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South Park: The AI episode

11 minutes of fake-South Park, with script, vision, voices and editing generated by AI is released online.

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Uh oh.

San Francisco startup Fable has released an 11 minute AI-generated episode of South Park.

The unauthorised episode demonstrates the power of its new Showrunner AI technology, dubbed SHOW-1. It is released in the middle of a WGA / SAG-AFTRA strike which includes concerns over the potential impact of AI.

The company, which won two Emmys and a Peabody award, has released a research paper outlining the potential of its AI Showrunner Agents, which can write, produce, direct, cast, edit, voice, and animate episodes of TV.

In a meta-twist, the plot of the episode sees Cartman and Butters attempting to launch their own deep fake streaming service in the midst of an actor’s strike.

“Essentially, what the AI Showrunner does is create episodes of South Park for you. All of this is created by the AI Showrunner,” said Fable CEO Edward Saatchi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Not just the dialogue. It animates, it does the voices, it does the editing. For the TV episodes, AI Showrunner can just generate episodes, or the user can create a prompt and create TV episodes based on a two-sentence prompt. People said AI can’t tell a story. Well, it can.

“This paper is just the beginning – imagine a world where fans can put themselves in their favorite shows, create new episodes and compete to create the best episodes ever made or a world where creators can use the AI Showrunner to make their own original shows,” Saatchi said.

South Park was used to provide a comparison between a high-quality human show and an AI show.

Saatchi emphasised that AI material should not be considered literary material and that AI Showrunner can help humans bring ideas to life, but is not a credible co-author on its own.

He added, “We aren’t releasing the Showrunner commercially and aren’t in talks with the South Park people (though we are with several studios as well as creators to make original IP).”

Of course, South Park has already done its own episode on chatGPT, so it’s a question of who has the last laugh…I think.

Source: VentureBeat

2 Responses

  1. I compare AI to a ‘talking’ parrot. Sure a parrot can make noises that sound like human speech but it doesn’t really understand what it is saying. AI has a long way to go before it can simulate biting satire or the wicked sense of humour of a gifted writer/comedian. This clip serves as an excellent warning to AI generators that their attempts to re-create comedy will remain lame while it doesn’t understand the human art of creating comedy.

  2. There’s probably going to be some really weird content in the future. Think watching a mashup of Friends and The Gilmore Girls that is flawlessly intertwined and not just cut up, edited and stitched-together scenes. And the script would be generated randomly or aided by user prompts.

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