Viewers Disliked the 'Squid Game' Finale, So They're Turning to AI for Alternatives

Pissing people off with your series finale is practically a rite of passage for beloved TV shows at this point. Just ask fans of The Sopranos, or Dexter, or Game of Thrones. And if you’re feeling butt hurt by your favorite TV show’s subpar ending, you may be tempted to imagine a whole new one—an ending where Tony gets whacked, or survives some kind of epic John Wick-style shootout, or, I don’t know, assembles all the Infinity Stones and becomes the supreme ruler of mobsters across the universe. Or better yet, if you live in 2025, you can simply just generate a whole new ending with a few words and the click of a button.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Squid Game finally dropped its third and final season, and the reaction to the series finale has been… mixed. For several reasons (one being I haven’t watched the finale myself), I won’t tell you what happens in the end, but it’s clear that things go off the rails and not to every fan’s satisfaction. In yesteryear, that would mean we’re relegated to bitching about the outcome to our friends or on Reddit, or to our poor therapists, but now we have video generators like Google’s slop machine, Veo 3, and people are obviously taking full advantage.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

You can watch Player 456 battle a CGI baby with a knife, or kick a CGI baby into the abyss, or even toss the CGI baby in! Or how about watching Player 222’s baby grow up. Yeah… really. The fact that there are so many variations out there—seriously, go look on Instagram or TikTok—is a testament to how easy it is to go from zero to “here’s what I think happened” and then actually sort of see that play out realistically. And yes, most of these are also half-joking, but that doesn’t mean that someone with a little more patience and maybe a better understanding of how to prompt AI couldn’t make a more serious one. Where are the real AI slop gurus at? I want to see the BAFTA-worthy version of these amateur AI endings, though making that ending may be a lot more effort than most are willing to put in.

I’ve previously covered the amount of prompting that actually goes into making a serviceable AI video, and it’s probably a lot more than you think. According to PJ Ace, who recently generated an AI commercial with Veo 3 that aired during the NBA finals, his 30-second ad spot took about “300 to 400” generations with Veo 3, which is hard to equate into hours, I guess, but still sounds like a lot more bullshit than just typing, “make me an ad inspired by GTA” and then cashing your check. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the wild world of video generation, it’s that trends tend to catch on quickly and explode way past the ceiling you thought they would, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that we haven’t seen the last of AI-generated endings for shows we know and love. And yes, that means a happy ending for Squid Game, a show about desperate people murdering each other for money.