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.