The AI-powered Netflix that lets you create your own TV series

There are TV series endings that we really hated. From Tracy's death in How I Met Your Mother to the rush that swept through the final season of Game of Thrones, who hasn't dreamed of rewriting the end of these stories from scratch? Who has not imagined throwing down a script, far removed from the productions of dubious quality that crowd streaming platforms today? Or again, how many people who really do this job have not wished for a budget sufficient to produce "the series of the century"? 

Today, with Showrunner, you can do all that, and so much more.  

With Showrunner, artificial intelligence, which until now had entered video production primarily as a technical tool, takes a definitive step inside the more creative aspects of streaming: directing, writing, set design, casting, and costumes. Already the many entirely AI-generated films and series expected this year had hinted at this scenario. But few expected a full-fledged streaming platform, where users can create their own animated series from scratch using only text prompts.

Showrunner, the streamig service devised by Fable Studio - a San Francisco startup known for producing deepfake episodes of South Park - is already funded by Amazon and is in talks with Disney and other giants to officially license existing IP. Open the site (showrunner.xyz) and the impact is that of a pirate platform, yet the intentions of its founder Edward Saatchi are very serious: "Using AI purely as a VFX tool is 'a little sad.' ... The 'Toy Story of AI' isn't just a cheaper 'Toy Story.' Our idea is that 'Toy Story of AI' would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney." Thanks to the proprietary Show-2 model, which is optimized for producing animated content, new episodes can be created, existing ones can be modified - licenses permitting - and even yourself and your friends can be included as actors within the scenes.

Millennials might be reminded of Wattpad, the peer-to-peer writing and reading social network founded in 2006 that, in addition to churning out fanfiction about One Direction, has spawned publishing cases such as After by Anna Todd. Gen Z, on the other hand, will be reminded of interactive series, such as the Bandersnatch of Black Mirror, launched by Netflix in 2018. 

Showrunner, however, aspires to do much more than that: to turn entertainment into a free, two-way experience that spreads across Reddit and YouTube rather than big and small screens. This is not so much a technological revolution as a cultural paradigm shift, coming at a time when overproduction and declining quality are being lamented in the streaming world. You may recall that back in 2023 striking Hollywood screenwriters were complaining that artificial intelligence was taking all their work away from them. 

The platform's first original title is Exit Valley, a satirical series set in a parallel San Francisco populated by current events figures such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Donald Trump. A simple link on the page leads to a Reddit thread where users share their own versions of the series and ,to greet you, there are some ethical "guardrails": no offensive or "politically incorrect" content, plausibly to avoid going the way of Musk's Ai. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the platform is its business model, which seems to favor users more than Hollywood's collective bargaining agreements: every time another user uses content you create to make a scene or episode, you earn a share of the revenue.