No, The Wheel of Time show isn't going to be powered by AI

If you're at all plugged in to The Wheel of Time fandom, you may have noticed quite a lot of horrified exclamations over the past week about the franchise's newest addition: a Large Language Model AI (LLM) similar to ChatGPT trained on The Wheel of Time novels, called the One Power. The One Power will power an AI companion known as The Guide, which can spit out facts in more than 40 languages. According to Venturebeat, this new software "aims to immerse fans in an AI chat service that has an encyclopedic knowledge of The Wheel of Time across various media formats, including books, television, movies, video games, and location-based entertainment."

If that paragraph made you cringe a little, hang in there. I've seen a lot of panic about what this means for The Wheel of Time show, so I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to clarify what the One Power is and what it isn't. First off, this product is not being put out there by Amazon or by the estate of Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time's creator and author of the majority of the series. Rather, it's a new product from iWot Productions, aka the company formerly known as Red Eagle Entertainment, in collaboration with a tech company named D1srupt1ve. (No, I didn't misspell that.) If you don't know what Red Eagle is or why this makes me immediately feel fine dismissing these new AI tools as a threat to the production of Prime Video's show, we'll get into it below.

What is iWot Productions aka Red Eagle Entertainment?

iWot Productions is helmed by Rick Selvage and Larry Mondragon, two investors who acquired the film and franchise rights to The Wheel of Time back in 2004. At the time, they operated under the company name Red Eagle Entertainment. Their goal was to make Wheel of Time movies, games and other tie-in media...but on the whole, those franchise plans largely fell by the wayside as the rights languished unused.

The relationship eventually soured between Red Eagle and The Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan, as Jordan elucidated in a 2007 blog post, barely more than a month before his death:

I hear things now and then floating out in the air. For instance, I hear that word was floating about Comics Con in San Diego that I am displeased with Red Eagle. Too true. Too very true. In a few more months that last contract they have with anyone on God’s green earth that so much as mentions my name will come to an end and we can see what happens after that. You see, among other things they forgot an old dictum of LBJ back when he was just a Congressman from Texas, when he famously, or infamously, said “Don’t spit in the soup, boys. We all have to eat.” Worse, Red Eagle though they could tell me they spit in the soup, or pee in it, if they wanted to and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. You can’t apologize your way out of that with me, not that they tried. There isn’t enough money in the world to buy your way out of it with me. Not that they tried that either. So they get no further help from me. Once they are completely out of the picture, we’ll see what happens.

Fast forward to 2015. After selling the rights to Universal Studios (and subsequently reacquiring them), Red Eagle's rights to The Wheel of Time were due to lapse and revert back to the Jordan Estate. Rather than allow that to happen, Red Eagle infamously produced a "short film" titled The Winter Dragon starring Billy Zane, which adapted the prologue of the first Wheel of Time book, and aired it on FXX TV in the middle of the night.

Jordan's widow and editor Harriet McDougal issued an official response saying that she was "dumbfounded" by this move and didn't have any knowledge of The Winter Dragon before discovering it was aired. She claimed The Winter Dragon was purposely aired mere days before Red Eagle's rights to the series lapsed as a way for them to hold on to The Wheel of Time. (And I do mean literal days; The Winter Dragon aired on a Sunday, and according to McDougal the rights would have lapsed the following Wednesday.)

This led to a lawsuit where Red Eagle claimed that McDougal was slandering them. The matter was eventually settled privately, but suffice it to say, it left a bad taste in many Wheel of Time fans' mouths that lingers to this day.

So what's the deal with The Wheel of Time AI?

That brings us back around to the One Power AI. Red Eagle, now rebranded as iWot Productions, still maintains screen rights to The Wheel of Time; that's why you'll see them listed as an executive producer on Amazon's television show even though they're not necessarily involved in the actual production of it. Beyond the Prime Video show, many of the recent announcements about new Wheel of Time stuff — such as The White Tower animated film or the Age of Legends movies — are coming from deals iWot is making with other companies. Given the speed of these announcements, and Red Eagle's history with announcing projects and then not following through (such as in both 2004 and 2006 when they made public statements about creating Wheel of Time movies, as well as comics which never materialized), it seems pretty clear that they're trying to capitalize on The Wheel of Time's new burst in popularity thanks to the Amazon show.

But, importantly, their projects are NOT linked to the Prime Video series in any way. So when you see statements like this from Selvage...

"The One Power will give rise to a new generation of products and services that will reshape the industry, setting the stage for a future where AI is seamlessly integrated into all facets of the entertainment experience."

...take it with a grain of salt. This sounds like a lot of the generic AI boilerplate that is getting tossed around; words with no real meaning behind them, beyond telling us how great it will be. Here's another, which contains a pretty fun clue about the sort of grifting language we're seeing in these press releases:

“The Wheel of Time is one of the largest fantasies in the world,” said Selvage. “It rivals the breadth and depth of Marvel and Star Wars in regard to the story. There are a series of novels that came out around 1990, written by Robert Jordan, who was George RR Martin’s mentor. And he ended up with the series ended up having 13 books in it 13,000 pages, the stories told in three years, with 2,750 named characters in it. So that’s a three-year story. That backstory is 3,000 years. It’s a huge, huge story.”

Okay, so Selvage isn't wrong about how vast The Wheel of Time is in relation to Marvel or Star Wars. But that bit about George R.R. Martin? Martin is an obvious name to want to associate with if you're doing any sort of adaptations in the fantasy space; Game of Thrones is one of the most successful TV series of all time, after all. But you want to know something else about George R.R. Martin? He was publishing short stories and books for around a decade before Robert Jordan even released his first novel. The two did have a well-documented friendship, and Martin has credited Jordan's support as a tremendous help for his Song of Ice and Fire books finding their audience. But the way Selvage frames this comes off to me as a somewhat disingenuous way to capitalize on both Martin and Jordan's names by misrepresenting their relationship. Considering that Martin himself is currently involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, I can only wonder at how he'd feel having his name used to prop up a new AI tool founded on his deceased friend's work. We can only imagine how Robert Jordan would have felt about it, for that matter.

The Wheel of Time show could use the new AI, but why would it?

Now look, if I'm wrong and the people behind The Wheel of Time show want this AI, then hey, I'll take my lumps for making a bad assumption. But so far it's been crickets from the production about it — they're too busy filming the rest of season 3 in South Africa right now. That hasn't stopped Selvage from publicly theorizing about how they might use The Guide, though:

“When you’re sitting in a writer’s room with 10 different writers for television or you’re developing a project from The Wheel of Time canon, there are a lot of great writers and directors who aren’t familiar with the canon. This technology allows them to find out anything about The Wheel of Time that they want," he said.

There's another solution to this problem he describes: hiring at least a few qualified people who actually know the source material inside and out. That's exactly what Prime Video's series did with their resident book expert Sarah Nakamura, someone who I heard referenced numerous times by The Wheel of Time cast and crew during season 2 interviews last year as an invaluable resource to the production. Nakamura has read The Wheel of Time in its entirety more than 30 times. Something tells me that's more times than the AI. I know which one I'd trust.

Regardless of my own personal opinions, the point in writing this was to reassure those who may be concerned that The Wheel of Time show is jumping the shark and powering its future via hyped up AI tools that this probably isn't the case. These are two completely separate business entities which are in no way linked, except that iWot Productions has a rights-holding stake in both. Hopefully this makes this complicated situation a little bit clearer.

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