AI slop is everywhere these days. It’s in your feeds, it’s in your vids, and, lately, it’s in the White House. People like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman call that progress. “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase,” Altman said, announcing the latest update for OpenAI’s AI-video generator Sora on his personal blog. That’s nice, Sam, but the majority of us see through this veil of thinly disguised bullshit to the truth: the only thing AI is going to do to art and entertainment is enshittify it.
This appears to be a fact that even Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, the viral YouTube star, can appreciate. This week, Donaldson took to social media to share his concerns about the increasing glut of AI-generated content. “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,” Donaldson mused on X. He added: “scary times.”
This is not exactly a stunningly original sociological analysis, but it is interesting coming from someone at the top of a social-media-dominated industry. Donaldson and his kind represent a fundamental subsection of today’s creative class. Being an influencer is, for better or worse, one route that young people can take to indulge in creative self-expression these days. That career—like many others—may now be under threat from new forms of automation, as AI firms begin to market their services to advertisers and businesses, in an effort to wipe out opportunities for human artists.
MrBeast’s company was valued at $5 billion earlier this year, but according to Bloomberg, it has “had three years of losses, including more than $110 million in 2024.” The problem is that running a viral empire is expensive, and Donaldson reinvests his profits into the content. Overhead for an AI influencer would be a pittance in comparison. So if a media giant like MrBeast can barely keep his head above water while chasing dominance, what chance to the next person following in his footsteps have?
Hollywood was also recently spooked by the emergence of a new “AI actress,” dubbed Tilly Norwood. Ms. Norwood, a digital creation from a company called Particle6, has made headlines in recent days, despite the fact that she isn’t real. At least a few numbskulls in the movie business think she’s the next Sydney Sweeney and audiences will soon flock to the theater to drop a hundred dollars for the whole family to enjoy her latest flick. The fact that talent agents are allegedly “interested” in Norwood (is that some sort of joke?) has reportedly made some in the acting community nervous.
Nobody should be nervous about Tilly Norwood, however, because nobody in their right mind wants to watch a movie starring an entirely AI-generated character. The whole notion is absurd, and anyone who thinks it’s some sort of big business opportunity clearly doesn’t understand the fundamental reason people appreciate art. The reason is this: it’s human. Yes, art is about connecting with other people through ideas and emotion. It’s not about appreciating the images an algorithm generated. So, while the concern about AI’s infiltration into the arts is understandable, it also shows that consumers fundamentally don’t want what AI companies are trying to sell.
Whatever you think of the quality of MrBeast’s content, it is primarily focused on putting real human beings in extreme circumstances as they try to win life-changing sums of money. That’s drama that AI can’t recreate, no matter how many GPUs Sam Altman buys.
