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s 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.
