You, A.I., and Nobody Else

On A.I. and the arts

A company called Fable is building a product called Showrunner. In the words of its CEO, Edward Saatchi, it may result in the “end of human creativity.” To him this is a good thing. To much of Silicon Valley this is a good thing and that is why understanding the story of Fable and Showrunner and Edward Saatchi is important. It helps us better understand the outcomes that many A.I. enthusiasts are after. The great Adam Pearson reports.

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In September of last year, Fable CEO and A.I. acolyte, Edward Saatchi, appeared on CNBC to peddle a new product called Showrunner, an app that generates TV and film length videos based on licensed I.P. Far from another Sora that simply allows users to create fan fiction of their favorite shows, you can insert yourself and your friends in the narrative, making yourself the hero of any story. They’re hailing themselves the “Netflix of A.I.” When the host asked him who this might put out of work, Saatchi dropped his voice low, with furrowed brows and a gawky grin, leaning in as if to divulge a secret. With the affect of a Roger Moore-era Bond villain, he delivered a line he’d clearly been rehearsing: “It’s potentially the end of human creativity.”

His eyes darted back and forth between each word as if to rapidly gauge the temperature of the room. The hosts were not impressed. He sat up and evened his posture. “I think what’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and we will enjoy entertainment created by A.Is.”

He said it with the sneering satisfaction of a rationalist, who, rejected by the creative class for lacking something fundamental to creativity, spent the last decade in Silicon Valley concocting his revenge. In an Orestean twist, his mother is Josephine Hart, famous theater producer and author of the 1991 novel Damage, which was praised by the likes of Iris Murdoch and adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons. By age twelve she was reciting entire Shakespeare sonnets as well as poems by Yeats, Auden, and T.S Eliot. Her former boss at Haymaker Publishing was to be Edward’s father, after he had gone on to co-found an ad agency. Though Edward was educated in Westminster and took a double first in English at Oxford, not even with his mother’s fame and institutional power could he become an artist of any sort. Instead, he took influence from his advertising mogul father, who had helped elect Margaret Thatcher several decades back, founding NationalField, a data platform for the 2008 Obama campaign. The London Standard gushed about him as “The British Mark Zuckerberg”, as he worked eighteen-hour days six days a week “without pay,” instead getting by on his family’s meager 149,000,000 pound fortune. Yet, in the CNBC interview, he characterizes himself as an outsider rebel, whom Hollywood would do anything to stop. The old-fashioned elite might prefer human-made art, but the young and revolutionary “artists” will surely embrace his technology with open arms.

Mr. Saatchi is not unique in arguing the democratizing capabilities of A.I., but the fantasy he paints of outsiders creating something revolutionary to make a name for themselves against the big Hollywood elites, presumably with his product, will have the opposite effect of any true artistic democratization. There is always a greater cultural output than there is an audience to consume it; when barriers to entry like talent, vision, and effort become superfluous to an industry’s creation of culture, other barriers to entry are strengthened, mainly: social connections, wealth, proximity to elites. Everyone else must resign to mediums that reward the kind of high output low effort content that could lead to internet virality, hardly the ambition of an artist who once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and dreamed of making something to astound a room full of people the way Stanley Kubrick did. This has already been happening across many mediums from music to film over the last several decades, when technology could obscure a lack of raw talent with green screens and pitch correction and post-editing. Generative A.I. will only amplify this dynamic further. The mass adoption of word processors and query trackers, which enabled the simplified editing and submitting of manuscripts, was supposed to democratize book publishing. Instead, book queries ballooned faster than any editor could read them and an influx of competition among aspiring novelists created necessary institutional layers to separate the wheat from the chaff. Once authors could use querytracker instead of physically mailing their manuscripts, the volume of queries shot even higher. Now several more institutional layers lie between authors and serious readership, with platforms like Substack beginning to chip them away, but only marginally. Whether all this increased competition over the last several decades resulted in better novels, I leave you to discern for yourself. These, however, were only mild technological advances compared to generative A.I. The word processor removed some of the effort in book writing, but it did not remove the need for hard work and talent.

On The Town with Matt Belloni, Saatchi softened his persona, aware that he was on a show that was more often hostile to A.I. than not, and mostly appealed to concerns that his Showrunner product was siphoning away money from Hollywood, emphasizing instead that it would be a new revenue generator for studios. For instance, say a Star Wars movie comes out on a Friday. Alongside it, a special Star Wars model with locked planets, locked characters, and storylines could be made available on ShowRunner. Users would pay for the ability to use that model and a cut goes to Disney, no different than a videogame adaptation. Saatchi repeats: “Cinema to television: more control for consumers. Cinema to video games: more control for consumers.” He assures that there will still be I.P. contingent guardrails. The goal isn’t to make another meme machine like Sora—no “Yoda fighting Bugs Bunny with a banana”—but a platform that generates quality entertainment. The overall vision Saatchi paints here is mostly innocuous, a new art form to co-exist with, rather than compete with, established mediums. Until towards the end of the episode, where he says “The truth is we are a competitor.”

“It’s a video game,” Belloni observed.

“A videogame on steroids. Yeah, I think that’s right,” Saatchi said.

Except, it would be more than that. He painted for Belloni an experience no other medium has quite captured. Say Matt’s friend, let’s call him “Craig,” was a fan of the show Friends, and the I.P. was licensed out to Fable. Craig could easily type in a prompt to make Joey do something wild and outlandish, but that’s not where the real magic is. The Showrunner app would train its A.I. on the show to such precision that every prompt would result in an episode that is true to the Friends formula. Craig would feel like he is actually in the show. The whole gang would accept him as one of their own. Craig and the friends of Friends would “actually” be friends.

