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”.<\/p>\n
AI tools that can create fully-formed videos from simple text prompts by users have made rapid advances in recent years.<\/p>\n
The most recent of these, OpenAI’s Sora – which was released last week – has attracted scrutiny<\/a> for the ease with which people can reproduce copyrighted characters and material.<\/p>\n 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”.<\/p>\n Fears about the impact AI will have on the jobs market are widespread – but particularly acute in the creative industries.<\/p>\n In the film and video game industries, there has been extensive industrial action over the use of AI.<\/p>\n Those concerns were recently reignited over a headline-making AI actor.<\/a><\/p>\n However, AI is also being widely used in the same sectors.<\/p>\n For example, YouTube offers the use of generative AI for content creators, including generating videos through Google’s Veo tool.<\/p>\n AI can also be used to auto-generate subtitles or to hone ideas and scripts.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n However, “the general trend of what we’re looking at AI as a tool [is] it makes creativity so much cheaper,” he says.<\/p>\n “I think the people that win in the short term will be just those who use it to create really good content,” he adds.<\/p>\n For creators like MrBeast, it is unlikely that he will be replaced by AI-generated videos.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n But, given his huge profile, interrupting his usual feed on X<\/a> – usually promoting his videos – to speak about this is significant.<\/p>\n Where AI could be useful to creators like MrBeast is behind the scenes, such as in production or graphics.<\/p>\n