A new entertainment startup, titled And Then, says it will use AI in service of the story. Courtesy Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Imagine you are sitting in a diner, and a man walks in with a bomb. You have five minutes until the police arrive. Can you persuade him to surrender? It's a classic movie plot, cliché even, but of course, you can't talk back to the movie, it is a one-way medium. Generative AI technology, however, can turn that experience into something much more interactive. A pair of TV veterans, working with a former journalist and technologist, are betting that while the technology may be nascent, the time to take that leap is now. Related Stories Movies Tilly Norwood Is "an AI Tool, Not a Performer" Says U.K. Acting Union Equity: "We Are Concerned About Where That Work Has Come From" Business Electronic Arts to Go Private in $55 Billion Deal Backed by Saudi PIF and Silver Lake Gavin Purcell, a former late night TV producer for NBC's Late Night and The Tonight Show, Kevin Pereira, the former host of the G4 series Attack of the Show, and Rex Sorgatz, a former editor for Wired and MSNBC, have launched a new company called And Then, which seeks to leverage human creativity and AI tools to create an entirely new form of interactive entertainment. And Then is launching with a handful of interactive experiences created by the founders, including a take on Password or The $100,000 Pyramid, with users having to feed clues to an AI-powered "celebrity" partner "La La Stardust;" and an experience where users need to persuade an alien manning a docking bay to allow their cargo ship to land. Each experience has an author or byline, allowing users to seek out creators that resonate with them. The experiences are audio-based (though there is a text mode for those who want it), with users speaking to the AI characters to try and accomplish the goal or task at hand. The result is surprisingly emotional, with the rush of having La La Stardust guess the right word, or a sense of relief when "Larry" disengages the bomb in the diner. "The thing that's kind of engaging about this idea, is you are getting into a conversation," Purcell says. There is something weird about the audio part of it all. When you are just talking, it makes it feel like it's okay to pretend, it's a little childlike in a weird way, you start to kind of buy into this thing. So I think for us, what we thought about is, what are interactive moments that could be really interesting? The goal with these is, ultimately, multi-chapter narratives which will be something we want to do. "My thesis about this is that younger people, who are already more performative when it comes to media, they're already on camera a lot more, is that I think they're going to want to be more active and more participatory in things," he adds. And, surprisingly for a startup built on AI technology, humans are at the center of what they are building. Each game, world, and character is created by a person, the rules are set by the creator, the AI is in service of the story. It's a contrast to the giant LLMs, which are capable of a lot, but require a lot of work on the user's part to get there. "I think that's the part that kind of like people are missing right now, when something is available and it's so big and so wide open, it's only once you start putting boxes on it that it starts to reveal itself as content," Purcell says. Take the alien docking experience. When The Hollywood Reporter recently played it, it was a bribe of freshly-baked Levain cookies that ultimately secured passage to the port. But everyone else's experience will be uniquely their own, by design. "Kevin made that in four hours, it was his idea, and I don't think an AI just coming up with that on its own would have been nearly as fun," Purcell says. "It may have gotten somewhere, but it'll start to feel a little cliched.I am a big believer that sure, AI will get better at making stuff, but I still think the human individual story and the spark will add something to it for a very long time. I think that's one area where even if the tools get great, the storytelling that a person has based on their background and their life and their experience is always going to bring something unique to it." The goal is to have a regular cadence of experiences, some wholly original and some built on a central premise. The game show, for example, can have fresh clues and contestants every day, or Change My Mind can see the user debate an AI competitor on a fresh topic that changes frequently. The company has raised some capital from the a16z speedrom accelerator program, but are early in the process of seeking investors, while also plotting how to monetize And Then. Advertising may be a part of that, as could be subscriptions (i.e. in a mult