Fallout season 1’s error-filled AI recap was so bad, Amazon yanked it

Corporate greed, unchecked hubris, technology advancing too fast without worrying about its impact. All of these themes are explored in the To fall games, and in the hit TV series that Amazon launched in 2024. Someone at Amazon probably should have watched it, before submitting an “AI”-generated recap so full of errors and errors that the company was forced to blow it up.

You probably know the short summary video format, a little “previously on Battlestar Galactica» segment that now precedes many scripted streaming shows when they launch a new season. They can be essential for viewers who need a refresher, especially since the scale of prestige streaming TV means it can be more than a year since the last one launched. They’re short and easy, probably a few days of editing room work, maybe a little voiceover.

But this small human effort, aimed at improving 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 used auto-generated alternatives that combine short clips from the show with an “AI”-powered voiceover to catch viewers up. If you watched the video for Fallout season 1, as Games Radar did, you would think that the nuclear war that takes place in the series’ flashbacks happened in the 1950s. In the games and the show, as is constantly repeated and confirmed, the Great War took place in 2077.

This is the kind of error 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 by AI errors. After issues with the recap video were spotted by Games Radar, the recap was removed from Amazon Prime Video. The Verge reports that similar recaps have been done for other shows like Jack Ryan by Tom Clancyand have since been deleted.

Bethesda

The aesthetics of To fall are indeed steeped in American imagery of the 1950s and 1960s, although its fictional timeline extends far into our future, even before the world is destroyed. This is an intentional and ironic choice intended to echo real history, when the world seemed to look forward to a mythical “atomic age” of technology, while fearing nuclear escalation during the Cold War. To fallPre-war antebellum culture and technology have, in many ways, been frozen for over a century as unchecked commercialism and corporate power run rampant. It’s a crucial detail to the identity and themes of the series… and the kind of subtle distinction that great language models aren’t very good at spotting.

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

Remember when Amazon made you pay extra for Prime to watch ad-free videos? I wonder where all this money is going.