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😂 South Park AI + The Future of AI TV

😂 South Park AI + The Future of AI TV

Plus an AI short film debut

Steve
July 22, 2023

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😂 South Park AI + The Future of AI TV
🕷 The Debut of Critterz
🍿 AI Kernels

South Park AI + The Future of AI TV 😮

Well, the best use case of AI has finally become clear: to replicate an episode of South Park. That’s exactly what a research team over at Fable Simulation did.

Fable Simulation is a team of ex-Pixar and ex-Oculus researchers who are building an AI app called Showrunner. Their goal is to build the reality TV of AIs: to build AIs that are truly living REAL daily lives in their simulations.

Soon, with the power of a prompt, you will be able to create an AI TV show.

You can watch AI South Park in this thread!

While they built an AI version of South Park, they have no intention of making that tool public due to IP issues. Nothing to worry about here.

Showrunner will soon be available to make your own shows with your own IP. In terms of process, creators will be able to:

Let the Simulation automatically create episodes
Give the Showrunner a prompt of a sentence or two
Give a prompt and then make edits

The team over at Fable will also be releasing IP of their own as multiple shows:

A space exploration simulation called 'The Prize'
A satire of Silicon Valley simulation called 'Exit Valley'
A playful detective simulation called 'Charlie Jupiter'

While Showrunner has received mixed results with some calling it “soulless”, we here at Hollywood AI are excited for what they’re building!

It’ll never replace humans, but maybe we’ll get some good entertainment!

The Debut of Critterz

Critterz is a short mockumentary about monsters in nature. It’s hilarious with wonderful visuals. And it was created with AI.

Mocking a David Attenborough nature documentary, a British voice narrates the different monsters he sees—which were created with DALL-E 2 by creative agency and production company Native Foreign.

The team over at Native Foreign used DALL-E 2 to generate hundreds of images of these adorable little monsters and then hired animators to come in and turn these 2D stills into a 3D world.

A red spider named “Blue”

When I taught animation way back when, and you asked someone to do an assignment, you would have good, serious students who showed promise, along with many hobbyists who thought it was going to be fun and interesting, and then they eventually burnt out or fizzled out. I was amazed that, out of the gate, Gen-1 DALL-E was producing work that showed promise.

And I thought, wow, if this is the ground floor of where this industry is going, we're starting at a pretty fascinating place. And once the technology caught up a little further, that's when I pitched to OpenAI, let's make a movie, let's tell a story. Let's do something that would show not only a real case study of what this AI is capable of, but also hopefully serve as a point of inspiration for creators. It knocked down all the barriers of time or money or resources – you’d been given a major turboboost in your ability to tell stories.

I mean, AI isn’t going to generate a Pixar film yet, but what it can do, even in its current form, is give you a visual foundation from which you can build a story.

Chad Nelson, creator of Critterz

DALL-E 2 was the main tool for imagery—but the team also used After Effects for background animations, Unreal Engine for the facial performance capture, and then Premiere for editing.

As Nelson said, AI isn’t going to generate a Pixar film, but it can give you a visual foundation from which you can build a story.

Critterz is worth the watch, go check it out here.

AI Kernels

Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:

8,500 authors ask AI to stop “stealing” their books. They want a) the power to grant their permission and b) get compensated. → TechCrunch

Google is testing a tool to write articles. Their goal is to help journalists, not replace them! → PC Magazine

“To save itself, Hollywood must build its own ChatGPT.” If you can’t beat em, join em! Hell yeah! → WIRED

AI-Themed Content of the Week

Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI.

It might be a book, movie, whatever.

Today we’ve got AI is Good For You, a book by an ex-Google robotics engineer Eric Jang. Let’s take a look at the last 10 years and the next 10 years.