Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated ‘Good Advice Cupcake’ TV Show. Its Original Creator Is Furious

Miles Klee Culture May 29, 2026 4:56 PM Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated Good Advice Cupcake TV Show. Its Original Creator Is Furious Loryn Brantz created The Good Advice Cupcake for BuzzFeed years ago. The company licensed the character for a new Amazon series—made with AI—without her consent. Photograph: Noam Galai/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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, a former executive creative director for the YouTube educator Ms. Rachel , blasted BuzzFeed and Ama