’t just be a brain in a jar, like one character by themselves. They have to have a family, they have to have a life.”
The idea of building simulations — sandboxed virtual environments defined by specific rules — to make AI characters feel more multifaceted by giving them contexts to exist in is what led to Showrunner using its SHOW-1 model to produce a series of unlicensed South Park episodes.
Showrunner could approximate South Park’s visual style and musical cues, but it struggled to re-create the show’s comedic patter or the kind of chemistry between characters that, traditionally, is rooted in human actors’ performances. Also, the ersatz South Park just wasn’t funny, and it felt more like poorly written fanfiction than episodes of television that people might actually want to watch. But to Saatchi, the experiment demonstrated that Showrunner could be fashioned into a service — one dedicated to giving its users a way to prompt up “shows” of their own, one AI generated scene at a time.
Saatchi speaks about Showrunner the way many pro-gen AI founders do — with an optimistic enthusiasm that doesn’t exactly feel justified when you look at what the platform is currently capable of churning out. He sees it as the “Netflix of AI” and thinks that, with enough users writing the right prompts, it could produce something comparable to The Simpsons, Euphoria, or Toy Story. But Saatchi also believes the real appeal to Showrunner is its ability to create entertainment that’s more interactive than traditional films and shows.
“We think the Toy Story of AI isn’t going to be a cheaply produced animated movie, it’s going to be something that’s playable,” Saatchi told me. “Most people feel that generative AI is a tool to make the same, but cheaper, and we’re trying to say it’s a new kind of medium. Cinema was not about saving theater owners money; it was highly disruptive and took years to explore as a medium. I feel like the industry is kind of cutting off that exploratory element with generative AI by just shoving it into movies.”
When I brought up the ongoing conversation about gen AI’s potential to put people in creative fields out of work, Saatchi said what almost everyone in his position says — that he sees Showrunner as a platform that’s meant to supplement traditionally produced entertainment rather than replace it. He told me that he finds the idea of studios embracing this kind of technology strictly for cost-saving reasons rather grim. Saatchi also stressed that, while Showrunner is built on a number of LLMs, the company works with human artists and animators to develop its visual assets “because something is just clearly lost without that.”
“I don’t think there’s any papering over the fact that AI is going to cut jobs, but that’s why we’re not very interested in the whole cheaper VFX paradigm that most other folks are going after,” Saatchi explained. “If all that we can do with such a powerful technology is just cut jobs, what was the point? Nobody’s gonna go to the cinema to say, ‘I heard this was the Toy Story of AI. I’ve really got to get my ticket because it’s so cool that they spent so little on this.’”
What Saatchi does think people will be willing to pay for is the ability to generate scenes based on licensed IP. Though Showrunner’s core use case right now is making short, unpolished clips based on Fable’s in-house properties, the company ultimately wants to partner with major studios like Disney to develop branded models that would allow, for example, you to prompt up scenes featuring characters from The Mandalorian. This would “give people a way to create millions of new scenes, thousands of episodes, or even their own movies,” Saatchi reasoned.
”Our idea would be that, instead of people getting excited about stormtroopers in ancient Rome, which is, like, a cheap concept, there’s a Star Wars model that 700 people have developed under Dave Filoni’s direction,” Saatchi said. “These models would have real characters and a world that could be explored through prompting, and you could also inadvertently trigger scenes within those worlds in a way that would make it feel as though you’re uncovering something unknown.”
A clip from Fable’s Everything Is Fine.
Throughout our conversation, Saatchi was insistent about Showrunner being a good thing and a revolutionary tool designed to give users a new way of engaging with media. But he agreed when I pointed out that the system he’s describing makes it sound like Showrunner would effectively turn its subscribers into unpaid employees working for some of Hollywood’s biggest and most powerful studios. Studios would own anything generated with Showrunner’s branded models trained on copyrighted IP, and users will eventually have to pay to use the service.
But Saatchi stressed that, while Showrunner definitely wants to work with companies like Disney, he is also interested in collaborating with smaller creators who would stand to benefit greatly from the company’s business model. An indie filmmaker could license their new project to Showrunner and subsequently be paid a portion of revenue share based on how many scenes people were generating with the model based on their movie. Saatchi could not give me a timeline on when Showrunner might start trying to establish those kinds of partnerships, but he was bullish about them being part of what makes the platform a boon to independent creators.
“This could create something where creators can earn money when people are emotionally connected enough to their work that they themselves want to make something with it,” Saatchi said. “Compare that to what creators earn just from people viewing their work online. Yes, there is a kind of ‘we’re all employees of Disney’ element, but from a moral point, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”
Listening to Saatchi describe what he wants Showrunner to become, it actually sounds a bit like Roblox and Fortnite. Not the building or battle royale of it all, but rather the way those games encourage players to create their own maps, share them, and get other people to do the same thing. The Roblox Corporation and Epic have both built platforms where being a consumer can also essentially mean being a worker — one whose labor serves only to contribute to the corporations’ bottom lines.
But whereas those games are free to play, Fable very much wants people paying upfront to use Showrunner. If Showrunner were truly capable of conjuring up imaginative, detailed worlds that felt like thoughtful works of art, Saatchi’s pitch might not sound so dubious and mildly exploitative on its face. But what Fable is shopping around right now sounds like yet another attempt at using AI to do something that human artists are already quite capable of doing much, much better.
