BuzzFeed has licensed its Good Advice Cupcake character to Amazon's Prime Video for a new animated series called Cupcake & Friends, produced with generative AI tools, and the character's original creator says she was never consulted. The show is one of three animated projects greenlit through the GenAI Creators' Fund, a joint initiative of Amazon Web Services and Amazon MGM Studios. Loryn Brantz, who built the character known as Cuppy at BuzzFeed in 2017 and left the company in 2023, went public this week with a call to boycott the project. The dispute lands as Amazon, BuzzFeed, and a wave of legacy media owners push AI-assisted animation into mainstream streaming pipelines.
Brantz began writing and illustrating for BuzzFeed in 2014. Her Good Advice Cupcake comic went viral in 2017 across multiple platforms, and BuzzFeed turned it into an 8-episode webseries that ran through the summer of 2019. The character, originally pitched as a children's book to a Disney imprint that passed, became one of the era's recognizable internet mascots, with a dedicated Instagram page that today has more than 2 million followers. Brantz continued licensing the character from BuzzFeed for her own content after leaving the company in 2023 to become an executive creative director for the YouTube educator Ms. Rachel.
The financial backdrop matters. Byron Allen acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed for $120 million and took over as chairman and CEO, with stated plans to use AI to reposition BuzzFeed as a YouTube competitor. Cupcake & Friends fits that strategy directly: a dormant 2019 webseries property, re-skinned for streaming distribution and accelerated through AI-assisted animation under an Amazon-funded development bucket. From BuzzFeed's perspective, the library has untapped value and AI lowers the cost of revival.
Key facts
- 01BuzzFeed licensed its Good Advice Cupcake character, Cuppy, to Amazon's Prime Video for a new AI-assisted animated series called Cupcake & Friends.
- 02Cupcake & Friends is one of three shows greenlit through the GenAI Creators' Fund, a joint initiative of Amazon Web Services and Amazon MGM Studios.
- 03Original creator Loryn Brantz, who developed Cuppy in 2017 and ran an 8-episode BuzzFeed webseries through summer 2019, says she was not consulted.
- 04Byron Allen acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed for $120 million and has outlined plans to use AI to turn the brand into a YouTube competitor.
- 05Brantz's Good Advice Cupcake Instagram page has more than 2 million followers; she says she is exploring legal options.
BuzzFeed's position is that ownership is not in dispute.
Jonah Peretti, president of BuzzFeed AI and the company's former CEO, said in a statement that BuzzFeed had told Brantz human creativity would remain central to the project, with writing, storytelling, and animation developed by humans and AI used as a creation tool. He compared the workflow to Disney's adoption of Xerox technology in mid-century animation. He also said Brantz had been offered involvement before declining.
Brantz disputes that sequence of events. She says she reached out to Peretti earlier this year after hearing rumors of BuzzFeed's animation deal with Amazon, and that other creatives told her they had been approached to write Cuppy scripts. She says Peretti would only share project details if she signed a nondisclosure agreement, which she declined. "Contrary to their statement, they did not contact me about this project and only mentioned telling me more after it became clear I would make a scene," she said. She has also rejected the Xerox comparison, offering to debate the history of animation publicly.
“Her personal opposition to AI cannot determine how BuzzFeed develops IP that it owns, or deny the many other talented creators involved in this project the opportunity to do their work.”— Jonah Peretti, President of BuzzFeed AI
The legal question turns on contracts signed years before generative AI existed as a commercial category. Brantz has not detailed the terms of her original Cuppy arrangement with BuzzFeed, but she has said she trusted assurances at the time that the company had no interest in continuing the character without her if she left. Whether work-for-hire language from the late 2010s covers a 2026 AI-assisted animated series is the kind of question the entertainment industry has been quietly negotiating for two years, mostly out of court. Brantz says she is exploring legal options.
Cupcake & Friends is also a test case for the GenAI Creators' Fund itself. Amazon MGM Studios and AWS have framed the program as a bridge between cloud AI infrastructure and entertainment production, and three greenlit shows is a small but visible portfolio. If the projects ship, they validate AI-assisted animation as a viable Prime Video format. If they stall in disputes like this one, the fund becomes a cautionary tale about acquiring rights to characters whose human creators are still active and publicly accessible.
The counterweight here is contractual, not creative. BuzzFeed's claim to the Cuppy IP is plausible on its face — Brantz was a salaried employee when the character was developed for the company, and the webseries was produced under BuzzFeed Studios. Peretti's framing that one creator's opposition to AI cannot dictate how a company develops the IP it owns is a defensible legal position, even if it reads poorly. What is genuinely unsettled is whether older IP contracts contemplated AI-generated derivative work at all, and that question will not be resolved by an Instagram post.
For the AI animation market, the Cuppy dispute is a preview of the friction ahead. Studios sitting on dormant character libraries — and there are a lot of them at restructured digital media companies — now have a cheap path to revive that IP through AI-assisted production. The original human creators, many of whom built audiences large enough to matter commercially, are a separate stakeholder with no contractual leverage but considerable platform leverage. BuzzFeed's calculation is that 2 million Instagram followers will not stop a Prime Video launch. The next year of streaming animation will test whether that math holds.
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