The world’s biggest YouTuber, MrBeast, says the rapid advance of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is “scary” for the “millions of creators currently making content for a living”.
AI tools that can create fully-formed videos from simple text prompts by users have made rapid advances in recent years.
The most recent of these, OpenAI’s Sora – which was released last week – has attracted scrutiny for the ease with which people can reproduce copyrighted characters and material.
On social media, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, asked what would happen to people like him “when AI videos are just as good as normal videos”.
Fears about the impact AI will have on the jobs market are widespread – but particularly acute in the creative industries.
In the film and video game industries, there has been extensive industrial action over the use of AI.
Those concerns were recently reignited over a headline-making AI actor.
However, AI is also being widely used in the same sectors.
For example, YouTube offers the use of generative AI for content creators, including generating videos through Google’s Veo tool.
AI can also be used to auto-generate subtitles or to hone ideas and scripts.
Some YouTube videos are fully AI-generated – for example long videos which people might put on to help them go to sleep, says Lars Erik Holmquist, professor of design and innovation at Nottingham Trent University.
However, “the general trend of what we’re looking at AI as a tool [is] it makes creativity so much cheaper,” he says.
“I think the people that win in the short term will be just those who use it to create really good content,” he adds.
For creators like MrBeast, it is unlikely that he will be replaced by AI-generated videos.
“His whole idea is to make people do uncomfortable or dangerous things for money – and if it wasn’t real, nobody would watch it,” says Prof Holmquist.
But, given his huge profile, interrupting his usual feed on X – usually promoting his videos – to speak about this is significant.
Where AI could be useful to creators like MrBeast is behind the scenes, such as in production or graphics.
In fact, he tried that earlier this year – but faced a backlash from other creators when he released an AI tool which generated thumbnails for videos.
But other prominent YouTubers pointed out the controversy around what generative AI is trained on – with some arguing it steals copyrighted material without paying the creators.
MrBeast removed the tools from his analytics platform and instead provided links to human designers.
Veo, Google’s AI video generator, is trained on a subset of YouTube videos – though it is not known how many, and whether MrBeast’s videos are included in the training data.
