That’s what some influencers were discussing at the “Snap Sanctuary” event hosted by Snapchat at the SXSW conference in Texas a few weeks ago. They weren’t alone.
“I’m worried about AI stunting creativity, replacing the need to use our brains,” said travel creator Jessica Morrobel, who has about 168,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram. “It has the ability to pull your image and likeness and generate material, so what will be the need for us at that point?”
A plethora of generative-AI tools — like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Aug X Labs — have popped up to address the specific needs of creators, from video editing to language translations. Existing tech giants, like Adobe and YouTube, have also introduced features that leverage AI to support users.
When AI started to ramp up in early 2023, many creators told Business Insider they were excited about its potential and were using it for a wide variety of tasks, from drafting legal agreements to writing LinkedIn posts. But in recent months, growing concerns about accuracy, bias, and creativity have caused some of them to reduce their ChatGPT usage, or stay away from generative AI altogether.
Noah Jennings, a web designer and creator with a million TikTok followers, said while tools like ChatGPT have helped him speed up some “filler” tasks, using generative AI for the creative portion of his work often ends up being more time-consuming than coming up with the concepts himself.
“It is a dead-end process,” he said. “Your options are either, I’m going to spend more time fixing this to make it look right, or I’m just going to use it as an example, and then I’m going to go a completely different route. It doesn’t actually take out parts of the process.”
Meanwhile, Marina Mogilko, a popular education YouTuber who’s embraced AI for scriptwriting, idea generation, and dubbing of her videos, said she only uses about 10% to 20% of the content that ChatGPT and similar tools generate.
Several creator-economy insiders also told BI that they were concerned about the rate at which AI has evolved. The recent introduction of OpenAI’s text-to-video generator Sora seemed particularly alarming.
Sora is “destroying humans,” said creator Cassey Ho, founder of the fitness platform Blogilates who has almost 16 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. “It’s extracting our creativity and not giving back in any way.”
Tools like ChatGPT are being used for menial tasks
The creators BI spoke with who make extensive use of existing AI tools tend to do it for more process-driven, repetitive tasks, rather than to replace the creative elements of their work.
Lifestyle creator Joseph Arujo said he primarily uses ChatGPT to format his emails, since he gets a lot of brand partnership requests. He also recently used generative AI to create a backdrop for a party he hosted with a friend.
Cherie Luo, who publishes educational content, said she uses AI to transcribe and summarize her podcast episodes.
And UGC creator Salha Aziz said she uses AI for a variety of tasks, including writing scripts for her videos. But she added that she’s careful with how often she does so in case it sounds too robotic.
“It does help to get a general layout of the bones when script-writing, but the human element is what adds all the meat to it,” she said.
Sora is a major concern for several influencers
OpenAI’s launch last month of Sora, its new text-to-video generator, caused shockwaves in the entertainment industry. Actor and producer Tyler Perry even said he’d halted a $800 million studio expansion he had been planning because of it.
“OpenAI basically rolled out the Ferrari of generative AI,” said Martin Haerlin, who calls himself “the AI-powered director” and has been using a variety of generative-AI tools like RunwayML, Pika, and Stable Video to create AI-generated films. “But this approach is not exclusive to OpenAI. It will be adapted by other players soon and will become the new standard in maybe a year from now.”
Creators like Tristan Tales, who makes whimsical videos and stories using VFX, are alarmed, especially about how a tool as advanced as Sora could impact jobs in the industry.
“It is concerning how good it’s getting,” said Tales, who has 2.7 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. “Collaboration is the best part of filmmaking, and knowing that Sora could eliminate a number of crew roles has me hoping that there are regulations put in place soon.”
Alex Piper, the head of Night Studios, the production company affiliated with the influencer talent-management company Night, expressed similar concerns.
“Now, instead of starting from scratch, many will be hired to ‘clean up’ work started by AI,” he said. “That means less overall staff, and far fewer hours for the ones who still get the call.”
On the other hand, creator-economy insiders seemed less worried about AI replacing the human capacity for coming up with impactful, complex storytelling.
“Sora alone won’t turn everyone into an artist,” Haerlin said.
Creators of color highlighted AI’s lack of inclusivity
Education creator Kahlil Greene, known as the “Gen Z historian” to his over 800,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, said that often, technology created by humans reflects the biases that they already have. As a result, in a world where creators of marginalized communities already face issues such as pay disparity, these unresolved problems could translate over to AI.
“We don’t have enough Black people working in AI and developing these tools, so that’s going to be reflected in the finished products that we see,” he said. “AI has a long way to go before it’s at a place where people like me feel comfortable using it, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get there.”
He had previously used ChatGPT when it first came out to help with content ideation, but stopped around five months ago because he read about researchers’ concerns that the tool was spreading misinformation.
Travel creator Nneya Richards, who has about 33,000 followers on Instagram, highlighted AI’s crediting issues and image stealing as a reason she’d stepped back from using AI, after occasionally tapping into ChatGPT when it launched.
“Being able to license your image or create your image is especially problematic for BIPOC creators because the industry has profited off of using our work,” she said.
For example, in the early days of TikTok’s popularity, many Black choreographers on the app were not properly credited for the dances they created.
“There are way too many kinks in the space right now, and I feel like making it more inclusive might not even be a priority because DEI initiatives cost too much, and these days everything is about profits,” Richards said of AI. “I just stay away from it, it’s very scary.”
