It's Fanfiction, You Have Reinvented Fanfiction
Showrunner wants to turn you into a happy little content prompter for the ‘Netflix of AI’: I read today that Edward Saatchi, co-founder of Oculus Story Studio, is building technology to generate fanfiction with prompts. No, really. From the article:
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.
And also:
The company ultimately wants to partner with major studios like Disney to develop branded models that would allow, for example, you to prompt up scenes featuring characters from The Mandalorian. This would “give people a way to create millions of new scenes, thousands of episodes, or even their own movies,” Saatchi reasoned.
And of course, yes, they would like to charge people for the ability to do this, i.e., to make this content that they will then likely use to attract eyeballs and mouse clicks onto their platform.
I actually think the title of my post is incredibly misleading. "Reinventing" being used to describe this kind of work implies that these people organically came up with this idea that people like building new stories set in the worlds they love. What Showrunner seems to be doing is wanting in on the action that already exists. There are thriving communities of people writing fanfiction, making video edits, participating in fic exchanges, narrating each others' fics, and so on. They do this for free, and not all of it is good quality, but through this, people find community on the internet, presumably build their creative writing abilities, and just do something that brings them joy.
And I am old enough to remember when the big media companies and IP owners hated this stuff! When every fic on Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal and Tumblr started with the disclaimer "I do not own these characters please do not sue me!!!" (or something to that effect). People created fanworks even when it carried legal risk because the act of creating for each other was, is, inherently meaningful. Following along with a fic writer who had a distinctive style, interesting headcanons, and an active Tumblr presence was genuinely delightful. I say this as both an ex-fandom participant and a current social computing researcher: fan communities are built on reciprocity, curation, and genuine human connection1.
Disney's incentive in this seems fairly obvious. Licensing their IP like this can be a way to cheaply outsource their franchise-fication of everything, which already nets them good money. But middleman companies like Fable fundamentally misunderstand why people do this. They seem to think the appeal is just shuffling characters around, "make them do X, now make them do Y." That's not it. The appeal is the community and the creative practice. You can't replicate that by selling people a prompt box, IP assets, and calling it the "Netflix of AI." That's just playing dolls, and media consumers are not (all) children.
I have not read this entire thesis but only the sections on gift culture, which are very cool.↩