“Nothing that was said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through,” Brantz says of her former employer BuzzFeed.
This week, Brantz shared an Instagram post calling out the once-major media brand. She was reacting to the news that the company has licensed her mentoring cupcake character, Cuppy, to Prime Video, which is planning to release a series. cupcakes and friendsDeveloped with AI tools. It is one of three new animated shows greenlit through the GenAI Creators Fund, a joint initiative of Amazon Web Services and Amazon MGM Studios.
“This is an attack on artists everywhere,” Brantz declared in his post.
The headlines announcing the project were a nightmare come true – and a scenario that everyone working in a creative field has come to fear in the age of AI. Digital media outlets, which have been constantly reorganized over the past few years, would seem to be particularly fertile ground for such deals. (Media mogul Byron Allen became chairman and CEO of BuzzFeed after purchasing a majority stake in the brand for $120 million. He described a plan to leverage AI to transform BuzzFeed into a YouTube competitor.)
Brantz, the former executive creative director of YouTube teacher Ms. Rachel, criticized BuzzFeed and Amazon for their plans to turn her character into a “benign AI puppet” on Instagram. “I encourage you to boycott BuzzFeed and any AI-generated or related animations,” she wrote.
Brantz began writing and illustrating for BuzzFeed in 2014, at the height of the outlet’s influence. She was also working on her own books and posting original content on her social media channels. In 2017, she went viral on multiple platforms with a comic featuring the anthropomorphic and innocent-looking “Good Advice Cupcake” whose demeanor turns violent as she suggests that “when life lets you down, you have to grab it by the balls – and make life your bitch.”
“The character is 100 percent based on my own personality, which is aggressively optimistic and almost pathologically positive,” Brantz told WIRED. “It was a way for me to give people motivational advice in a cute and humorous way.”
Originally, Brantz came up with the flask for a children’s book pitch. After Disney Publishing caught wind of the idea, they included it in their internet comics. And when it spread on social media, BuzzFeed saw an opportunity.
Brantz recalls, “From there, there was a lot of back and forth on how to move forward to animating it as a web series on BuzzFeed.” Ultimately, BuzzFeed produced eight episodes. Good Advice Cupcakes Webseries, which ran until summer 2019. Topics included “Advice on Your Messy Life” and “Advice on Coming Out”.
“When all this happened, AI didn’t even exist,” Brantz says, noting that she would never have signed a contract allowing BuzzFeed to push QP content created with this ubiquitous technology. She says, “In the end, I trusted him, even if naively, when he said he had no interest in continuing Cuppy without involving me if I ever left, and that he would respect my creative wishes for that.” Brantz leaves BuzzFeed Ms Rachel in 2023 and continued to license his own characters from the company for his material, including a Good Advice Cupcakes Page on Instagram with over 2 million followers.
<a href