Amazon MGM’s Dream of a ‘New Golden Age’ of Animation Hinges on Three Iffy-Looking AI-Created Kids Shows

At the AI on the Lot conference, the studio's COO Albert Cheng, along with creators for each show, made their case for generative AI.

What does it look like when Hollywood finally embraces artificial intelligence? In the three years since the labor strikes that laid down the ground rules for the use of generative AI in film and TV, as well as two new guild contracts soon to be put in place, we haven’t really seen it yet.

Sure, there are fringe examples from smaller filmmakers reviving dead stars or film festivals like Tribeca giving a platform to some shorts being made in Sora, but not a major studio putting real money behind it. You could imagine that, when it happens, it will be “Tilly Norwood” starring in a superhero movie or an entire studio film written by a computer model, but the reality is it’s unlikely — today or in the near future — to be that full-throated of an embrace.

Instead, it will probably look like what Amazon MGM Studios announced on Wednesday, May 27. The studio has greenlit three animated children’s series, each made with generative AI, that will soon be available on Prime Video, though no release dates were specified. The shows were announced and teased as part of two separate panel discussions to open Wednesday’s AI on the Lot conference, which took place on the Amazon MGM Studios lot in Culver City and was keynoted by Albert Cheng, Amazon MGM Studios’ chief operating officer.

The AI series were all developed as part of a pilot program called the GenAI Creators’ Fund and was done in partnership with the studio’s more tech-minded sister organization Amazon Web Studios. But make no mistake: this is a real, major TV studio giving the go-ahead to three AI-generated animated series from real creators and noted animators who proudly took a stage to talk about the excitement of working with AI.

So, were they any good? From what we saw, we’re less convinced these will today be the first to usher in what creator Albie Hecht said was us “entering a new Golden Age” of animation.

Amazon at AI on the Lot teased roughly five minutes from each series. The first was “Love, Diana: Music Hunters,” which is an animated series based on “Kids Diana Show,” which is one of the most popular channels on YouTube. The series was created by Hecht, now of a brand called pocket.watch but who was formerly President of Entertainment at Nickelodeon and who developed “SpongeBob SquarePants.” The characters’ big round heads and eyes look like “Cocomelon” creations, but the fact that the series is about a band of girl musicians traveling through space on a tour bus singing music that vaguely resembles K-pop and also has “Hunters” in the title should give a pretty good idea what audience it is trying to reach.

The second, “Cupcake & Friends,” is created by BuzzFeed Studios and is based on one of their web series. Though it’s very kid-friendly, the 2D-animated, web comic look, including a segment in 3D animation, is aiming for a quirkier brand of Internet humor.

And last is “Punky Duck,” which was created by Jorge R. Gutierrez, an Emmy winner who directed “The Book of Life” and created “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” and “Maya and the Three.” His AI series, seen in a quick teaser, resembled some of his past work of blocky, stop-motion figurines, but this time following a duck with a punk rock haircut and style as he pilots a spaceship, battles robots who hate punk rock, and more mayhem.

When asked what creating this series was like, Gutierrez told the crowd at AI On the Lot that it was like having sex and then immediately being handed the baby.

“I’m used to two years for a pilot, and something like this … it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast,” he said. “For someone like me who’s used to waiting so long, this has been a life-changer.” Gutierrez said that he designed the characters for “Punky Duck” himself, and the process for creating the pilot concept for the series was done in five weeks.

All three projects were also created in Amazon’s proprietary AI production platform that they’re, for now, calling Project Nara. It’s a platform that marries AI production with other tools like Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine, and Adobe Suite, and then is a model trained on Amazon MGM Studios IP. It means you’re not just punching prompts into a closed, single AI model like Midjourney over and over and hoping to get back a coherent, consistent result. The tool is similar to platforms like ComfyUI or Google’s Flow that operate like more common filmmaker editing software tools and incorporate AI, and the idea is to give filmmakers actual control to do what they want to see rather than finessing a prompt and hoping the slot machine spits out a winner.

Cheng explained that the whole suite is also there to actually prove there’s a human author behind what’s been generated. Amazon MGM, after all, wants to ensure that these AI shows can be copyrighted and monetized. He also said that the shows still need to have a certain cinematic quality, and while AI models “can get you 80 percent there,” there’s still a lot of human work that needs to go into finishing it.

The argument against all of this is that these three AI series could be taking away resources or opportunities from other filmmakers, people doing their own hard work and animation, all while employing fewer people to make them. In the past, Amazon has neglected kids programming, and these shows in a way represent a return to that market that might not have been there otherwise. But all three shows are the kinds of things Hollywood would likely greenlight with or without AI, including two shows based on existing, popular IP, and a third from an acclaimed, established filmmaker.

To that end, Cheng believes AI production could actually serve to bring production jobs back to Los Angeles (he wouldn’t mind some tax credits either).

“You need to think about a more nimble model. How do we start getting tax incentives for AI-assisted films for smaller crews? Because I’d rather make 10 shows in one sound stage instead of one. Not only that, it doesn’t take that long to make because then we can go on to the next show,” Cheng said during the AI on the Lot keynote. “So more people have more access to different roles and different projects throughout the year. If you think about these sound stages, in order to get more jobs through, you need to increase your throughput. More projects, even if you have smaller crews, but your turnover is a lot higher so that you have more ability for people to get jobs.”