When it comes to quality content that the whole family can enjoy, nobody is doing it like Jimmy “MrBeast“ Donaldson. As YouTube’s first billionaire, his thought provoking oeuvre spans classics like “I Helped 2,000 People Walk Again” and “Would You Risk Dying For $500,000?“
Arguments over the merits of his content — which often turn financially desperate people into living spectacles, lining Donaldson’s pockets but allowing him to pass along some fraction of the gains to better his subjects’ lives — have been rehashed for years.
But now, a telling new data point has emerged: Donaldson is worried that his niche could be threatened by AI.
Posting on X-formerly-Twitter over the weekend, MrBeast fretted that “when AI videos are just as good as normal videos, I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact the millions of creators currently making content for a living.”
“Scary times,” he admitted.
Of course, the implication here is that MrBeast videos aren’t exactly hard to reproduce. Typically depicting larger-than life competitions or outrageous stunts like “Lamborghini Vs World’s Largest Shredder,” Donaldson’s videos depend on the kind of reality-defying premise AI excels at spitting out.
Donaldson’s existential worrying comes after the launch of OpenAI’s Sora 2, generative AI software that lets users create short, photorealistic clips with alarming ease. Soon after its release, users began spoofing OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman into an endless variety of mocking scenarios, such as grilling a dead Pikachu, or CCTV footage of the exec shoplifting from Target.
Altman seemed to take it in stride, though OpenAI did clamp down on the kind of content users could generate with Sora 2. “It is way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than i thought it would be,” the CEO quipped on X.
For Donaldson, however, the relationship with AI is a little murkier. Earlier this year, he announced he was using an “AI tool” designed to help YouTube creators churn out the kind of uncanny video thumbnails his young audience knows to look for.
That quickly backfired, as fans and non-fans alike dogpiled on the MrBeast social media accounts demanding he hire human artists for his thumbnails. Since the backlash, Donaldson says he’s stopped using AI and started hiring human digital artists, though he fell short of issuing an apology.
“I thought people were going to be pretty excited about it, but I definitely missed the mark,” he said at the time.
If nothing else, it sounds like Donaldson can now empathize with the human artists, musicians, and filmmakers whose work is being stolen and regurgitated to fuel the rise of generative AI — it just took a threat to his bottom line.
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