beast

CW: This one gets a little opinionated and heated

With Mr. Beast’s thumbnail generation tool, everyone could see it was blatant theft.  Training the AI on another creator’s thumbnail style and slapping your face on it is mask off soulless bullshit. But what if I told you…that’s no different than how these AI models were created in the first place. It was drawing from a larger pool of artists so it feels more amorphous, but it is EXACTLY. The same. Even if you are asking the AI to generate something “by itself”, or using your own art to train it, it’s still stealing. The entire mechanism was built on theft. ChatGPT is not exempt from this either, scraping written material is no different than scraping art. AI used for anything other than analysing mass quantities of data for scientific/medical purposes, or maybe coding, is bad! Fuck fuck fuck AI. There’s no such thing as “just using AI for inspiration”. It’s asinine. Fucking engage with this social experience we call life and find inspiration from the infinite human creativity all around you. 

It also drives me crazy when people get annoyed at critiques of Mr. Beast, as though it’s redundant or beating a dead horse. Adults in the space need to understand that young up and coming creators overwhelmingly idolize him. He has and continues to define new media content creation. The fatigue is what he is banking on. He loves to characterize justified hate as hyperbole and subjective bias. Don’t shut up about him. Protect your peace of course, but if you have something to say, don’t hold back because it seems pointless. Don’t bend over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s not well meaning and misguided. He’s no better than Logan Paul and I will say that with my whole chest. It’s just optics. Logan leans into being a villain, a heel, but Mr. Beast knows spin. He knows how to get the softer creators who do get fed up and speak out to roll over. He gives just enough performative concern to deflate the backlash.

This article was equal parts fascinating and depressing. The girl interviewed seems genuine and is clearly a sharp business woman, but her approach to content creation embodies how cynically business first it’s become. She has 9 million subscribers on YouTube, but if you look at the views on her videos it’s obvious it’s completely from shorts. Look at her other social media and you’ll see she’s not building a following in the way YouTubers even 5 years ago were. Her strategy is based on pure virality, there’s no connection to her personality or creative voice. It’s yet another knock on effect of Mr. Beast’s inescapable shadow.