Unlike many gen AI-focused entertainment companies that use the technology in ways that aren’t necessarily visible to audiences, Saatchi and his team at Fable created Showrunner to allow users to generate content tailored to their specific preferences. Currently, Showrunner operates on a Discord server where users can create short animated videos by selecting characters and art styles from a list and writing prompts to dictate the characters’ dialogue and interactions with their surroundings.

For instance, if you want to see Elon Musk and Sam Altman conversing about turning homelessness into a software service in an office break room, Showrunner can generate a clip that mostly fits this vision. These clips, styled to match one of the platform’s preset show aesthetics like Exit Valley—a blend of Silicon Valley and Family Guy—feature characters with AI-generated voices mimicking real individuals. The animations often reflect a mechanical stiffness, emphasizing the machine automation over human artistry in Showrunner’s production.

Currently free, Fable plans to implement a future subscription model for Showrunner, potentially costing between $10–$20 per month. Although presently limited to its own original programming, the platform has attracted interest from other studios such as Disney, who might license their IP to Showrunner.

In a recent conversation with Saatchi, he reflected on his time with Oculus, admitting to being overly confident and later humbled by the studio’s closure. This experience led him to reassess consumer desires in entertainment and conclude that the future lies in generative AI.

“We were incredibly arrogant after Meta acquired Oculus,” Saatchi recalled. “I remember pitching our ideas throughout Hollywood with an attitude like, ‘You’re done; we’re taking over.’ But ultimately, our impact on the industry was negligible, and our VR movie revenue amounted to around $10.”

To Saatchi’s mind, the big issue with VR was that it kept users in a kind of limbo where they were expected to be both passive and interactive depending on which scenes they were watching. Alternating between those two modes of engagement, Saatchi told me, was part of Oculus’ plan to make its projects feel like crosses between traditional movies and video games. But Saatchi’s own disinterest in watching VR movies was a clear sign to him that the technology was a dead end he should move on from in favor of something more dynamic.

Saatchi’s interest in gen AI was actually sparked by a technical roadblock he and his collaborators ran into while developing a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2003 children’s book, Wolves in the Walls. In both tellings of the story, a young girl named Lucy lives in constant fear of the wolves living in the walls of her house, while her family insists that the creatures aren’t real. Saatchi and his team wanted their version of Lucy to be able to have fluent conversations with players / viewers as she guided them through the various rooms in her house. But the character was limited to reciting canned bits of dialogue rather than responding with context-specific speech.

This hurdle got Saatchi thinking more seriously about how he might be able to build Lucy as a complex “digital being” capable of having complicated interactions with people. That concept put Saatchi on a path to working with a team from OpenAI to see if it was possible. It wasn’t, not really. But the experience of building a slightly more robust Lucy character convinced Saatchi that generative AI could be the key to creating a new kind of entertainment experience.

“We made Lucy into a character that you can talk to and video chat with,” Saatchi said. “But what we quickly realized is that if you want to make a character truly live — which became our big goal — then you have to build a simulation of their world. They can’t just be a brain in a jar, like one character by themselves. They have to have a family, they have to have a life.”

The idea of building simulations — sandboxed virtual environments defined by specific rules — to make AI characters feel more multifaceted by giving them contexts to exist in is what led to Showrunner using its SHOW-1 model to produce a series of unlicensed South Park episodes.

Showrunner could approximate South Park’s visual style and musical cues, but it struggled to re-create the show’s comedic patter or the kind of chemistry between characters that, traditionally, is rooted in human actors’ performances. Also, the ersatz South Park just wasn’t funny, and it felt more like poorly written fanfiction than episodes of television that people might actually want to watch. But to Saatchi, the experiment demonstrated that Showrunner could be fashioned into a service — one dedicated to giving its users a way to prompt up “shows” of their own, one AI generated scene at a time.

Saatchi speaks about Showrunner the way many pro-gen AI founders do — with an optimistic enthusiasm that doesn’t exactly feel justified when you look at what the platform is currently capable of churning out. He sees it as the “Netflix of AI” and thinks that, with enough users writing the right prompts, it could produce something comparable to The Simpsons, Euphoria, or Toy Story. But Saatchi also believes the real appeal to Showrunner is its ability to create entertainment that’s more interactive than traditional films and shows.

