Tubi, the last good streaming service, has managed to piss off at least a portion of the fans who would otherwise be thrilled to scroll through whatever forgotten ’90s classics the platform managed to get its hands on. This week, the company (which, it should be noted, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation) decided to AI-ify by launching the first native streaming app for ChatGPT and juicing its recommendation algorithms with AI in hopes of appealing to the coveted Gen Z demographic. Early returns suggest the plan is backfiring.
On its face, there’s really nothing all that objectionable about Tubi’s AI offerings. The ChatGPT app just lets users type in plain-language requests for content, like “a movie that feels like a fever dream but isn’t horror,” or “a thriller for tonight.” The requests can be made in a standard ChatGPT conversation by summoning the streamer with “@Tubi.” Seems fine, especially if having access to Tubi’s library makes the responses better, because if you’ve ever used AI (intentionally or because Google funnels you into the AI Overview when you search for basic stuff) to try to search for a movie, you know that most of the time the results are like, the five most generic and predictable picks imaginable. Like, wow, no one would have thought to watch “Interstellar” or “The Martian” when looking for movies about space, super helpful suggestions.
Tubi is also reportedly using AI to improve its personalized content recommendations, according to the Wall Street Journal. Once again, a pretty normal use for AI. Machine learning-based recommendation systems have been around basically as long as streaming has, and used to be one of the big differentiators that Netflix would point to that made its platform so sticky for viewers. If you can provide people with better recommendations for what to watch, it keeps them in your app longer (a win for Tubi, which is ad-supported) and it gives them what they want. In theory, it’s a win-win.
Where Tubi is losing people—and what has seemingly turned its supporters against it on social media—is the reported embrace of AI-generated content. Per WSJ, Tubi is planning to increase the amount of “creator-made” content that it serves up in its app. That will include video made, in part or wholly, by AI. That is something that most people simply aren’t interested in. (Or at least they say they aren’t—someone is giving these AI-generated YouTube channels billions of views.)
Tubi’s embrace of AI seems to be part of a broader plan to appeal to younger viewers. The company believes that it needs to compete with the TikToks and YouTubes of the world for eyeballs, and it thinks that AI presents an opportunity to gain a foothold. But the platform might be misreading the room. Gen Z is certainly exposed to plenty of AI and isn’t afraid to make use of the technology, but polls show the demo is getting increasingly disillusioned about its implications.
It seems like generative AI has poisoned the well so much for most people that it’s made even pretty vanilla uses of the technology now leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Tubi would probably be better off just saying it’s improving its search and recommendation features without slapping the AI label on it. It’d definitely be better off not letting AI slop take over its platform.
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