Amazon Pulls AI-Generated ‘Fallout’ Recap Ahead Of Season 2 Amidst Backlash

It’s quite extraordinary, the things Amazon can’t be bothered with. For instance, the company simply cannot be bothered to hire someone to put together a short recap of the first season of Fallout. The second season debuts next week on Prime Video, and a helpful recap video is pretty standard for the industry. Instead of paying a human being to edit a recap video together, Amazon used generative AI. The results were . . . not good.

You see, Amazon also couldn’t be bothered to pay someone to actually watch said AI recap video and ensure that it was accurate. AI is, of course, notoriously prone to “hallucinate” and make up details instead of admitting when it doesn’t know the answer. Why bother fact-checking? It’s just a silly TV show!

After fan backlash and a series of mocking articles landed online, Amazon pulled the AI recap, which included a monotonous AI dub spouting off all sorts of incorrect information. These mistakes included:

The flashbacks, in which we see Walton Goggins’ character and his family in a retro-futuristic 2070s, were mis-identified as the 1950s by the AI. Nobody at Amazon caught this incredibly obvious mistake.

The recap claimed that the Ghoul gave Ella Purnell’s Lucy a choice to “die or leave with him” when they go after Kyle MacLachlan’s character, Hank, as he heads across the desert to New Vegas. This makes the interaction sound threatening, when in fact Lucy and the Ghoul are fairly chummy at this point.

But the inaccuracies are just one symptom of a much larger problem and even a perfectly accurate recap – the bare minimum one would expect from this kind of video – would still be problematic. AI is a useful tool but a poor replacement for human labor and creativity. Recaps aren’t the most important part of a show, obviously, but they’re very useful for viewers and, in the right hands, can also be a lot of fun in their own right.

Jane the Virgin featured hilarious recaps before each episode that really leaned into that show’s parody of telenovelas. Vince Vaughn’s Apple TV series, Bad Monkey, did something very similar with its recaps. Like a good trailer, a good recap can set the tone and help viewers focus on the important bits, highlighting details people might have missed or indicating where we should focus.

You won’t get this from AI. You can’t even get a competently edited recap of Amazon’s biggest show of December. Of course, Amazon is saving a buck by putting out AI slop instead of a professional recap, but human talent is paying for it in the long run.

“Video Recaps marks a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming,” VP of technology at Prime Video, Gérard Medioni, said in a statement when these AI recaps were first revealed. “This first-of-its-kind feature demonstrates Prime Video’s ongoing commitment to innovation and making the viewing experience more accessible and enjoyable for customers.”

How AI recaps make the viewing experience “more enjoyable” remains a mystery, given entire YouTube channels exist where very real and talented human beings make detailed and useful recaps for fans. For instance, here is a recap of Fallout Season 1 – made by an actual human being – that Amazon could very easily paid someone to make:

Then again, not paying people seems to be more important than making the “viewing experience more accessible and enjoyable.” At this point, most of these companies have sunk so much money into AI, they kind of need to use it whenever possible, even as (a lousy) proof of concept. But that’s not good for people working in these industries.

As one commenter on reddit noted, “I’m an editor who literally used to cut these types of recaps together as part of my old job. I would get notes from the client, watch the show, mark up the episodes, and then carefully string together a recap that hopefully had a little stylistic panache while still going over the main points that were needed for the next season.

“I moved on to other types of editing, but am currently struggling to find much work, as are many talented editors I know with years and years of experience. So yeah…this definitely took someone’s job.”

It may just be recaps now, but AI is worming its way into more and more aspects of life and the entertainment industry. The problem is that AI certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to brainstorming, organization, research and so forth, but it’s very bad at actual creativity. A lot of executives and tech bros don’t really understand that – they’re good at business stuff but couldn’t identify actual creativity if it slapped them in the face.

Champions of AI are constantly posting AI clips on X and elsewhere and gushing over how it’s going to totally overtake Hollywood, but I have yet to see a single AI clip that isn’t wooden, fake and lifeless. Tech evangelists are pushing this like it’s the second coming of NFTs, but I think they underestimate the widespread distaste for all things AI, and our human need for a human touch.

In other news, Disney is at once suing Google over copyright infringement for its generative AI and signing away its soul to ChatGPT, licensing its vast library of content to be used by the Sora AI video-generation service. None of this will end well, I suspect, but at least we’ll have generative AI chatbots to reassure us that everything will be okay. (Seriously, go ask ChatGPT and it will reassure you that while you have every reason to be worried, it will all work out okay in the end. Would you like it to compile a list of reasons not to be worried about the coming apocalypse?)

I’ve reached out to Amazon for comment on the AI recaps and the company’s decision to pull the Fallout video, and will update this post if and when they respond. It’s certainly the kind of bad press that the company wanted to avoid less than a week before Season 2’s debut on Prime Video. Of course, this is an unforced error if ever there was one. C’est la vie.

I’m genuinely excited for Fallout Season 2. I thought the first season was great fun. Sure, it changed some lore stuff around, but it got the tone of the video games right and the casting was pitch-perfect. This time around, instead of releasing all episodes at once, Amazon is wisely releasing one episode per week. Look for my recaps and reviews of the new season here on this blog. You can check out my weekend streaming guide right here.