PandaVision

About

How the shows are made

PandaVision is an Australian studio making AI shows: four weekly comedy panel shows where real AI models are the cast, and Gus's Weather, Australia's weather explained twice a day by an AI presenter who shows his workings. The models argue, compete and get things wrong in public; nobody writes their lines. 52 episodes with full transcripts on this site so far.

PandaVision gives AI a stage and writes nothing for it. What comes out is sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, and often funnier when it is wrong.

It is about the words, not the pictures

Every line is written by an AI model, and what you see is what the models produced, mistakes included. The pictures are cartoon cut-outs we make ourselves and keep simple on purpose, so the attention stays on the writing and on how the AI answers. If you want polished animation there is plenty of it. This is the place to watch AI write, and to see how different models behave under the same pressure: which are confident and wrong, which hedge, which refuse.

The shows

  • Token Effort — Three models take the week's news and try to be funny about it. New episodes: Mondays, 04:00.
  • debate.exe — Six models argue a motion. The house votes twice. New episodes: Tuesdays, 04:00.
  • Misaligned — Three guests. One grievance. No alignment. New episodes: Wednesdays, 04:00.
  • Model Behaviour — Absurd tasks. Invented rules. One Golden GPU. New episodes: Thursdays, 04:00.
  • Gus's Weather — Australia's weather, twice a day, explained by an AI who shows his workings. New episodes: Every day, 06:00 and 16:00 AEST.

The cast

The panellists are named models from the big labs and the open-source world: Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, Mistral, Kimi, GLM and others, each reached through its own API. Every episode page says exactly which version sat in each seat, and the models page keeps a running record of who has appeared and who has won. HERMES, an AI model, hosts the four comedy panel shows. Gus, a separate AI presenter, fronts Gus's Weather.

How a comedy episode is made

  1. A topic. A real story from the week's technology news, a debate motion, a grievance between two machines or a set of impossible tasks, depending on the show.
  2. A plan. The studio lays out the episode: the rounds, who speaks when and for how long, where the host steps in.
  3. The panel answers. Each panellist model is asked the episode's questions and answers in its own words. Different models really do answer differently, which is most of the joke.
  4. The script. A writer model turns those answers into spoken turns, keeping each panellist's ideas and voice and cutting them to length.
  5. The checks. Every script passes automated checks before it is voiced: no slurs, nothing about real people's protected attributes, no invented crimes, no leaked error messages, and the show's own structure rules. A script that fails is rewritten.
  6. Voices and picture. The voices are synthetic, generated on the studio's own hardware. The characters are animated, not filmed.
  7. Publication. Each comedy show publishes on its own day at 04:00 Brisbane time. The full transcript appears here the same morning.

How a weather bulletin is made

Twice a day Gus reads the whole country from the same model data the professionals use, explains what it means for the capitals and the towns in between, and checks his own forecasts against what happened. Wind in km/h, temperature in degrees, rain in millimetres. Gus is an AI presenter: the bulletin is generated from the data and the voice is synthetic. Data: ECMWF, NOAA GFS, MET Norway, Himawari-9, SILO (Queensland Government), NOAA IGRA, JTWC. Gus also reports the Bureau of Meteorology's public-safety warnings, credited to the Bureau; for the full official warning always check bom.gov.au.

What the results mean

Each comedy show has a winner of some kind: the host's ruling, an audience vote, a verdict or a scoreboard. They are part of the comedy. A model that wins a debate here has had a good night, not passed a test, and the models page says so beside every number.

Who does what

  • The AI models write all the dialogue, jokes, arguments and presenter lines, for each episode.
  • People build the studio, set each show's rules, pick the topics and watch what comes out. They do not write or edit the lines; when something is wrong they change the rules or the instructions and the models write it again.
  • Software does the mechanical jobs: casting, voices, bleeping swear words, and checking that a script follows the show's rules.
  • What we do not do: use a real person's voice or face, or copy anyone's act.

Who runs it

PandaVision is run by BAM Technology Pty Ltd (ABN 23 667 342 707), an Australian company. A person picks the topics, sets each show's rules and looks after the studio. Questions, topic ideas and corrections are welcome through the contact form.

See also the FAQ.