“We think the Toy Story of AI isn’t going to be a cheaply produced animated movie, it’s going to be something that’s playable,” Saatchi told me. “Most people feel that generative AI is a tool to make the same, but cheaper, and we’re trying to say it’s a new kind of medium. Cinema was not about saving theater owners money; it was highly disruptive and took years to explore as a medium. I feel like the industry is kind of cutting off that exploratory element with generative AI by just shoving it into movies.”

When I brought up the ongoing conversation about gen AI’s potential to put people in creative fields out of work, Saatchi said what almost everyone in his position says — that he sees Showrunner as a platform that’s meant to supplement traditionally produced entertainment rather than replace it. He told me that he finds the idea of studios embracing this kind of technology strictly for cost-saving reasons rather grim. Saatchi also stressed that, while Showrunner is built on a number of LLMs, the company works with human artists and animators to develop its visual assets “because something is just clearly lost without that.”

“I don’t think there’s any papering over the fact that AI is going to cut jobs, but that’s why we’re not very interested in the whole cheaper VFX paradigm that most other folks are going after,” Saatchi explained. “If all that we can do with such a powerful technology is just cut jobs, what was the point? Nobody’s gonna go to the cinema to say, ‘I heard this was the Toy Story of AI. I’ve really got to get my ticket because it’s so cool that they spent so little on this.’”

What Saatchi does think people will be willing to pay for is the ability to generate scenes based on licensed IP. Though Showrunner’s core use case right now is making short, unpolished clips based on Fable’s in-house properties, 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.

”Our idea would be that, instead of people getting excited about stormtroopers in ancient Rome, which is, like, a cheap concept, there’s a Star Wars model that 700 people have developed under Dave Filoni’s direction,” Saatchi said. “These models would have real characters and a world that could be explored through prompting, and you could also inadvertently trigger scenes within those worlds in a way that would make it feel as though you’re uncovering something unknown.”

_{A clip from Fable’s Everything Is Fine.}

Throughout our conversation, Saatchi was insistent about Showrunner being a good thing and a revolutionary tool designed to give users a new way of engaging with media. But he agreed when I pointed out that the system he’s describing makes it sound like Showrunner would effectively turn its subscribers into unpaid employees working for some of Hollywood’s biggest and most powerful studios. Studios would own anything generated with Showrunner’s branded models trained on copyrighted IP, and users will eventually have to pay to use the service.

But Saatchi stressed that, while Showrunner definitely wants to work with companies like Disney, he is also interested in collaborating with smaller creators who would stand to benefit greatly from the company’s business model. An indie filmmaker could license their new project to Showrunner and subsequently be paid a portion of revenue share based on how many scenes people were generating with the model based on their movie. Saatchi could not give me a timeline on when Showrunner might start trying to establish those kinds of partnerships, but he was bullish about them being part of what makes the platform a boon to independent creators.

“This could create something where creators can earn money when people are emotionally connected enough to their work that they themselves want to make something with it,” Saatchi said. “Compare that to what creators earn just from people viewing their work online. Yes, there is a kind of ‘we’re all employees of Disney’ element, but from a moral point, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

Listening to Saatchi describe what he wants Showrunner to become, it actually sounds a bit like Roblox and Fortnite. Not the building or battle royale of it all, but rather the way those games encourage players to create their own maps, share them, and get other people to do the same thing. The Roblox Corporation and Epic have both built platforms where being a consumer can also essentially mean being a worker — one whose labor serves only to contribute to the corporations’ bottom lines.

But whereas those games are free to play, Fable very much wants people paying upfront to use Showrunner. If Showrunner were truly capable of conjuring up imaginative, detailed worlds that felt like thoughtful works of art, Saatchi’s pitch might not sound so dubious and mildly exploitative on its face. But what Fable is shopping around right now sounds like yet another attempt at using AI to do something that human artists are already quite capable of doing much, much better.