By Variety | Created at 2026-08-12 12:18:39 | Updated at 2026-08-12 13:12:21
4 hours ago
AI-generated historical drama “Castle Walls,” produced by Turkish TV powerhouse Ay Yapim, is launching Wednesday on Prime Video in what is being touted as the first show made end-to-end using artificial intelligence to premiere on a major global streaming platform worldwide.
“Castle Walls” (“Surlar” in Turkish) spans two 15-minute episodes and focuses on the enigmatic story of present-day Iran’s Alamut Castle. The fortress has been made popular as a location in Ubisoft’s popular “Assassin’s Creed Mirage” video game. The short series is written by Turkish television veterans Kerem Deren and Çisil Hazal Tenim (“El Turco”). It is produced by Ay Yapim under its new Singapore-based subsidiary, AI Yapim.
“Castle Walls” was made end-to-end using AI “for prompt enhancement and creative development,” using “a proprietary AI storyboard system developed in-house by AI Yapım, and AYDNA, a video diffusion model developed by the AI Yapım team and trained exclusively on Ay Yapım’s own licensed content catalogue,” according to an Yapim statement.
“Unlike many AI productions that draw on datasets of uncertain provenance, every element of the AYDNA training pipeline was built on rights-managed material,” the company added. The series is dubbed in every language by real human voice artists. Significantly, “acting performances are not AI-generated,” the statement specified.
In a previous statement – released when the groundbreaking series was announced in Oct. 2025 – Ay Yapim had revealed that the show was developed over the the course of a year, and produced end-to-end using a mix of AI technologies, including ChatGPT, “for prompt enhancement and creative refinement,” the statement said. Generative artificial intelligence program MidJourney was used “for visual exploration and inspiration,” it had added, while AI video generator Runway and the Google Nano Banana image generating and editing tool were employed “for character integration.” Additionally, Veo, Kling, ComfyUI and Topaz were used “for video generation and cinematic execution.” Runway and AI voice generator ElevenLabs where used for voice and dubbing “merging creativity with execution,” the Oct. 2025 statement had noted.
“The production process itself tells its own story,” Ay Yapim said in its statement on Wed. “The first episode was built shot by shot using an inpainting technique that predates the current generation of image-generation tools — completed before now-ubiquitous models.”
“By the second episode, more advanced generative AI technologies were integrated into the pipeline,” it added. “The hand-drawn character and location sketches created by the human team before AI processing began demonstrate the level of creative and craft input that underpins every scene. This is not a production that bypassed human skill; it is one that used AI to amplify it,” the statement went on to point out.
Ay Yapim is best known for the International Emmy-winning “Endless Love,” “Fatmagul,” “Ezel” and “Forbidden Love,” among other global hit series.
The prominent Turkish TV outfit underlined that the “Castle Walls” launch builds on AI Yapım’s “growing role in the global conversation about AI and storytelling.” AI Yapım leads WAIFF Turkey, the Turkish chapter of the World AI Film Festival (WAIFF), the international event dedicated to films created with artificial intelligence. They also serve as the AI production capability-building partner of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (International Emmy Awards) education program.
“‘Castle Walls’ is the clearest expression to date of the argument both forums made: that AI-produced long-form content is not a future possibility but a present fact,” the Ay Yapim statement claimed.
Amazon MGM Studios in May annnounced they had greenlit three animated AI series for Prime Video: “Punky Duck” from Jorge R. Gutierrez (director of “The Book of Life”); “Love, Diana Music Hunters” from Albie Hecht, chief content officer at pocket.watch (and the former president of Nickelodeon who developed “SpongeBob SquarePants”); and “Cupcake & Friends” from BuzzFeed Studios. All three series will premiere on Prime Video but no dates have been set yet.
