{"id":449782,"date":"2026-05-28T17:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/449782\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T17:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:27:09","slug":"amazon-mgm-just-greenlit-3-animated-ai-kids-shows-were-not-sold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/449782\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon MGM Just Greenlit 3 Animated AI Kids Shows \u2014 We’re Not Sold"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> in film and TV<\/a>, as well as two new guild contracts soon to be put in place, we haven\u2019t really seen it yet. <\/p>\n

Sure, there are fringe examples from smaller filmmakers reviving dead stars<\/a> or film festivals like Tribeca giving a platform to some shorts being made in Sora<\/a>, but not a major studio putting real money behind it. You could imagine that, when it happens, it will be \u201cTilly Norwood\u201d starring in a superhero movie or an entire studio film written by a computer model, but the reality is it\u2019s unlikely \u2014 today or in the near future \u2014 to be that full-throated of an embrace.<\/p>\n

\"THE<\/a> \"Hannah<\/a> <\/p>\n

Instead, it will probably look like what Amazon MGM Studios<\/a> announced on Wednesday, May 27. The studio has greenlit three animated children\u2019s 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\u2019s AI on the Lot<\/a> conference, which took place on the Amazon MGM Studios lot in Culver City and was keynoted by Albert Cheng, Amazon MGM Studios\u2019 chief operating officer.<\/p>\n

The AI series were all developed as part of a pilot program called the GenAI Creators\u2019 Fund and was done in partnership with the studio\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So, were they any good? From what we saw, we\u2019re less convinced these will today be the first to usher in what creator Albie Hecht said was us \u201centering a new Golden Age\u201d of animation.<\/p>\n

\"AA still from the AI-generated \u2018Love, Diana: Music Hunters\u2019Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n

Amazon at AI on the Lot teased roughly five minutes from each series. The first was \u201cLove, Diana: Music Hunters,\u201d which is an animated series based on \u201cKids Diana Show,\u201d 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 \u201cSpongeBob SquarePants.\u201d The characters\u2019 big round heads and eyes look like \u201cCocomelon\u201d 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 \u201cHunters\u201d in the title should give a pretty good idea what audience it is trying to reach. <\/p>\n

The second, \u201cCupcake & Friends,\u201d is created by BuzzFeed Studios and is based on one of their web series. Though it\u2019s very kid-friendly, the 2D-animated, web comic look, including a segment in 3D animation, is aiming for a quirkier brand of Internet humor. <\/p>\n

And last is \u201cPunky Duck,\u201d which was created by Jorge R. Gutierrez<\/a>, an Emmy winner who directed \u201cThe Book of Life\u201d and created \u201cEl Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera\u201d and \u201cMaya and the Three.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m used to two years for a pilot, and something like this \u2026 it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast,\u201d he said. \u201cFor someone like me who\u2019s used to waiting so long, this has been a life-changer.\u201d Gutierrez said that he designed the characters for \u201cPunky Duck\u201d himself, and the process for creating the pilot concept for the series was done in five weeks.<\/p>\n

All three projects were also created in Amazon\u2019s proprietary AI production platform that they\u2019re, for now, calling Project Nara. It\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u2019s Flow<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Cheng explained that the whole suite is also there to actually prove there\u2019s a human author behind what\u2019s 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 \u201ccan get you 80 percent there,\u201d there\u2019s still a lot of human work that needs to go into finishing it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To that end, Cheng believes AI production could actually serve to bring production jobs back to Los Angeles (he wouldn\u2019t mind some tax credits either). <\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to think about a more nimble model. How do we start getting tax incentives for AI-assisted films for smaller crews? Because I\u2019d rather make 10 shows in one sound stage instead of one. Not only that, it doesn\u2019t take that long to make because then we can go on to the next show,\u201d Cheng said during the AI on the Lot keynote. \u201cSo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does it look like when Hollywood finally embraces artificial intelligence? In the three years since the labor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,229034,14926,363,364,140039,111,139,69,145,437],"class_list":["post-449782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-on-the-lot","tag-amazon-mgm-studios","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-jorge-r-gutierrez","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}