Prime Video is launching AI-generated, "spoiler free" "X-Ray Recaps"

Oh, boy, some more generative AI news—exactly what we needed this week! The entertainment industry’s various AI investments seem to be seriously ramping up lately, and of course Amazon—a film and TV studio that is also a tech behemoth—is in on the trend. Today Prime Video announced a new feature called “X-Ray Recaps,” a “spoiler free” generative AI tool that will recap any Amazon MGM Studios Original series. 

Lots of shows already provide recaps between seasons and even between episodes, but the appeal here seems to be that this tool can get even more granular and specific (and, presumably, they don’t have to pay whatever editor was cutting together the “previously on” package). “X-Ray Recaps is a generative AI-powered feature that creates brief, easy-to-digest summaries of full seasons of TV shows, single episodes, and even pieces of episodes, all personalized down to the exact minute of where you are watching,” a press release from the company explains. “Whether you’re a few minutes into a new episode, halfway through a season, or took a break from watching a series and need a refresher, X-Ray Recaps delivers short textual snippets of key cliffhangers, character-driven plot points, and other details that can be accessed at any point in your viewing experience.”

According to the release, X-Ray Recaps is powered by Amazon Bedrock using a combination of Amazon Bedrock models and custom AI models trained on Amazon SageMaker. (N.B.: Generative AI uses such an excessive amount of energy that it’s reportedly revitalizing the fossil fuel industry; last month, Amazon announced its intention to invest more than $500 million in nuclear power to address this problem.) The tool analyzes “video segments, combined with subtitles or dialogue” to create detailed summaries of the content. There will be “guardrails” to ensure concise and “spoiler-free” summaries, though it’s unclear what those guardrails are or even why you’d want a spoiler-free recap for something you’ve already seen. 

You’ll be able to find these recaps in the X-Ray section, which is the little sidebar that comes up on Prime Video content that shows cast information, production trivia, and the like. Starting on Monday, the recaps will begin to be available to Fire TV customers, “with support for additional devices coming by the end of the year.” Non-Prime Video audiences will just have to continue getting their recaps the old-fashioned way, by rewinding and watching the part we missed, or perhaps checking an entertainment site like avclub.com.