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Showrunner is framed as a platform that enhances connectivity: people creating episodes together and sharing them with their friends—surely no sizeable population in the 21st century could be at risk of doing away with their flimsy social connections altogether for the company of Rachel and Chandler—but a look on Fable’s history presents a wider view of their overall project. In 2019, they launched an A.I. character named “Lucy,” the protagonist from their V.R. adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves In The Walls, that users could have a two-way relationship with. The idea was an embodied A.I. assistant that can be your best friend. “Everything we do is at the service of bonding you to her.”

A few years later, Fable soon pivoted to a new project called The Simulation, in which users create entire societies of A.I. characters based on N.F.T. tokens. These characters would live independently of their one-on-one user interactions, existing in virtual societies among other A.I. characters where they could learn from each other, have their own daily needs and activities, and ultimately become more and more human as they are released from their A.I. villages into the “Grand Simulation,” where the hope is that one of them might achieve Artificial General Intelligence. “When we started on that quest, we felt that the movie Her by Spike Jonze offered an inspiring path of a relationship between an A.I. and a human,” Saatchi said in a quote to Gamesbeat in 2022. “But we realized that to connect emotionally, virtual beings need real lives, and they need to operate in space and time, have bodies, needs and struggle with living, just like us. We started to look at Westworld, The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Free Guy as examples of societies of A.I.s or virtual beings, playing off each other and eventually mixing seamlessly with human beings.”

As V.R. adoption began to plateau before growing past a niche market, as the metaverse was humbled by an unforgiving stock correction, as N.F.T.’s became a punchline, Fable had to pivot once again. Hence, Showrunner. The app is meant for screens: your television, your phone, your iPad. Saatchi emphasizes this on The Town presumably to distance himself from past failures. But the goal is fundamentally the same: ultimate curation not just in entertainment, but in reality itself. If they failed to fully bond human users to Lucy, or the A.I. characters that were allowed to roam and interact freely in their curated universes, the solution to bond humans with A.I. on a larger scale might be with characters mass culture has already absorbed. Who you’ve spent six seasons with before ever officially meeting.

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If all of this is starting to sound a little doomsaying, it’s worth pointing out one small hurdle in Fable’s plan of becoming the end of human creativity: the product sucks. The Hollywood Reporter had shown it to various showrunners and they thought the dialogue was terrible, the jokes were lame, and the A.I. models had only the vaguest semblance of the IP worlds they were inhabiting. When Matt Belloni pointed this out, Saatchi countered that of course people in Hollywood would have their own pre-conceived conceptions of the product given how threatening it will be to the entire industry. A Showrunner generated episode of something resembling South Park began circulating online, and the internet was none too kinder towards it than the Hollywood industry professionals Saatchi believes he so intimidates.

Despite the app’s inefficacy at creating something watchable, let alone revolutionary, it is worth knowing what sort of vision of the future these A.I. hustlers are so urgently trying to bring about. Right now the saving grace for artists of all kinds is just how bad A.I. is at creating even the lowest rungs of commercial entertainment. It is worth knowing because (1) A.I. is improving at an exponential rate and (2) A.I. doesn’t really need to outperform humans in the creation of entertainment: Our expectations for the quality of what we consume just needs to dip down far enough that it is still more profitable for the culture industry to use A.I. to churn out its swill.

On that second point, it is worth examining what kind of artifice we have made a part of our day to day lives that groomed civilization for an A.I. takeover to begin with. The mechanization of art into marketable outputs has always been a problem, and the 2010s only amplified it with its reliance on algorithms to determine not just what kind of shows to dump out on the streaming platforms, but the exact pacing, story patterns, and tropes that could keep people tuned in the longest. The majority of mainstream films had a hypereal uncanny valley effect from copious C.G.I. long before generative A.I. even existed. For nearly a century now, most of us spend a great deal of our waking hours in anti-human environments filled with cubicles and fluorescent lightings speaking in a kind of alien lingo meant to disguise any trace of emotion, as we all know to some degree we are captive; why wouldn’t we rather stop talking to our fellow inmates altogether and just have the machines talk to each other instead? But, mostly, it is important to understand the technocratic vision because it shows us that certain things we take to be an inviolable aspect of human existence are contingent on their machines not quite working as intended.

In any medium, an artist must dream up and struggle to bring into creation a vision out of solitude, perhaps in collaboration with others, and this art must percolate in the sphere of one’s own consciousness before it can be brought to the public. From there, you, the consumer, encounter this work that you did not create, that you do not control, that was not made for you specifically, that may or may not cater to your expectations or worldview or ontological orientation. In consuming art, you therefore encounter the Other. Let’s imagine, then, that Showrunner becomes such a resounding success that traditional cinema becomes a niche legacy form like vaudeville or opera. Users have abandoned traditional media formats to have all of their stories generated on Showrunner, where they can control the narrative and always be the hero of it. There is never any need to learn how to write, play an instrument, make a film, paint, act, or do any other creative endeavor that requires passion, craft, or discipline. All of that effort can be redirected into one’s day job instead, which will last right up until A.I. takes that as well. In this technocratic utopia, the Other can be, if not eliminated outright, then at least ventriloquized beyond all recognition to your content, until all images are images of your own making, and the entire known world becomes a house of mirrors.

Every Fable project thus far has only worked to isolate humanity from itself further than the age of social media already has, taking algorithmic entertainment to its absolute conclusion. Should this technology truly become viable, it will take more than a hardline stance against A.I. generated entertainment to resist it. It will take a complete unlearning of how the 21st century has taught us to consume.

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