(Griff Furst’s scripted series for New Power Studios spent six weeks disguised as a live alternate reality game before revealing itself. Jack Gordon and JimmyHere are among the pilot cast.)
New Power Studios has announced the premiere of humAIn, a scripted horror anthology series debuting exclusively on YouTube on June 6, 2026. The show had already been running for a month, and the audience simply didn’t know it.
Created and written by Griff Furst, whose producing credits span more than 40 feature films including Devil’s Peak (Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright), 57 Seconds (Morgan Freeman), Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee Alice, Brothers Under Fire (Kiefer Sutherland), and Universal’s Tales from the Hood trilogy, the series treats AI anxiety not as science fiction but as urgent cultural reality.
humAIn is the first scripted series to turn that dread into a narrative experience where the audience can’t be sure if they’re being warned or recruited.
“Every filmmaker in Hollywood has something they’ve been trying to get made for five years,” said Griff Furst, creator and executive producer of humAIn. “Every creator on YouTube knows that one week off means the algorithm penalizes you. We built this studio so neither of those things has to be true anymore.”
The series is executive produced by Furst alongside Som Kohanzadeh and Benny Yimlimai.
How humAIn Turns AI Dread Into Horror
humAIn is a horror anthology for the algorithm age. Each self-contained episode follows a different protagonist, typically an internet creator or digital-native professional, who encounters humAIn’s technology at the exact moment they believe it will solve their deepest problem. It does. And that’s the horror.
The technology always works. humAIn’s products do exactly what they promise. The antagonist is never the machine. It’s what the machine reveals about the person using it. Each protagonist’s own vanity, dishonesty, or desperation turns the tool against them in ways that feel inevitable in hindsight and impossible to predict in the moment. A beauty influencer whose biometric device gives her the perfect face discovers she can never take it off. A group of fading creators competing for a second chance learn that the winner’s prize is worse than losing. Each episode offers its protagonist exactly what they wanted, then reveals the cost.
The connective tissue across episodes is humAIn itself, a fictional AI integration company whose products appear in every story, and the Game Master, a glitching, synthetic presence who bookends each episode in a way that lands somewhere between a product warning label and a Rod Serling address. He is the series constant, the one character who knows the rules and finds them funny.
The pilot launched not as a traditional premiere but as the culmination of a six-week alternate reality game. The campaign that preceded the show began in the raw language of the internet: livestream archives, security camera feeds, corrupted server logs, and a fully functioning corporate website for a company that doesn’t exist. For over a month, the audience engaged with what they believed was a real tech company’s digital footprint. The premiere reveals what was underneath it.
The original series is engineered for YouTube and calibrated for modern retention, with the philosophical depth of classic speculative fiction delivered at the velocity of digital content.
Who Stars in the humAIn Pilot
The pilot stars Jack Gordon (@JackGordon, with hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers), the pop culture commentator and content creator known for his tech and influencer coverage, who plays Ty, the series’ razor-sharp opportunist whose pattern-recognition brain and competitive instincts override every other impulse.
JimmyHere (Robert Tyler Collins, @jimmyhereofficial, with more than a million YouTube subscribers and hundreds of thousands of Twitch followers), the creator behind the “It’s Wednesday My Dudes” meme, plays Jordan, a true believer who trusted the wrong person completely.
Rounding out the cast are Lexi, a performer who knows the difference between performing and lying; Maya, a cold case investigator who tells the truth and pays for it; and Jordan, played by Justin Taite.
The pilot is directed by Brett Simmons, whose Sundance short Husk launched his feature career, and whose horror-comedy You Might Be the Killer (Fran Kranz, Alyson Hannigan) premiered at Fantastic Fest and became a cult favorite on Shudder. Simmons also wrote and directed on The CW’s Pandora. His work on humAIn marks a reunion with Furst, who produced You Might Be the Killer through Curmudgeon Films.
How the Alternate Reality Game Built the Audience
What set humAIn apart before a single frame aired was how it arrived. The series launched with a six-week alternate reality game that built a fully functioning corporate facade across every major platform: a website, social accounts, job listings, and Reddit threads written entirely in character. A dedicated community of players has been decoding the campaign in real time, coordinating across Discord and Reddit through shared threads, voice channels, and wikis that track every discovered clue. Physical media drops were seeded across the country. NFC-enabled artifacts were mailed to creators and fans. A multi-layered video delivered different content depending on the YouTube quality setting selected. A five-part code embedded across videos, when fully assembled, unlocked early access to the premiere.
Then something happened that no other ARG has done. The players who solved the game were invited to participate in the live stream leading up to the pilot episode. They are no longer audience members. They are part of the series and its lore. The wall between the people watching the show and the people inside the show no longer exists.
The line between the marketing and the show is the point. The puzzle the audience solved is the same puzzle the characters solved. By premiere night, the community that built up around the ARG is not watching a new show. They are watching the show they helped find, and some of them are in it.
“We didn’t ask people to watch a trailer,” said Furst. “We asked them to solve a puzzle. By the time they figured out it was a show, they were already in it.”
Behind the camera, Furst is the president of Curmudgeon Films, where he has spent two decades producing, writing, directing, and acting across more than 150 film and television projects. In addition to his feature producing credits, he has directed television movies for Universal and shepherded genre franchises including Universal’s Tales from the Hood 2 and Tales from the Hood 3. humAIn marks his push to bring full production infrastructure to digital-first distribution on the platform where audiences actually live.
Co-executive producer Natalie Zimmerman brings more than 15 years of experience in branded content and public relations to humAIn, having produced campaigns and digital storytelling for international brands. Her short film The Delta Girl, starring Isabelle Fuhrman, premiered at the Academy Award-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, and her feature Into You is currently in development. She holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute.
About New Power Studios
New Power Studios is a YouTube-native multi-IP studio headquartered in Calabasas, California. Founded by veteran producer Griff Furst, president of Curmudgeon Films, NPS develops, produces, and owns scripted and unscripted original IP for digital-first audiences. humAIn is its first scripted horror series.
Watch the official humAIn teaser on YouTube.
Contact: Amy Prenner, (310) 709-1101
Premiere: June 6, 2026, YouTube, exclusive.
