Artificial intelligence has made movies and music, and now it also has its own TV channel on popular streaming platform, the Roku Channel.

Roku did not publicly announce the addition of Fairground AI Creator TV — fully AI-generated content, 24/7, for free — on its streaming platform. Instead, Cord Cutters News was the first to report its inclusion in Roku’s lineup.

But if the online backlash is any indication, viewers might be inclined to change the channel.

“Roku is giving the masses what they never asked for: an unending conveyor belt of AI slop,” wrote Frank Landymore of Futurism, a science and technology news website.

Bradly Shankar of MobileSyrup, a Canadian tech news website, was just as critical.

“[Roku’s] a nice option to have in this oversaturated and increasingly expensive streaming market. But enshittification comes for us all, and Roku is sadly no exception.”

Fairground AI is a FAST channel, meaning a free, ad-supported streaming television. 

There are about 200 FAST channels available on the Roku Channel in Canada, though Fairground AI is not currently one of them. The company has not said whether there are plans to bring the channel to Canada.

Roku cashes in on streaming

Roku is one of the world’s most popular streaming companies. Fox reached an agreement to buy the company in a deal worth $22 billion US in June, giving it access to over 100 million global households using the platform.

The new channel comes amid a proliferation of AI-generated content. Earlier this year, Tribeca Festival became the first major film festival to feature an AI-generated movie. Toy giant Hasbro announced in June it would create AI-powered versions of its popular characters, citing unauthorized AI use of its intellectual property. Human web traffic is also declining against AI, according to internet data.

Roku told CBC News Tuesday it provides “customers with a variety of streaming options,” in response to an inquiry about the AI channel and the backlash.

AI channel’s CEO expecting ‘same evolution’ as YouTube

The Roku Channel isn’t Fairground AI’s only platform — the company’s website says it’s slated to stream on five TV and FAST platforms starting this month. 

On its website, Fairground AI calls its channel “the first FAST channel dedicated exclusively to AI-generated content.”

Colin Petrie-Norris, Fairground AI’s founder and CEO, told CBC News that the channel is also on electronics company LG’s streaming platform, but did not say what other platforms the channel is slated to appear on.

“Overall, we’ve seen really strong interest by streaming platforms of all types in the medium,” he said.

Petrie-Norris is convinced the AI doubters and skeptics will come around eventually.

“When YouTube first launched, its early creators were written off as being limited to ‘dogs on skateboards’ and low-quality user-generated content,” he said.

“YouTube creators today are now mainstream personalities driving billions of dollars for the entertainment industry. We believe the same evolution will happen with Fairground’s AI creators.”

Why do people watch TV?

Roku’s adoption of an AI channel does not surprise Fenwick McKelvey, a professor of information and communication technology policy at Concordia University in Montreal.

“Streamers are looking to lower costs and raise time on platforms, and this looks like the inevitable direction,” he said, adding it remains to be seen whether viewers will like the channel.

He said Roku made a name for itself partly through the popularity of its screensavers, which suggests not everyone wants to have engaging content on their screens. The channel may function for many viewers as a more dynamic screensaver.

“One of the things that’s really important is we often miss why people watch TV,” he said. “There’s lots of ways that television is just something people have on in the background.”

Late last year, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission updated its definition of Canadian content to exclude fully AI-generated content.

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The regulator said in its updated definition that “while AI may serve as a potential tool to assist in the creation of Canadian content, the Commission is of the view that humans should hold creative control to support economic opportunities and remuneration for Canadians creators.” 

But McKelvey said many difficult questions on AI generated content have not been addressed, such as the AI industry’s often dubious record adhering to copyright laws and privacy protections. In May, Canada’s privacy commissioner found that AI company OpenAI was not compliant with Canadian privacy laws when it trained its chatbot, ChatGPT. 

The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists has also consistently opposed replacing human performers with AI and has repeatedly called on the government to pass more laws regulating AI.

And so, what remains unsolved are the “fundamental issues about how artists get paid, or how do we pay for culture,” McKelvey said.

“Largely, the business-first, economic opportunity of AI has trumped most other social concerns.”