AI might be moving at breakneck pace, but society at large is finding it hard to keep up with the changes.
Mr. Beast, the most-subscribed YouTuber in the world, has taken down an AI YouTube thumbnail generation tool he’d created following criticism that it took away jobs of human thumbnail designers. Mr. Beast has now replaced the tool with a marketplace where users can connect with human thumbnail developers, and then hire them for their services.
“A week ago, I launched an AI thumbnail tool that helped small creators make better thumbnails,” Mr Beast said in a newly-released video on X.
“I thought people were going to be pretty excited about it, but I definitely missed the mark. I read all of you guys’ feedback, and we enacted some changes that we thought you guys would find positive. Going forward, there will be no AI thumbnail tool. We’ve pulled it down. On top of that, I wanted to go a step further to show artists that I care. We’ve added an option to hire a thumbnail artist, where you’ll be able to commission a real thumbnail artist to make you a real thumbnail,” he had added.
After Mr. Beast had announced his AI thumbnail tool, he’d been criticized that the tool stole real artists’ art to make thumbnails. “People being surprised that Mr. Beast is promoting AI to literally steal thumbnail artwork means nobody has been paying attention. It’s not surprising. It was inevitable. Still doesn’t make it right, but not surprising coming from Mr. Beast,” a user had posted on X.
“It steals creator’s and artist’s hard work, and serves to aid corporations rather than people when you pay 80$ per month. Most people know that Ai isn’t the problem, it’s creators are so make your voices heard,” another user had said.
The thumbnails on YouTube videos are a critical part of determining their success. The thumbnail largely determines if users will even click on the video to watch it, so YouTubers spend large amounts of time and effort to make eye-catching thumbnails. Mr Beast, in particular, has spoken about how much he’d analysed thumbnails when he was just starting his YouTube channel. As such, it seemed like a clever business idea for him to launch an AI thumbnail creation service, and charge $80 per month for it.
But the backlash from his fans and the YouTube community appears to have prompted him to not only delete the tool, but also replace it with a new tool that makes it easier to hire human programmers. And given how quickly AI is improving across a variety of fields, such backlash might become more and more commonplace as AI begins threatening an ever-greater number of human jobs.