{"id":239368,"date":"2025-09-19T16:51:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T16:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/239368\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T16:51:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T16:51:11","slug":"can-ai-write-tv-human-showrunners-weigh-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/239368\/","title":{"rendered":"Can AI Write TV? (Human) Showrunners Weigh In"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLooking over the vast landscape of television options in 2025, do you yearn for a show tailored more to your exact tastes? Or, more precisely, a show where characters like President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian can fight, levitate and\/or experience an emotional breakdown while delivering dialogue that is (kind of) your creation?<\/p>\n

\n\tIf so, then Showrunner from Fable Studio may be for you. The AI-powered platform, released to the public in July, allows users to craft short animated scenes for free after typing in a dialogue text prompt and choosing from a menu of preset characters, actions and settings. Users simply access the platform\u2019s Discord, pick from a drop-down menu of options (other available characters include Arnold Schwarzenegger and a young Clint Eastwood), type up an overarching idea, wait a few minutes and voil\u00e0 \u2014 out pops a scene in a style reminiscent of Adult Swim\u2019s Rick\u00a0and\u00a0Morty.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s all part of the company\u2019s ambition to create the \u201cNetflix of AI.\u201d The leaders of Showrunner see a future in which audiences can insert themselves into their favorite shows and create new episodes. \u201cAI is not just a tool in the toolbox; it\u2019s a competitor,\u201d chief executive Edward Saatchi says in a video posted to Showrunner\u2019s website. Major gatekeepers have taken note, with Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund recently making an investment in Fable and Saatchi telling Variety he\u2019s in talks with Disney and other studios about licensing their titles.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut does this technology<\/a> threaten the story professionals, aka the actual showrunners? To find out, The Hollywood Reporter asked a few to create scenes in the public-facing platform in its current state. Read their takes below. Spoiler alert: The writer-producers aren\u2019t fearing for their livelihoods just yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the show we\u2019re doing now, we have a group chat, and I thought, \u201cOh, I\u2019ll come up with some little quick videos, and then I\u2019ll amaze people by sending in this funny video.\u201d The interesting thing is that it\u2019s amazing it makes these animations, [but] by the same token, I spent 45 minutes on and off and I made six or seven of them \u2014 and I didn\u2019t wind up sending any of them. None of them wound up being, to me, especially funny or clever.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat they do is they make connections. AI is very good at that. If you put in Elon Musk and you put in Bernie Sanders, it\u2019ll make connections between the words you put in and something about Bernie Sanders. To me, it was just references. It was just connecting things in a way that a database of infinite amounts of information can do in a way I can\u2019t do.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe best episodes of shows I\u2019ve done come from experience, come from a fight I had with my wife or something I did with my kids or a phone call. Those come from real, lived experiences. And I\u2019m sure AI can read up about all these experiences. They probably have, but I don\u2019t know if they can experience it \u2026 I would never say it\u2019s not possible. But I don\u2019t see it yet.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tScreenshot\/Courtesy<\/p>\n

\t\tJeff Dixon and Jim Cooper, showrunners, Curses!\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDIXON<\/strong> To me, it felt more like a party trick than an actual replacement. I was comparing it to when you were a kid and you would make music on one of those old Casio keyboards and they had the little drum button where it would be like, \u201cPush for beat\u201d \u2026 and you\u2019d be like, \u201cThis is the best song ever!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCOOPER<\/strong> Every character cussed. Like every character. And it didn\u2019t really matter which one you picked. \u2026 It\u2019s funny, you can see that in beginning writers\u2019 writing a lot. If you read a spec of another show, a lot of times people are dropping [those words], like, \u201cI\u2019m matching the dialogue\u201d and you\u2019re going, \u201cBut there\u2019s not really the joke there other than you did the\u00a0F-bomb \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDIXON<\/strong> I know it\u2019s growing, and I know it\u2019ll change. I know it\u2019ll get there, but just looking at it now, it feels like just output, and not actually a story.<\/p>\n

\t\tMarc Guggenheim, showrunner, Arrow, DC\u2019s Legends of Tomorrow<\/a>, Carnival Row<\/strong>\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe truth is I was generally unimpressed. I certainly don\u2019t feel as though my job is under threat by this app. Yet. The app \u2014 which you have to access through Discord, which makes for a frustrating user experience \u2014 is basically a souped-up version of the flash animations that have been available for ages.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe name \u201cShowrunner\u201d is, I think, a bit misleading. I think the public thinks showrunners just create ideas and write them, but that\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the job goes. Ninety percent of the job is dealing with other people \u2014 executives, actors, directors, crew \u2014 and that\u2019s not something you can outsource to AI. I like to say that I write for free. I get paid to take notes. But how would AI deal with bad notes? Could it even recognize them? I doubt that very much.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf I had the idea for a funny animated short to, say, skewer Trump in my newsletter, I might try to use Showrunner for that purpose. But that\u2019s a pretty narrow use case.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appeared in the Sept. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking over the vast landscape of television options in 2025, do you yearn for a show tailored more…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":239369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[30038,691,738,128122,158,128123,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-239368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-a-i","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-legends-of-tomorrow","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-the-neighborhood","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115232000351301416","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}