Edward Saatchi, CEO of Amazon-backed startup Fable, said AI is “possibly the end of human creativity,” framing it as the end of creativity as an exclusively human endeavor rather than a negative outcome. He made the remarks on CNBC’s Squawk Box as Fable’s interactive platform, Showrunner, announced a “non-commercial, academic” effort to reconstruct lost footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. According to Deadline, the initiative aims to approximate Welles’ intended version over the next two years.
Showrunner’s Welles project and creative stakes
Saatchi said the team wanted to train its AI on “the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years, Orson Welles,” envisioning a future where audiences “enjoy entertainment created by AIs.” The original Ambersons, released after Citizen Kane, was cut by the studio, including a revised, upbeat ending Welles did not approve. About 43 minutes from the director’s cut were destroyed to recover silver nitrate, and the fate of the missing material has become a major Hollywood mystery, with searches extending to Brazil, where Welles spent time when the alterations occurred.
Warner Bros., which has been involved in recent efforts to revitalize classic titles, has not formally endorsed the Ambersons reconstruction. Saatchi described the work as a painstaking AI process intended to get “as close as possible to Welles’ exact vision – as close as possible without finding the destroyed footage.”
Rebuilding scenes from fragments
Filmmaker and researcher Brian Rose has joined the Showrunner project after five years attempting to reassemble 30,000 missing frames. His prior work involved rebuilding sets in 3D and matching camera moves to documentary evidence, the script, studio and Welles notes, set photos, interviews, and archives. Showrunner says that out of 73 scenes in the original film, 21 were cut or reshot and 39 were shortened; Rose said only 13 remained intact, calling the changes radical and made without Welles’s approval.
Studios’ evolving view of AI-generated content
Saatchi acknowledged industry anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs, a concern reflected in 2023 labor negotiations. Still, he characterized AI as a “huge revenue generator,” noting conversations with Disney and other major players. He outlined a scenario where a film releases with an AI model alongside it, enabling “millions of new scenes” and even full fan-generated features by the end of opening weekend. While studios resisted such ideas a year ago, Saatchi said they are now considering how to monetize AI rather than leave value to tech firms outside the studio ecosystem. He added that computer-generated art would have excited figures like Warhol and DaVinci.
