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 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.
How AI is already changing YouTube: Some content on the platform is already fully AI-generated, though primarily in less personality-driven categories.
Why MrBeast might be safe: His specific content format may provide some protection against AI replacement, according to experts.
Behind-the-scenes AI adoption: MrBeast has already experimented with AI tools for production work, though not without controversy.
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.
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.