Roku has released twenty-four hour television channel that consists entirely of AI-generated content, as first reported by Cord Cutters News. The channel, known as Fairground AI, is one of four added to the company’s library as part of their August update.
Fairground AI is the brainchild of entrepreneur Colin Petrie-Norris, founder of the Comcast-owned streaming service Xumo. He launched Fairground Entertainment in May of last year with the goal of creating the world’s first streaming service dedicated exclusively to AI-generated television. “The entertainment industry is at a pivotal moment, driven by the rapid advancement of AI technologies that promise to redefine content creation,” Petrie-Norris told Variety.
The success of Roku and Petrie-Norris’ newest gambit is, of course, dependent on whether Americans will accept the presence of fully artificially-generated content as paid entertainment. AI has already been adopted in virtually every corner of the federal zeitgeist, with everyone from household brands like CocaCola to official White House correspondents brazenly using the technology in their newest press releases. Yet the technology’s growth has also been mirrored by a growing contingent of Americans frustrated by an Internet inundated with low-effort AI content — pejoratively known as “AI slop.” That’s to say nothing of the ongoing efforts by members of the entertainment industry to prevent the technology from taking their jobs.
Fairground AI’s “content creators” — to whatever extent such a term is relevant here — consist largely of people Petrie-Norris found using the technology on social media (per Yahoo News). From a brief parse of the channel’s live feed, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of unifying trend among the content shown, barring the obvious: an anime-style music video might be followed by a faux stop-motion fairy tale, which might in turn lead to a loose pastiche of The Jeffersons. Many of these segments, no more than ten minutes long, are separated by ads; naturally, these commercials are also AI-generated.
Roku’s decision not to advertise Fairground suggests an awareness that the backlash towards prodigious AI use is of potential relevance to their bottom line. Sure enough, since Cord Cutters first brought attention to the channel, numerous Roku customers have taken to social media to voice their displeasure, often in language unrepeatable here. That the company has chosen to premiere the channel anyways, then, signals a willingness to weather the storm — or at least to test the waters.