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Join nowand also get a VIP ticket to GamesBeat Next (Nov 2-3, SF).Amazon has released the first fully AI-generated long-form drama series to premiere worldwide on a major global streaming platform.
“Castle Walls,” a historical drama, premiered on Amazon Prime Video today, August 12, making history as the world’s first entirely AI-created television show, consisting of two 15-minute episodes that both went live today. Produced by AI Yapım, the AI production arm of the three-time International Emmy-winning Turkish production studio Ay Yapım, the series draws on the legend of Alamut Castle, the fortress at the center of Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Amazon Prime’s new streaming series was built using AYDNA, a proprietary video diffusion model trained exclusively on Ay Yapım’s own licensed content catalogue, with the goal of avoiding the third-party scraped data that has drawn scrutiny elsewhere in the media industry. In a press release, AI Yapım described the decision to train AYDNA exclusively on Ay Yapım’s own licensed catalogue as deliberate, given the ongoing legal and ethical scrutiny facing AI training pipelines industry-wide. That scrutiny has followed other AI productions accused of drawing on datasets of uncertain or unlicensed origin, making AYDNA’s rights-managed training data a notable point of distinction. The pipeline also relied on AI for prompt enhancement and creative development, as well as a proprietary in-house storyboard system, before AYDNA generated the finished video. Despite the AI-driven visuals, the dubbing in every language was handled by human voice artists, and the show’s acting performances were not AI-generated.
The two episodes of “Castle Walls” were made roughly two years apart in AI development, and it shows. The first was built shot-by-shot using an inpainting technique that predates today’s mainstream image-generation models — an older, more labor-intensive method of assembling frames. For the second episode, the show’s production team integrated more advanced generative AI tools into the pipeline, reflecting how quickly the underlying technology moved during the show’s development. Taken together, the two episodes offer a compressed, side-by-side record of that shift, visible within a single series rather than across separate productions released years apart.
Despite the AI-heavy production process behind “Castle Walls,” all of the show’s narrative and editorial decisions were made by a human creative team led by writers Kerem Deren and Çisil Hazal Tenim, both veterans of the internationally distributed drama “El Turco.” Before AI processing began, human artists produced hand-drawn character and location sketches for the series, laying out settings and character designs by hand ahead of any AI involvement. Those sketches are included in the show’s press kit and are intended to document where the human creative work sits within the broader production pipeline, according to AI Yapım.
“Castle Walls” has a relatively robust production pedigree for an AI-generated series. Ay Yapım, AI Yapım’s parent company, is a three-time International Emmy winner with a portfolio that includes hits like “Endless Love (Kara Sevda),” the first Turkish series to win an International Emmy; “Şahsiyet,” for which star Haluk Bilginer won the International Emmy for Best Performance by an Actor; and “Family Secrets (Yargı).” The company’s catalogue also includes internationally distributed titles “Çukur (The Pit)” and “El Turco.” AI Yapım, for its part, leads WAIFF Turkey, the Turkish chapter of the World AI Film Festival, and serves as the AI production capability-building partner of the International Emmy Awards Education Program — positioning the studio at the center of the broader industry conversation about AI’s role in long-form storytelling.
For gamers, the Assassin’s Creed connections in “Castle Walls” gives the show’s launch a familiar entry point. Alamut Castle has already been explored as a fictional setting in Ubisoft’s Mirage, and now provides a narrative anchor for the show. “Castle Walls” is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video worldwide.