Gossip Goblin aka Zack London

Sculpture, then pen and ink

Zack London studied art at university, specialising in sculpture and large metal-cast pieces, and when sculpture proved hard to keep up after graduating he fell back on illustration^[2]. Through his twenties he drew and wrote alongside a day job, self-publishing books of short stories and dense pen illustrations, one of which he held up on AI LIVE: A Gossip of Goblins, now out of print^[2]. He says he also illustrated Magic: The Gathering cards, though we could not find a published credit^[2].

The name came from a sticker order. He had about 2,000 stickers printed with the Gossip Goblin handle, and after that, he jokes, he could not change it; it later became the name of his studio, Gossip Goblin, Inc.^[2][5]. The Guardian, which visited him in May 2026, describes a 35-year-old transplant from California working from his apartment in Stockholm^[4].

I've spent decades learning a craft. I don't want to automate that overnight.

Gossip Goblin^[1]

A fake country in the Altai

He started playing with AI image tools about four and a half years before July 2026, from early DALL-E to the Midjourney versions that first came close to photorealism^[2]. He made a rule he still keeps: no AI for illustration, the craft he spent decades on^[1]. Instead he used it to render believable worlds. His first big AI project, Urum Kuan, was a photo essay about an invented country in the Altai Mountains between Mongolia and China, written like a National Geographic feature from the 1970s^[2][1].

He began making AI films a little over three years before May 2026^[4]. In the early days, he remembers, a character kissing a frog could take 500 Runway generations and still never land^[1].

Thirteen cycles of humanity

The breakthrough came in June 2025 with a run of vertical Shorts about the Cycles of Humanity: The Tenth Cycle on 2 June, The Twelfth on 18 June and The First on 30 June, now at roughly 8, 11 and 5 million YouTube views^[13][12][14]. Each cycle is a human civilisation on a different world that engineers its own extinction, introduced with a title card such as Proxima Beta, 980,000 BCE, and narrated by the Basilisk, a disembodied AI turned demi-god^[14][12]. Those early Shorts credit Midjourney, Kling, Hailuo, Luma, Runway, ElevenLabs, Suno and Udio^[13][12].

Serials followed that summer, among them The Story of Atlantis and Rome & The Cosmic Nullifier, an alternate history in which Rome's first rocket breaches the sky in 287 AD and Earth's ancient empires carry their rivalries into space^[3][11]. Its 23rd episode, The Gupta Arks, released on 27 August 2025, is still his most watched YouTube Short at 15.4 million views^[11]. He makes most Shorts alone and releases one every few days across Instagram, YouTube and X, using them to build the world, and the audience, for longer films^[4][2].

Niiro Cradle

From October 2025 the Second Cycle of Humanity took over. On Niiro Cradle, a corporation called NiiroCore runs a Substrate Migration Protocol that moves human minds into synthetic bodies, and the vignettes follow black markets in jailbroken brain matter, dream spools and hybrids living on the fringes^[16][15]. Chewing Slag and NiiroCore drew more than 14 million YouTube views between them, and The Departure, in April 2026, another 10.8 million^[15][16][17]. By then the credits had grown to Seedream, Nano Banana, Veo 3, HeyGen, Runway Act Two, Hedra and a human voice actor^[16].

WOODNUTS

On 26 December 2025 he released WOODNUTS, billed as "the first short film from Gossip Goblin"^[5][9]. Written with Jacob Batchelor and told entirely in voiceover by Joseph Nesbitt-Larking, its ten minutes and 41 seconds follow a labourer, desperate for credits, who joins a hazard crew harvesting psychoactive sap from the forests of Jatar and is consumed by the forest's memories^[5][1]. It has passed 9.4 million views^[5]. It was made before Nano Banana existed, which he compares to putting a man on the moon with stone age technology^[1].

Real voices

His next film, The Patchwright, ran about 20 minutes: a fugitive android visits an unlicensed body mechanic in the slag heaps of Niiro Cradle to trace a fragment of a childhood memory^[34][4]. He calls it fundamentally a Kling film, with real voice actors; the title role went to Goshfather, a San Francisco DJ and former opera singer who improvises off script^[18][2]. It reached 10 to 11 million YouTube views before he made it private, because it is being folded into his feature^[4][18][38]. AI LIVE screened it on 12 May 2026, where nine of ten voters gave it a 1, the top score^[34].

Two days later the Guardian ran a profile from Stockholm: a team of eight collaborators across Europe, Instagram Shorts reaching up to 7 million views, and more than 500 million views in all by his own calculation^[4]. It reported that Joe Rogan had shown one of his clips on his podcast, a character on a dream spool living a parallel life as a goldfish, and that La Haine director Mathieu Kassovitz had praised the emotion in one AI actor's eyes^[4].

I have found myself at the inception of a new thing where there are no rules.

Gossip Goblin^[4]

Pomegranate

Pomegranate, about 30 minutes long, premiered on his channel on 22 July 2026^[1][21]. A jaded aristocrat who has lived thousands of lifetimes through dream spools, and can no longer feel any of them, visits his back-street dealer in search of something real^[1][8]. The spools take him through a Leviathan hunt, a god-king's court and a hyper-stimulated pinball world; the pinball world was the easiest scene, because it has no humans, and the god-king's dialogue the hardest^[1][2]. He cast four voice actors and directed them in person in a studio over three or four days^[1]. On AI LIVE, 11 of 12 voters had given its trailer the top score, and a sneak peek topped the weekly vote the day before the premiere^[35][36].

Two hours after the premiere he joined AI LIVE Creator Sessions #2 to break it down: no 3D pipeline, no fixed workflow, and directing AI "like jazz"^[1]. Real actors are non-negotiable, he said, because prompted AI voices pull from the lowest common denominator^[1]. Pomegranate is no longer public on YouTube.

Gods Don't Give Gifts

The same day, he and Fable, Edward Saatchi's studio, announced Gods Don't Give Gifts for US cinemas^[19][20]. It is an anthology of four interconnected stories set on Niiro Cradle, "where bodies are disposable and consciousness has been commoditised", directed by London, written with Jacob Batchelor and produced with Saatchi^[28][6]. Zack says Fable also helped produce and fund the development of his films^[2].

A 15-second teaser came on 28 September and the official trailer on 6 October 2026; by 22 October Screen Daily counted more than 15 million trailer views across platforms^[7][6][28]. The release moved from 30 October to 4 December so the film can campaign for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, and it is rated R by the MPA, which Futurism reports makes it the first fully AI-generated feature to receive an MPA rating^[23][25][24]. It opens on fewer than 1,000 US screens, and AI LIVE reported a London opening added after London topped his fans' postcode sign-ups^[28][37]. On 22 October AGC International took world sales outside the US, launching them at the American Film Market in November; WME Independent brokered the US deal^[28][29][30].

Using a medium to interrogate that medium is one of the oldest moves in art.

Zack London, director's statement^[25][23]

What comes next

On 20 October he co-hosted a Gossip Goblin GenJam with Machine Cinema at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, where 15 teams made two-minute films from a seed clip of Gods Don't Give Gifts, with Showrunner billed as his official creative platform^[33]. He is clear about the goal: not to kill Hollywood, which he says AI will not do anyway, but to make stories that would never get greenlit^[1][20]. Sebastian Furrer, a songwriter and producer who worked with Avicii, is scoring a longer film^[4].