Amazon invests in Fable — the ‘Netflix of AI’ — where users can create TV shows with prompts

Amazon is backing a San Francisco startup behind a platform that allows users to create AI-generated scenes and episodes for TV shows by simply typing in a prompt.

The amount of Amazon’s investment in Fable was not revealed Wednesday in reports by Variety, The Wrap and others.

Fable has called its Showrunner service the “Netflix of AI,” where creators can use their own ideas and words to shape a story from scratch or inside a world someone else has already created.

Visitors to the Showrunner website are directed to join Discord where they can watch and make episodes.

The public launch features one original show called “Exit Valley,” which is described as a “Family Guy”-style satirical comedy set in Sim Francisco and taking on tech personalities such as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Fable previously released nine AI-generated episodes based on “South Park,” created using its proprietary AI model. The episodes have been viewed more than 80 million times, according to the company.

Fable was co-founded by CEO Edward Saatchi, who previously co-founded Oculus Story Studios, a division of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Meta.

“Hollywood streaming services are about to become two-way entertainment: audiences watching a season of a show [and] loving it will now be able to make new episodes with a few words and become characters with a photo,” Saatchi told Variety. “Our relationship to entertainment will be totally different in the next five years.”

Showrunner is focused on animated content at the start because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking video scenes, according to Variety. Saatchi told the magazine Fable wants to stay out of the “knife fight” among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content.