Amazon is making an AI-animated TV show called “Good Advice Cupcake.” Its original creator is angry

Author and illustrator Loren Brantz never imagined this book would be so popular cartoon The character she created nearly a decade ago will one day be the subject of intellectual property The dispute involved BuzzFeed, AmazonVideo streaming service,generator artificial intelligence. But this is exactly the situation she finds herself in today.

“Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed up on,” Brantz says of her former employer, BuzzFeed.

This week, Brantz shared Instagram share Calling out the once dominant media brand. She was responding to news that the company had licensed her advice-giving character, Cuppy, to Prime Video, which plans to release a series called Cupcake and friendsDeveloped using artificial intelligence tools. It is one of three new animated shows greenlit through the GenAI Creators Fund, a joint initiative from Amazon Amazon MGM Studios and Web Services.

“This is an attack on artists everywhere,” Brantz declared in her post.

The headlines announcing the project were a nightmare come true, a scenario that everyone working in a creative field in the age of artificial intelligence is beginning to fear. Digital media, which has been constantly restructured over the years, appears to be a particularly fertile ground for such deals. (Media mogul Byron Allen later became BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO Buying a majority stake in the brand for $120 million, describing plans to leverage artificial intelligence to turn BuzzFeed into a YouTube competitor.)

Brantz is currently the Executive Creative Director of the company YouTube jam Mrs. RachelShe criticized BuzzFeed and Amazon for plans to turn her character into a “soulless AI doll” on Instagram. “I encourage you to boycott BuzzFeed and any AI-generated or cartoon-adjacent cartoons,” she wrote.

Brantz began writing and illustrating for BuzzFeed in 2014, at the height of the outlet’s influence. She has also been working on her own books and posting original content on her social media channels. In 2017, she went viral across multiple platforms with a comic strip featuring the anthropomorphic, innocent-looking “Good Advice Cupcake” whose behavior changes violently as she suggests that “when life gets you down, you grab it by the balls — and make life your bitch.”

“The character is 100 percent based on my personality as someone who is intensely optimistic and almost pathologically positive,” Brantz tells WIRED. “It was a way for me to give people motivational advice in a kind and humorous way.”

Originally, Brantz had conceived the idea for Cuppy for a children’s book showcase. After Disney’s publishing imprint picked up the idea, they introduced it into online comics. When it blew up on social media, BuzzFeed saw an opportunity.

“Since then, there has been a lot of debate about how to move forward with the animation as a web series at BuzzFeed,” Brantz recalls. In the end, BuzzFeed produced eight episodes of the series Good tip cupcake Web series that ran throughout the summer of 2019. Topics included “Advice on Your Messy Life” and “Advice on Coming Out.”

“When all this happened, AI didn’t exist,” Brantz says, noting that she wouldn’t have signed a contract allowing BuzzFeed to pursue more Cuppy material created using this now-ubiquitous technology. “In the end, I trusted them, despite my naivety, when they said they were not interested in continuing to work with Cuppy without my involvement if I left, and that they would respect my creative wishes for her,” she says. Brantz left BuzzFeed for Mrs. Rachel In 2023 and continues to license its own character from the company for its content, including a Good tip cupcake An Instagram page with more than 2 million followers.