At first, it felt a bit like Emmy-winning writer director Jorge Gutierrez had been living under a rock.

On May 27, Amazon announced that it had ordered an animated series, dubbed “Punky Duck,” as part of its GenAI Creators’ Fund, celebrating it as a “creative breakthrough.” The fund, a collaboration between Amazon’s MGM Studios and its Amazon Web Services, was designed to hand creators “access to professional-grade AI tools and funding” to “produce high-quality cinematic entertainment.”

Gutierrez seemingly couldn’t believe the power he’d been handed.

“The best way I can describe it is, it’s like you have sex, and then someone hands you the baby,” he told a panel during an announcement last week. “It’s pretty crazy.”

However, given the way the conversation surrounding the use of AI in creative industries has been headed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reactions to the news were overwhelmingly negative, with Gutierrez swiftly becoming the target of an astonishing amount of online outrage.

His Wikipedia profile was edited to describe him as a “sellout” and early attempts to allow his fans to vent their frustration on his Instagram account didn’t go over well, either, forcing him to delete swaths of posts.

Not all the derision was from the online peanut gallery.

“It is very seductive that something now exists that contains the collective works of millions of artists and wordsmiths all thrown in a blender allowing one to pour out on demand things based on suggestions and prompts,” wrote acclaimed voice actor Billy West. “You become a soul stealer, a grave robber of sorts. You are an artist! God gave you a far greater gift and purpose to share with others. We need your true self!”

The backlash was so extensive, Gutierrez ended up backtracking on the lucrative gig entirely, in one of the clearest signs yet that AI has become toxic sludge to much of the audience Amazon is trying to woo.

“I have decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon,” he tweeted on May 29, just two days after the company’s announcement. “I will not be making a Punky Duck series. Actions speak louder than words.”

The incident perfectly highlights just how much the AI backlash has grown, with experts warning that the tech is causing cultural stagnation while Hollywood actors panic over being replaced. Some of the biggest names in the industry have publicly spoken out against the use of AI in creative fields, forming a expanding line of resistance.

It apparently wasn’t just angry comments directed at Gutierrez for “selling out.” In a separate tweet, Gutierrez said that “the racist stuff and the attack on my kid were too much,” indicating pundits online had gone to extreme lengths.

Even this attempt to defuse the situation didn’t sit well, with users accusing him of pulling the “racism card,” while others claimed he was “making this up to deflect from your piss poor choices.”

Oddly enough, Gutierrez was once a vocal critic of AI, as the Los Angeles Times reports, posting several memes decrying the tech between 2023 and 2025.

“Threatening the dude and his family is obviously going way too far, but I’m still against major animators using AI, 100 percent,” one Reddit user argued. “I’m still glad he dropped out of it, but I f***ing hate that people threatened the dude.”

“Animation isn’t worth that, the hell is wrong with people?” the user added.

Meanwhile, Gutierrez has tried to get the angry mob back on his side.

“Learning a lot from many of you,” he tweeted. “Thank you. Lots of information that I’m digesting wholeheartedly. I am absolutely understanding the concern of using AI to assist an animation pipeline.”

“For all those showing me grace, I really appreciate it,” Gutierrez added. “I have a lot to think about.”

More on AI backlash: Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

The post Amazon’s AI-Generated Animated Series Canceled After Relentless Derision appeared first on Futurism.

The United States is facing what’s shaping up to be the largest series of initial public offerings in the history of the modern stock market. How they go is anyone’s guess, but the results are sure to be extreme one way or another.

There are three absolute whoppers looming on the horizon: Elon Musk’s absurd $1.75 trillion SpaceX public launch targeted for early June, as well as IPOs by the already-hulking AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI. As the Economist notes, the triple threat could feed some $4 trillion worth of value into the US stock market — if, that is, the market can keep them down, or even swallow them all in the first place.

As the publication observes, huge IPOs like his are typically seen as signs that a bull market, a long period of rising stock prices, is about to come to an end. For example, we saw similar conditions prior to market downturns in 2021, 2008, and the late 1990s. The Economist explains that mega-IPOs sometimes signal bear markets — prolonged periods of declining prices — as in 2021, but could likewise forewarn heavier downturns, like the Great Recession or the collapse of the dot-com bubble.

How severe that reversal could be depends in no small part on how those three mega corps perform. If there’s underwhelming investor appetite for their unprecedented valuation targets, the Economist notes the three IPOs could easily drag markets into correction territory all on their own.

That’s because each firm is heavily involved in the financial behemoth that is AI. With global private investment in the tech skyrocketing despite no tangible financial returns, the bill will eventually come due on the AI frenzy. If the IPOs disappoint, analysts fret, it could signal that patience has finally run out for the country’s unprecedented technological spending.

What ultimately sparks the panic that sends stock brokers stampeding for the door is impossible to predict, but it seems painfully clear this can’t keep on forever.

More on finance: Bank Warns of Tesla Stock Collapse

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