“They don’t understand our skin tone, they don’t understand our hair texture, they don’t understand how we walk, how we talk. So when you try to create something in AI, it’s off.”
Jason Harvey is describing a problem with the artificial intelligence tools increasingly used to create animation. For him, the issue is not simply whether the technology can generate images quickly, but whether those images accurately reflect the people and cultures they are supposed to represent.
After spending seven years helping build BET+, the streaming service associated with one of America’s most prominent Black media brands, Harvey is turning his attention to this problem. His new venture, Underscore Animation, is an AI-native animation platform designed to help creators produce culturally authentic stories and make animation more accessible. The ambition is not only to give more people the tools to create, but also to address the gaps in the datasets that shape how artificial intelligence generates characters and stories.
Harvey’s interest in this problem is personal, shaped by his experience as a father and his frustration with how few animated stories allow Black children to see themselves in a range of roles. But his path to building a company at the intersection of animation and AI began long before he entered entertainment.
Harvey grew up in Los Angeles below the poverty line, raised by a single mother. When he was 15, his mother became addicted to drugs, and he had to leave home. He slept on friends’ couches before one offered him a room where he could stay until he finished high school. He remained there for about two and a half years.
Harvey did not have a fixed career plan, but he had always set his sights on working in the entertainment industry. Growing up in Los Angeles, close to Hollywood, he was surrounded by friends working in the business, both in front of and behind the camera. He was also drawn to its creative possibilities. “A lot of my friends were in entertainment. Some were in front of the camera; others were behind it. I’m very creative.” But wanting to work in entertainment did not mean he knew how to get there.
What he knew was that he could communicate with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and socioeconomic classes. “I could talk to anybody anytime, and I was very convincing.” Having to fend for himself meant he unintentionally developed great public-speaking skills and the ability to get his point across to any audience. A high school teacher encouraged him to consider college, and he eventually won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he studied business and marketing.
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After graduating, he was not ready to settle into an office job. He had been called in for desk-job interviews but wasn’t convinced this was the direction he wanted to take. Then he accompanied a friend to the Peace Corps office. “We got there, and I started reading these pamphlets, and I’m like, oh, this is kind of interesting. I could travel.”
Travel was a major attraction. Harvey’s background meant he barely had the chance to fly. The Peace Corps offered an opportunity to see more of the world while working on business development. He was accepted into the programme and sent to Ecuador, where he worked on micro-lending and community banking initiatives, including helping women establish businesses. He stayed for more than two years, learned Spanish and later picked up Portuguese.
The experience broadened his perspective, but it wasn’t exactly helpful when he returned to America and was looking for a job. “Corporations weren’t valuing my experience in the Peace Corps as much as they should have.” He already had about $120,000 in student debt and couldn’t afford the low-paid entry-level jobs that might have helped him. He decided to pursue a master’s in business administration.
After his MBA, he joined Ford Motor Company’s marketing leadership programme. His work spanned brand marketing, content and incentive marketing, and regional marketing and sales. He later worked at an advertising agency, Google, and eBay, gaining experience in marketing, technology, and business development. Along the way, he helped launch several entertainment startups. One of these ventures was Active Video, an early attempt to deliver content directly to television set-top boxes before streaming devices such as Roku became commonplace. The company ran out of runway because the market and funding were not ready. He also co-founded a music and radio streaming service called Eighbox that struggled to raise enough money to compete. The ventures ultimately failed, but they prepared him for his later work at BET+.
The BET network originally recruited him as a consultant to help work out the technology and organisational structure needed to build a direct-to-consumer streaming service. “They said, hey, we’ve never done this D2C thing before. It’s different than cable. I was like, it sure is. So they brought me in to consult about how we build a technology stack.”
That work led to BET+, a streaming service that was devoted primarily to distributing content that elevated Black culture. It also fulfilled his secret long-running desire to get into the entertainment industry. “It took me 20-some odd years to get to entertainment, but when it did, it was the right place, right time.”
Building BET+ wasn’t easy. One central challenge was understanding the audience. BET had long spoken about representation, but Harvey believed the business needed better data on who was watching its content. “I think the biggest challenge for us was, you have this legacy business that was a company that wanted to talk about representation and wanted to talk about black content, but didn’t understand that you needed to build a data infrastructure to do that. I wanted to understand the exact numbers before I printed something. I wanted to bring all this data so that we had signals on every piece of information that we could possibly have. Who’s watching when they dropped off, what brought them in, what brought them back? Nobody had ever built an audience platform like this for our particular audience in the past.”
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When Paramount wanted BET+ to use shared technology to reduce costs, he pushed to maintain a separate data infrastructure. That decision gave the service access to first-party audience data, including 35 million unique users and more than two billion hours viewed. The team could track how subscribers found the platform, how content performed and how much it cost to acquire and retain customers. The data also changed how the business approached marketing. Instead of treating marketing primarily as a cost centre, the team used it to drive revenue. They leveraged the data to make informed decisions about marketing spend, content greenlighting, churn prediction, and customer retention through targeted communications.
Paramount’s decision to consolidate BET+ into Paramount+ marked a change in the business, but Harvey says he is proud of what the team built. He points to BET+ shows becoming some of the most-watched content on Paramount+ and does not want to speculate on the reasons behind the decision. By then, he was already thinking about what came next.
Animation had been on his mind partly because of his four children. He struggled to find stories where Black children could see themselves not just as sidekicks, but as heroes, villains, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. He believes those possibilities need to be visible early in life. In 2015, he wrote a children’s book about entrepreneurship to show young readers how they can make an impact. “If you can get young kids in the community starting their own businesses, that can change an entire community. So I wanted to let people know that, especially young kids and their parents, that, hey, you’re never too young to start a business. You’re never too young to make an impact.” He plans to develop the book into an animated series.
With Underscore Animation, he has a platform to pursue these interests. The platform is intended to serve different kinds of creators. Someone with no drawing experience could pay about $10 a month to start creating animated work, while professional animators could collaborate with engineers to fine-tune the AI models that power the platform. Harvey believes the technology could significantly reduce studios’ production costs. For example, a series that might traditionally cost $20 million to produce could potentially be made for $8 million.
But access to the tools is only one part of his plan. Harvey believes the models themselves need to better reflect the people and cultures whose stories they tell. He argues that much of the data used to train AI systems reflects Western, English-speaking and urban perspectives, leaving other experiences underrepresented. As a result, the outputs can misrepresent skin tones, hair textures, speech, and movement. He wants Underscore to help address that gap while building opportunities for creators in Africa. He wants to see African countries become animation hubs alongside established centres such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan.
As with his career so far, he wants to turn work he cares about into something bigger than a job. “Each step I’m getting closer and closer to having what’s not even a job anymore. Because if you’re working at something that you’re passionate about and love, it’s not a job.”
