Mrbeast, the world’s top YouTuber, has closed its AI thumbnail generator that it released last week after receiving intense criticism from the creator community.
This feature allowed users to generate video thumbnails by mimicking aspects of existing video art, including faces and other changes.
“You’ve created something that you can always take away from me (and my artist),” Twitch and YouTube Streamer Pointcrow (Eric Morino) wrote for X.
Mrbeast is currently retreating. In a video posted Thursday, he said he killed the AI feature and instead directed users of his ViewStats platform to hire human designers.
“I care more than anyone else about the YouTube community than I can imagine,” he said. “When people in the community do things that make me angry, it makes me deeply sad.”
Mrbeast’s backlash to tools shows the tightrope that companies must navigate when implementing AI capabilities for creators. There is a tiny line between automating work to help influencers save time and providing shortcuts that creators consider to be replacing or stealing their work.
AI is coming hard for creators
Mrbeast’s thumbnail generator is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the disruptive AI technology that has hit the creator community. Meta, Tiktok, and YouTube are all moving forward with AI tools that change how videos are created and what ultimately gets watched. And I think they’ll be less receptive than Mrbeast because of the backlash.
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Tiktok users will now be able to turn static photos into AI-generated videos, and YouTube plans to make the AI video generator tool Veo 3 into shorts this summer. If VEO 3 is enough to produce a TV commercial, it could potentially make a big splash on YouTube. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said earlier this month that he was “very excited by the potential of AI tools to enhance human creativity.”
It will be difficult to find a creator platform that hasn’t overrun with AI recently. Pinterest users have discovered that AI images are taking over the grid, and Music Streamer Deezer recently revealed that 18% of all new songs uploaded to the platform are fully AI-generated. There is even a wave of startups that help users automate the entire process of creating and uploading videos to Tiktok.
Creators can be furious with Mrbeast, but the biggest player in Generative AI is moving forward. Even if Mrbeast closes his short-lived AI thumbnail generator, it’s very easy for creators to generate thumbnails using other AI tools like Openai and Midjourney.
Mrbeast described his AI thumbnail tool at launch as “the future of YouTube thumbnails” in a video since then. He was probably right.
