AI tool creates South Park episodes with user in starring role

A US company says it has cracked the formula for making an episode of South Park using artificial intelligence – and it allows users to be the star of the show.

Fable Simulation has created an AI tool that can create brief original episodes of the cartoon. “Not just the dialogue. It animates, it does the voices, it does the editing,” the company’s chief executive, Edward Saatchi, told the GamesBeat website.

The tool, called AI Showrunner, allows users to enter a one- or two-sentence prompt that then generates an episode, and can create a character based on the user’s own looks and voice.

Generative AI, the catch-all term for tech systems that produce convincing text and images from prompts, has gripped the public imagination since the launch of ChatGPT in November. It has also played a part in Hollywood actors joining writers on the picket lines over wages, technology and how to divide the profits of the digital streaming era.

Saatchi stressed that the South Park tool, produced without copyright permission, was purely for research and would not be available for public use.

“We did the South Park episode as an example and for research to show generative TV. We don’t want to profit from it and we are not releasing a way for other people to do it. We realised it was hard to illustrate how the model works without a comparison,” he said.

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