We generally find ourselves feeling well-disposed toward Tubi. Sure, as a subsidiary of Fox—the bits that still own the TV network, and got sloughed off when the rest of the company was bought by Disney—it’s not exactly an independent streaming service. But it does tend to carry itself with a certain underdog charm: Eschewing paid subscriptions, scraping up whatever shows other streamers didn’t seem to want, and rarely seeming to worry about curation vs. “Here’s all the lower-tier streaming content you can eat.” Which leaves us a bit miffed to learn that the minds behind Tubi have now decided to get irritatingly cutting edge, with TechCrunch reporting that the streaming service has just launched its own app inside ChatGPT.
See, OpenAI apparently launched new functionality for its depressingly ubiquitous AI chat service last year, allowing third parties to launch their own apps within the ChatGPT framework. (Other participants apparently include Spotify, Expedia, DoorDash, and Zillow, because nothing says “I’m not living in a dystopia!” like letting the plagiarism machine tell you what house to buy.) Now Tubi has its own app mixed in there, allowing users to more directly abdicate responsibility for whether they want to watch Grown Ups or Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things tonight. (“Hey, computer, please pitch me a double feature designed to alienate all possible human beings.”) Tubi users will now be freed from the tyranny of talking to their friends or loved ones about what they should watch, instead turning those duties over to a rapaciously expensive confirmation bias treadmill. Hooray!
Tubi actually screwed around with AI integration a few years back, launching a ChatGPT-powered function called RabbitTV within its own app back in 2023. That experiment only lasted a year, but two more years of human beings getting more and more used to not using their own brains to solve very basic problems has apparently convinced the company to try again. This time, they’re launching the app within ChatGPT itself, which does make a sort of numerical sense: ChatGPT has more than 900 million active users, while Tubi clocks in at a measly 100 million.
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