Affable “MrBeast” warns AI video tools pose frightening threat to creators

MrBeast, the world’s biggest YouTuber with over 330 million subscribers, has expressed concerns that AI video generation tools pose a “scary” threat to the millions of creators who make their living on the platform. His comments, posted on social media, specifically questioned what would happen to creators “when AI videos are just as good as normal videos,” highlighting growing anxiety within the creator economy about AI’s potential to automate content production.

What you should know: MrBeast’s concerns center on recent advances in AI video generation, particularly OpenAI’s Sora tool released last week, which can create fully-formed videos from simple text prompts.

• The tool has already attracted scrutiny for its ability to reproduce copyrighted characters and material with ease.
• His social media post represents a significant departure from his usual content promoting his videos, underscoring the gravity of his concerns about AI’s impact on the creator economy.

The bigger picture: AI anxiety is particularly acute in creative industries, where the technology threatens to automate jobs that were previously thought to require human creativity and personality.

• The film and video game industries have already seen extensive industrial action over AI use, with recent controversies around AI actors reigniting these concerns.
• However, AI is simultaneously being embraced by the same sectors—YouTube itself offers generative AI tools for creators, including Google’s Veo video generation tool.

How AI is already changing YouTube: Some content on the platform is already fully AI-generated, though primarily in less personality-driven categories.

• “The general trend of what we’re looking at AI as a tool [is] it makes creativity so much cheaper,” says Lars Erik Holmquist, professor of design and innovation at Nottingham Trent University.
• Long-form videos designed to help people sleep represent one area where AI-generated content has already found success.

Why MrBeast might be safe: His specific content format may provide some protection against AI replacement, according to experts.

• “His whole idea is to make people do uncomfortable or dangerous things for money—and if it wasn’t real, nobody would watch it,” Prof. Holmquist explains.
• The authenticity and real human stakes of his elaborate challenges and stunts would be difficult for AI to replicate convincingly.

Behind-the-scenes AI adoption: MrBeast has already experimented with AI tools for production work, though not without controversy.

• Earlier this year, he released an AI tool for generating video thumbnails but faced backlash from other creators who argued that generative AI “steals copyrighted material without paying the creators.”
• He subsequently removed the tools from his analytics platform and instead provided links to human designers.

The training data question: Google’s Veo AI video generator is trained on a subset of YouTube videos, though the company hasn’t disclosed how many videos or whether MrBeast’s content is included in the training data.

• This opacity around training data continues to fuel concerns about creators’ work being used to develop tools that could eventually replace them.

What they’re saying: “I think the people that win in the short term will be just those who use it to create really good content,” Prof. Holmquist predicts, suggesting that creators who adapt AI as a production tool may have advantages over those who resist it entirely.