Amazon’s AI-Animated Good Advice Cupcake Show Angers Original Creator

Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never imagined that a cartoon character she created nearly a decade ago would become the center of an intellectual property dispute involving BuzzFeed, Amazon’s video streaming platform, and generative artificial intelligence. Yet that is precisely the predicament she faces today.

“Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with,” Brantz says of BuzzFeed, her former employer.

This week, Brantz posted on Instagram calling out the once-dominant media brand. Her frustration stems from news that BuzzFeed had licensed her advice-giving cupcake character, Cuppy, to Prime Video, which plans to release a series titled Cupcake & Friends, developed using 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 assault on artists everywhere,” Brantz wrote in her post.

The headlines announcing the project felt like a nightmare realized,a scenario that anyone working in a creative field has started to dread in the age of AI. Digital media outlets that have undergone constant restructuring over the years seem especially 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 leverage AI to transform BuzzFeed into a competitor to YouTube.)

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

Brantz began writing and illustrating for BuzzFeed in 2014, during the outlet’s peak influence. She also worked on her own books and shared original content on her social media channels. In 2017, she went viral across multiple platforms with a comic featuring an anthropomorphic, innocent-looking “Good Advice Cupcake” whose demeanor turns violently cheerful as she advises that “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 being someone who is aggressively optimistic and nearly pathologically positive,” Brantz tells WIRED. “It was a way for me to yell motivational advice at people in a cute and humorous way.”

Originally, Brantz created 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 exploded on social media, BuzzFeed saw an opportunity.

“From there, there was a lot of back and forth on how to move forward animating it as a web series at BuzzFeed,” Brantz recalls. Eventually, BuzzFeed produced eight episodes of a Good Advice Cupcake web series, which aired through the summer of 2019. Topics included “Advice on Your Messy Life” and “Advice on Coming Out.”

“When this all happened, AI didn’t even exist,” Brantz says, emphasizing that she would never have signed a contract allowing BuzzFeed to pursue further Cuppy material created with this now-ubiquitous technology. “In the end, I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me involved if I ever left, and that they would respect my creative wishes for her,” she says. Brantz left BuzzFeed for Ms. Rachel in 2023 and continues to license her own character from the company for her content, including a Good Advice Cupcake Instagram page with over 2 million followers.