The world's biggest YouTuber MrBeast says the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is “frightening” for the “millions of creators who currently make their living creating content.”
Artificial intelligence tools that can create full-fledged videos from simple text prompts from users have made rapid progress in recent years.
The most recent of these, OpenAI's Sora, released last week, attracted close attention for the ease with which people can reproduce characters and copyrighted material.
On social media, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, asked what will happen to people like him “when AI videos are as good as regular videos.”
Concerns about the impact of AI on the labor market are widespread, but they are particularly acute in the creative industries.
There have been large-scale strikes in the film and video game industries over the use of AI.
These concerns have recently resurfaced due to An artificially intelligent actor making headlines.
However, AI is also widely used in the same sectors.
For example, YouTube encourages content creators to use generative artificial intelligence, including creating videos using Google's Veo tool.
AI can also be used to automatically create subtitles or to hone ideas and scripts.
Some YouTube videos are entirely AI-generated – for example, long videos that people can play to help them fall asleep, says Lars Erik Holmqvist, professor of design and innovation at Nottingham Trent University.
However, “the general trend is that we view AI as a tool [is] it makes creativity much cheaper,” he says.
“I think in the short term the only winners will be those who use it to create really good content,” he adds.
For creators like MrBeast, AI-generated videos are unlikely to replace it.
“The whole idea is to get people to do uncomfortable or dangerous things for money, and if it wasn't real, no one would watch it,” says Professor Holmquist.
But given his huge profile, interrupting him normal feed on X – usually promotes his videos – talking about this is revealing.
Where AI can help creators like MrBeast is behind the scenes, such as in production or graphics.
In fact, he tried this earlier this year — but faced backlash from other creators when it released an artificial intelligence tool that created thumbnails for videos.
But other prominent YouTube users have pointed out controversy over what the generative AI is being trained to do, with some claiming it steals copyrighted material without paying the creators.
MrBeast has removed these tools from its analytics platform and instead provided links to human designers.
Veo, Google's AI video generator, YouTube video training – however, it is unknown how many and whether MrBeast videos are included in the training data.
