AUSTIN, Texas — The founder of TriplePlay Studios, viral marketing company, said he took a leap and created an artificial intelligence-generated animated series.
Alex Craig said "Bear Wars" is an animated series about AI teddy bears fighting a war in the future. The series premiere was packed Saturday night.
Craig said it took them about three weeks to create the first episode. Typically, a large production needs dozens of people, but he said they were able to do it with a team of four or five.
Craig said they used a program called Midjourney to help prompt and create images. He then took the images and put them into a tool called Runway that animates the images, then put them all together.
He spoke with KVUE about why he chose to use AI instead of going the traditional route.
"In the world of creating movies, you have to spend so much money, you have to raise a ton of money," Craig said. "It makes it difficult for anyone that wants to be a storyteller and that wants to create film to do that."
Craig said all of the tools they used to make "Bear Wars" are available online and easy to access, making the creative possibilities endless.
A big concern with AI is it will cut jobs. Craig said he is making the series without a CGI artist, voice actors, a sound team and more.
"I think with any new revolution with technology or anything like that, jobs adapt and people change. And, hopefully, the AI ecosystem does that for people as well," Craig said.
Craig said he believes there will be more AI-generated series and movies in the future.
"I think, in the future, we're probably going to have content that you can't even tell is made by AI," Craig said. "It's kind of a scary thought and kind of an unknown of the future."
Craig used "older AI" to create his series: Open AI, the inventors of ChatGPT. The program is called Sora, and all you have to do is type a description of what you want it to create and then – boom – you have a realistic-looking video.