As generative artificial intelligence improves, creators are increasingly confident they will use it to create content for their audiences.
Generic AI usage is increasing for all types of content creators. In March, a content expert survey by Kontent.AI found that 74% used AI tools every week and 39% used them every day. Currently, digital creators from platforms such as YouTube and Spotify are taking part in this growth trend and are expanding their content even further.
Below is how some creators leverage generation AI to create video, audio and written content, and whether it is a turn-off for advertisers.
AI-generated podcasts
Media and investment company FlightStory, a producer of popular podcasts such as Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO,” is testing seven AI-generated shows in the market, including Bartlett’s “100 CEO” interview series. These shows are fully scripted, produced and edited by AI and hosted by Bartlett’s AI-Cloned Voice, but are based on concepts and prompts written by Bartlett and his production team.
FlightStory is experimenting with AI-creating animations for the visual components of “100 CEOs” with plans to deploy these within the next three weeks for each FlightStory CRO Christiana Brenton. Humans review podcasts at every stage of the production process to ensure that they feel authentic to Bartlett fans.
FlightStory CEO Georgie Holt said the company is now about internal teams coming up with key challenges and compete to “disrupt themselves” to solve AI. The goal is to make the company’s work more efficient and cost-effective by determining where human attention is no longer needed.
“I’m essentially trying to commit suicide in 60 days,” Holt said. “Can I remove myself completely from the organization and it can run without me, what I’m trying to test.”
YouTube AI
YouTubers such as Bennett “Money Mind” Santora combine a variety of tools to create videos that are completely AI-generated. Santora uses 11 voices, Heygen in clones to create AI video avatars and poppy AI, write scripts, mixing all three outputs to create videos. He has already uploaded hundreds of past video scripts to Poppy AI to build a unique model of his personal tone and vocabulary.
He said he wasn’t overly concerned about fans’ reactions to AI content, as he thinks he cares more about the quality of the information he shares, rather than the specific tool used to create the videos. He plans to create a dedicated YouTube channel to share his AI creation journey with his fans.
“We probably still need humans to look into the script and make sure everything makes sense,” said Soundtrack. “It also probably passes through 11 parts. Sometimes the voices are weird at some spots and you might need to do some playback on those parts.”
Ultimately, Santora hopes to use AI tools to dramatically increase video output, increase the share of search traffic, and generate more revenue.
AI Newsletter
Lauren Devane regularly uses AI tools to create Subscack blog posts, edit the output of various models, and create blog posts about AI technology development and current events. She estimated that 70% of her material items were generated by AI, and that all AI output was directly influenced by her personal ideas and context.
“We’re trying to see how we can use this to write something that really resonates with. The more we give them a context about who the audience is, the more we can connect with them,” Devane said. “I know the audience well enough, so I’m a factor in its taste. I’m a real person who sees it, sees it and looks like, ‘This is a hit, or this isn’t a hit.’ ”
I’m doing that right
Throughout podcasts, videos and Saccak, creators who use AI try to be transparent with their fans about it. Many people are wary of AI’s invasion of everyday life. A 2023 report by creator marketing data platform IZEA found that 86% of consumers believe Creators should disclose when creating content using AI.
“The issues of ethics and AI are clearly very multifaceted. I think anyone who isn’t a writer uses ChatGpt. I think that’s their dirty little secret,” said Allison Harbin, a responsible AI expert who serves as AI analyst at Professional Services Advisory CBIZ. “From an ethical perspective, I would say I’ll make it clear that it’s the right thing to do.”
Despite the rise of AI-generated author content, Harbin said fans expect real video and AI-generated video and audio identification to be better. As a result, she does not view AI-generated content as an existential threat to human content.
“Human-generated content is likely to win every time by being communicated and due to the fact that a large language model is essentially a parrot. It’s just parroting the information it’s trained, based on the prompt you’re giving it,” Harbin said. “So I think there are real creative limitations to how good AI content is.”
Advertiser’s perspective
Some creators are all-in-the-art AI-generated content, but not all advertisers are the same.
Jeremy Whitt, executive media director at Hanson Dodge, a full-service agency, said his clients perceive creator content generated by AI as low quality, and agents have certain terms in their creator marketing agreements to prevent content being created using AI.
Otherwise, it could raise a nasty conversation about creator fees. “They want to make sure the people they hire are actually making the content,” he said.
While some creators may be excited by the possibility of scaling content output faster, the risk is that if left unchecked, the platform is flooded with poor quality content. Harbin, who previously worked as a prompt engineer for Google’s AI search engine capabilities, had no connection to this risk and had expected Google to adjust its algorithm to respond in the end.
“Google is also involved in AI games and will ultimately tweak the search algorithm to reflect that,” she said.
However, Whitt said his clients are not distorted using AI-generated content to meet programme media purchases that are motivated by pure indicators rather than creator content credibility.
“I don’t care if I’m going to use AI to fill a podcast ad slot somewhere on my network or crank out a 100 version of the banner,” he said. “But when it’s people, especially those with faces and voices, yeah, that starts to become more important to them.”
