Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never imagined that a popular cartoon character she created almost a decade ago would one day be the subject of an intellectual property dispute involving BuzzFeed, Amazon’s video streaming service, and generative artificial intelligence. But that’s exactly the situation she finds herself in today.
“Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with,” Brantz says of BuzzFeed, her former employer.
This week, Brantz shared an Instagram post calling out the once-dominant media brand. She was responding to news that the company had licensed her advice-giving cupcake character, Cuppy, to Prime Video, which plans to release a series called Cupcake & Friends, developed with AI tools. It’s 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 declared in her post.
The headlines announcing the project were a nightmare come true—and a scenario that everyone who works in a creative field has begun to dread in the age of AI. Digital media outlets that have been continually restructured over the years would seem to be particularly fertile ground for such deals. (Media mogul Byron Allen just became BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO after buying a majority stake in the brand for $120 million, describing plans to leverage AI to turn BuzzFeed into a YouTube competitor.)
Brantz, currently an executive creative director for the YouTube educator Ms. Rachel, blasted BuzzFeed and Amazon for their plans to turn her character into a “soulless AI puppet” on Instagram. “I encourage you to boycott BuzzFeed and any AI-produced or adjacent animation,” 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 to her social media channels. In 2017, she went viral across multiple platforms with a comic featuring an anthropomorphic and innocent-looking “Good Advice Cupcake” whose demeanor violently shifts as she suggests 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 had come up with Cuppy for a children’s book pitch. After a Disney publishing imprint passed on the idea, she brought it into her internet comics. And when it blew up 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. Ultimately, BuzzFeed produced eight episodes of a Good Advice Cupcake webseries, which ran 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, noting 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 continued to license her own character from the company for her content, including a Good Advice Cupcake page on Instagram that has more than 2 million followers.
“BuzzFeed owns the Cuppy IP, not Loryn, who is a former employee,” a BuzzFeed spokesperson tells WIRED. “BuzzFeed Studios is excited to use new technology to bring a dormant library series off the shelf and to give it new life, and we are thrilled to work with a talented team of creatives to tell new stories.”
In a statement shared with WIRED, Jonah Peretti, president of BuzzFeed AI and former CEO of the company, said they had tried to reassure Brantz about the artistic integrity of the new Cuppy series. “We shared with her that human creativity would remain at the core of this project, with writing, storytelling, and animation being developed by humans and AI being used as a creation tool to help facilitate that,” he said, drawing a comparison to Disney’s adoption of Xerox technology to facilitate the animation process.
“However, she made it clear that she was categorically opposed to the use of AI in all its forms, and we respected that she did not want to be involved as a result,” Peretti’s statement continued. “That is absolutely her right. But her personal opposition to AI cannot determine how BuzzFeed develops IP that it owns, or deny the many other talented creators involved in this project the opportunity to do their work.”
Brantz says she reached out to Peretti earlier this year, after hearing rumors about BuzzFeed’s animation deal with Amazon, and other creatives told her they had been approached about writing Cuppy scripts. She claims that he would only offer more details of the project if she signed a nondisclosure agreement. Brantz declined.
“Contrary to their statement, they did not contact me about this project and only mentioned telling me more after it became clear I would make a scene,” she says. “Which I am.”
In a follow-up Instagram post about Peretti’s statement, Brantz said that BuzzFeed was being deliberately vague in describing how AI would be used in the making of Cupcake & Friends and challenged the equating of AI with Xerox as deeply misleading. “If Jonah would like to debate the history and integrity of animation on a public platform at any time, I’m happy to oblige,” she wrote.
Brantz’s fans have applauded what they see as a stand against the onslaught of AI in the entertainment industry. A top commenter on Brantz’s first Instagram post wrote of how much they admired her “courage and transparency in going public with this.”
She tells WIRED she is exploring legal options but is “not feeling as optimistic as usual.”
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