Amazon Is Developing an AI-Animated “Good Advice Cupcake” Series, Sparking Outrage from its Original Creator.

Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never anticipated that a beloved cartoon character she created nearly ten years ago would eventually find itself at the center of an intellectual property conflict involving BuzzFeed, Amazon’s video streaming service, and generative artificial intelligence. Yet, that’s precisely the situation she faces today.

“Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with,” Brantz remarks about BuzzFeed, her previous employer.

This week, Brantz took to Instagram to call out the once-prominent media brand. Her post came in response to news that the company had licensed her advice-giving cupcake character, Cuppy, to Prime Video, which intends to launch a series titled Cupcake & Friends, developed using AI tools. This is one of three new animated shows approved via the GenAI Creators’ Fund, a collaboration between Amazon Web Services and Amazon MGM Studios.

“This is an assault on artists everywhere,” Brantz proclaimed in her post.

The headlines announcing the project felt like a nightmare come to life—and a scenario that anyone in a creative profession has started to dread in the AI era. Digital media outlets, having undergone constant restructuring over the years, would appear to be particularly susceptible to such deals. (Media mogul Byron Allen recently became BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO after acquiring a majority stake in the brand for $120 million, outlining plans to harness AI to transform BuzzFeed into a competitor for YouTube.)

Brantz, a former executive creative director for the YouTube educator Ms. Rachel, criticized BuzzFeed and Amazon for their intentions to turn her character into a “soulless AI puppet” on Instagram. “I encourage you to boycott BuzzFeed and any AI-produced or adjacent animation,” she urged.

Brantz started writing and illustrating for BuzzFeed in 2014, at the peak of the outlet’s influence. Simultaneously, she was working on her own books and sharing original content on her social media channels. In 2017, she went viral with a comic featuring an anthropomorphic and innocent-looking “Good Advice Cupcake,” whose tone violently shifts as she advises, “when life gets you down, you gotta grab it by the balls—and make life your bitch.”

“The character is 100 percent based on my own personality as someone who is aggressively optimistic and nearly pathologically positive,” Brantz tells WIRED. “It was my way of delivering motivational advice to people in a cute and humorous manner.”

Initially, Brantz conceived Cuppy for a children’s book pitch. After a Disney publishing imprint passed on the idea, she incorporated it into her internet comics. When it gained traction on social media, BuzzFeed recognized an opportunity.

“From there, there was extensive discussion on how to animate it as a web series at BuzzFeed,” Brantz recalls. Ultimately, BuzzFeed produced eight episodes of a Good Advice Cupcake web series, which aired during the summer of 2019. Topics ranged from “Advice on Your Messy Life” to “Advice on Coming Out.”

“When this all started, AI didn’t even exist,” Brantz explains, emphasizing that she would never have agreed to a contract permitting BuzzFeed to create additional Cuppy material using this now-common technology. “In the end, I naïvely trusted them when they claimed they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without my involvement if I ever left and that they would honor my creative wishes for her,” she reflects. Brantz departed BuzzFeed for Ms. Rachel in 2023 and continued to license her character from the company for her content, including a Good Advice Cupcake page on Instagram with over 2 million followers.