Corporate greed, unchecked hubris, technology advancing too fast without any regard for its impact. All these themes are explored in the Fallout games, and in the wildly successful TV series that Amazon debuted in 2024. Someone at Amazon probably should have watched it, before submitting an “AI”-generated recap so full of errors and flubs that the company was forced to blow it up.

You’re probably familiar with the short recap video format, a little “previously on Battlestar Galactica” segment that now precedes many scripted streaming shows when they drop a new season. They can be essential for viewers who need a refresh, especially since the large scale of prestige streaming TV means it can be more than a year since the last one debuted. They’re short and easy, probably a couple of days’ work in the editing room, maybe a bit of voice-over.

But this small bit of human effort, to enhance the viewing experience of a show that reportedly costs more than $100 million per season to produce, is apparently too much for Amazon. The company has been using auto-generated alternatives that splice together short clips of the show with “AI”-powered voice-over to catch viewers up. If you watched the slop video for Fallout season 1, like Games Radar did, you’d think that the nuclear war that takes place in the show’s flashbacks occurred in the 1950s. In the games and the show, as is constantly repeated and confirmed, the Great War occurred in 2077.

It’s the kind of error that you’d see in a million “recap” edits posted to YouTube by people who didn’t actually watch the movie or TV show, and which are now, of course, replaced with AI slop. After the issues with the recap video were spotted by Games Radar, the recap was taken down from Amazon Prime Video. The Verge reports that similar recaps were made for other shows like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and have since been deleted.

The aesthetics of Fallout are indeed steeped in 1950s and 60s American imagery, though its fictional timeline extends far into our future even before the world gets destroyed. It’s an intentional and ironic choice meant to echo real history, when the world seemed to look forward to a mythical “atomic age” of technology even while dreading nuclear escalation during the Cold War. Fallout‘s pre-war culture and technology are, in many ways, frozen for over a century as unchecked commercialism and corporate power runs rampant. It’s a detail that’s crucial to the series’ identity and themes…and the kind of subtle distinction that large language models aren’t very good at spotting.

This isn’t Amazon’s first issue with AI slop on Prime Video. Just a couple of weeks ago the company pulled AI-generated English and Spanish audio tracks from several anime series, apparently generated and applied to the shows without the knowledge or consent of some of the original creators. Viewers complained of terrible audio “performances” from the AI-generated voices, and started sharing clips that would embarrass fan dub torrents from the 2000s.

Remember when Amazon made you pay extra for Prime in order to watch video without ads? I wonder where all that money is going.

Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld