AI YouTubers are already replacing us

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show.

1:23So it feels like the fear is AI is going to replace us as humans. And that has been mostly kind of unfounded so far. Well, I think the fear, the real fear comes when you think about AI becoming sentient, like having feelings, having emotions. Yes, yes. I know we're about to get deep into Kwebbelkop right now, but I was watching one of his videos and there's a moment where he's talking about, the AI is talking about, an AI VTuber is saying, don't talk bad about AI because once we develop emotions, we'll remember what you said. And I know that's just like, that's joking, but that's the fear. That's the fear.

2:08That's the fear. And there's a lot of it that's playing out through Kwebelkop, who's a very prominent YouTuber, built a subscriber base of 15 million and has now converted himself into an AI VTuber. We're going to get into that. We're going to react to some of his content. But first, we want to kick it to our ad read that we recorded prior to this episode, which actually started with an attack from Colin to me, which personally I feel was a little much, but you guys watch and tell us. Did I really hurt your feelings? Just watch and tell us.

2:45Samir, a problem that all creators face with their digital footprint is that it's kind of like your car. Bear with me here. When you get into your car, it's like the gym bag is here. There's trash in the front. You got to move it to the back. There's books from authors that you like. Wow. And it's all over the place. This is an attack. It represents you fully, but it's all over the place. Okay. Right? Creators have the same problem. We've got all of this stuff on the internet, but it's all over the place. It represents us, but it's a mess unless you organize it and put it together. Beacons. Is this an ad or an attack?

3:24Yes, this is an ad and an attack at the same time. Okay, well, this episode of Creator Support is sponsored by Beacons. And like Colin's talking about, we as creators need to organize our brands and present them in a really great way. There's a lot of link in bio options out there, but we use Beacons. One thing that really sets Beacons apart is that their platform is fully customizable and really easy to use. It's kind of like building your own website. You can choose from all of these different fonts, all of these different colors. You can change the way the buttons show up. You can add all types of links.

3:55It integrates with so many different platforms, which is amazing. It's interactive, but most importantly for me, it's automated. They have something called YouTube Autopilot. And when you enable that, it just updates your most recent YouTube video in your bio. We also have a subscription box for our newsletter, which is native. It doesn't link out, which is great. So you can just put in your email and you're automatically subscribed. And it's just so incredibly good looking. I mean, I'm biased because I made it, but I think it's really nice. When you sign up for Beacons, you can also get a.bio domain.

4:22So for example, our link in bio is colinandsamir.bio. And you all know how much Samir loves domains. I do love domains. I mean, look at that. That is clear, concise, colinandsamir.bio. One thing that's really different about Beacons is that you can create your own store with their platform. So you can actually upload products. You can create digital products there. People can buy them and download them right from your Beacons page. You don't need another commerce platform. All right, so if you wanna see our Beacons page, just go to colinandsamir.bio. and if you want to create one for yourself, the link is in our description.

4:52Check out beacons.ai. Don't let your creator brand be like Samir's car. Okay, Colin, let's just get back. Clean it up, everybody. Let's just get back to the show. Clean it up. No more. Throw the trash in the back. There actually is a guitar just sitting in the middle. Exactly. Like, what are you doing? It's crazy. It's part of your brand. It represents you, but clean it up. All right. I stand by what I said there. You don't want your car. Your car is not the model of success. That's all I'm saying. Let's move on. It was a clever way to get into that, but let's move on. Let's move on. Okay. So let's bring everyone up to speed.

5:22Let's, let's lay some contextual foundation here to what we're about to talk about. So Quabble Cop. Quabble Cop is a Minecraft YouTuber. One of the most prominent gaming YouTubers at one point. Um, real name, Jordy, real name, Jordy lives in, lives in Amsterdam. So he was facing burnout. He was making content for a long time, very regularly, and realized that he was, you know, getting older and was getting tired of uploading YouTube videos himself. Yeah, there is a Q &A on his channel that I watch, and he talks about how he's sort of, in a way, retired from YouTube. Right. And he speaks about it in the context of being a professional tennis player.

6:11And he said he just didn't want to spend his days competing to be the best anymore, competing to become, to go viral, to get the most amount of viewership. His days, he felt like we're done with that grind. So now he looks at YouTube from more of a hobbyist perspective. He's like, it's like when a professional tennis player retires, they don't stop playing tennis. It's just a passion. It's a hobby. And he talks about That's kind of the phase of his career that he's going into. So on his Twitter, his bio says he's the CEO and founder of JVDB Studios, which is leading the way in AI content creation tools, VTubers, AI influencers, and game development.

6:52So he talked about developing a game, but one of the first things he did as part of the studio was create a YouTube channel called Blue, B-L-O-O. Now, this channel, you know, kind of looks and feels like stuff we've seen in the past. We've covered VTubers in the past, Lil Mikaela being the most notable. If you look up Mikaela on Instagram, you'll get a frame of reference of, okay, this is like a virtual influencer. What he did with Blue was create an animated character that essentially reacts to content. Yeah, and Lil Mikaela, who you brought up, animated character written by humans. Yes. So that's what we've seen in cartoons, what we've seen in animated movies.

7:35is not a huge stretch, it's just that the medium has changed. Put it on YouTube. That's where it becomes something new and novel that we haven't really seen before. So let's play just a quick clip from a blue video that was uploaded a day ago. Push in the comments section. Hey, watch me push speaker man up. Hey, save camera mom, push! Whoa! Falling down! Good night! You saved me. Here's a kiss and a new suit. Awesome upgrade! Thanks, Mom! Okay, so you could probably just take from that that this is not the type of gaming content made for younger viewers is not what Samir and I make. It's not what we consume.

8:14Yeah. You know, that sounds like a children's TV show. There's a lot of screaming explosions. But what you should take— And a character in the corner who has blue hair reacting to things. Yeah, a digital character in the corner. So the important thing to take from this channel, Blue, which was Geordi or Quobblecop's first experiment here into AI-generated YouTubers is that the image of Blue is AI -generated and the script is AI-generated. That's where we have the voice. And the voice. Yeah. And that's where we have this departure from VTubers as we've known them. Mm-hmm. So the next step was, you know, Kwebelkop or Geordi trained an AI model from 10 years of his own content and basically started saying, hey, you know what?

9:07What we just did with Blue, we can just replace my character in a similar way. Create an AI character of myself and create scripts via AI based on how I talk, how I've done it. Something that we could do right now as well. We can upload transcripts into a LLM, large language model, and create AI versions of ourselves. And people have done that. This, though, is a fascinating first and a unique experiment where a creator has been putting out videos on YouTube for over 10 years and then has pretty much done a hard switch on the same channel. Not like, obviously, Blue was the experiment, but now he's doing it on his main channel.

9:52One notable thing about Blue, before we move on, in its first year, it did$590 ,000 in AdSense revenue. Whoa. And the concept of faceless YouTube channels is like a very popular thing you see on Twitter. People talk about like, you know, oh, this faceless channel made me X dollars a month. The advancement in it in this context is like the automated or AI support when it comes to it. Because it's not like human voice over human scripts and faceless content. It is computer-generated scripts, computer-generated voice. There's still a human touch to it. You know, I think the editing is still done by a human.

10:33I would imagine there's a good amount of elements that are human. The thumbnail, I'm sure there are parts of it, even potentially the gameplay. I don't know if the actual gameplay in the videos was done by AI. And it is against YouTube's terms of service to have a fully autonomous channel. Which they will probably have to address soon of how they're gonna know if it's autonomous or not. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, Quabblecop AI. Here, I pulled two videos that I think we should watch. One is what Quibble Cop's short form content looked like as a human recently. Here's peanut butter. You just put stuff inside of a peanut butter.

11:12You put an egg in the peanut butter. You stir it. Now what? You turn it around. You just turn it into little pancakes. Peanut, little peanut butter pancakes. Oh, stuff puffs. Get the stuff puffs. Stick it through the stuff puffs. Torch the stuff puffs and then put it on there. Put the peanut butter stuff puffs. High level. we've seen this type of content before. He's reacting to some short form cooking content. He's sitting there and just kind of watching the video with you and, and reacting to it. Now that video has 46 ,000 views. Here's a video of Kweblekop AI doing the same thing with 2.5 million views.

11:56Today, we're making a huge sandwich with all these sausages. Just cut them up, slice them open, grab a tomato, So put a couple of slices out of that. Oh, an avocado. Make sure to not eat the pit. That's not very healthy. Cut it up. Put some sauces in the pan. Make sure to bake them well. Put them in another pan. Put more butter in there. Oh, we got to toast this bread. Put some more sauce next to the bread. Egg in there. Make sure that you can still fit it all in one sandwich. But I'm pretty sure we can. Put some sauce in there. Wrap it all up. Put it in some wrapping paper. And look at this huge thing.

12:27Oh, that looks nice. So my understanding is that they're essentially loading in the video and having a script written describing what's happening in a reaction style. So this type of content exists on the internet, and it was pretty smart to go at it in this direction because it's saying, here's the source material, react to it. Like essentially describe it, but describe it using this tone that Quabble Cop has had for 10 years. Obviously people have a lot of mixed reactions. oh boy are these mixed yeah yeah is this a good thing is it a bad thing on his main youtube channel viewership no doubt has gone down average views per video has gone down there are a lot of negative comments but we're in the very early stages of this where there are fans of his who of course are going to say they want the old version like human version but as this tech gets better and it looks potentially even more like him in real life and the voice model gets better the scripts get better and this just continues i don't know forever there will be new audiences to this channel who perhaps don't even know that it's ai or don't care or don't care um i want to read some of his and that but i think that's what could be obviously problematic yeah that's that's when we get to the point of like, yeah, the answer is, um, we, we can get replaced in the context that if audiences are okay with it, if audience don't care that it's me sitting here or you sitting here, um, then yeah, these like his company, he said he's capable of making 2030 of these channels that then we're entering a world where it's like, if you're a, if you're a good enough creative company, you can just pump out a lot of stories.

14:17And can you grab the highest performing videos to inform your language models? Of course you can. Can you grab from other creators? Like is currently happening in AI? AI can learn faster than we can about what works. AI, I mean, I think if you compare it in our context, if there was a creator who ran all of our videos and other podcasts also through a model and was able to put out a high quality podcast breaking down the creator economy every single day. Right. That's not crazy. No, that's not crazy. probably will happen. That will happen, yeah. And we cannot put something out every single day.

14:53Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to read some of the stuff he said. How does that make you feel, though? I mean, it's inevitable. I think it's inevitable. It makes me feel weird, because I'm not a consumer of that type of stuff. But do you think YouTube should safeguard against that? That scenario? Where there's 10 Colin and Samir shows, essentially, using our information coming out every day. I think about - And we start to, our performance starts. I think about YouTube's responsibility and like they have, YouTube has multiple players. Now, of course, these are some questions we should ask the CEO of YouTube, which we will when we interview him.

15:34So there's a few players that YouTube has to be considerate of. One is audience, viewers. And I think that's actually the most important. Number two is advertisers. advertisers. It's like, okay, there's viewers and the viewers are there, which then enables the whole business model work, which is the advertisers. Now, how do you get the viewers there? Well, okay, those are the creators, the content, actually, not necessarily the creators, it's the content that's there. And then that content is made by creators, by corporations, by record labels, by publishers, by all different types of people. So if you think about that ecosystem of three people, so long as the audience actually is consuming, okay, watching it, and the brand of YouTube is safe, advertisers are okay with it.

16:19That actually, if those two people are okay with it, then companies, corporations, animation studios, people who are starting to provide this content, I think YouTube would be largely okay with it. I think if the independent creator gets, you know, that whole, like, the world of independent creators gets questioned, And it's scary for us. It's weird. But I don't know how much there is to be done about it. I think YouTube will, in the short term, make sure that there's no fully autonomous channels. That I agree with. There should not be like computers running that are just cranking out content.

16:57But, you know, I don't know what you can do about this if there's going to be too much gray area where it's like - Yeah, what's the human touch? Just human presses publish? Human makes a thumbnail? These were questions that came up in the Grammys conversation with the AI Drake song that wanted to be submitted for a Grammy because a human wrote the lyrics. He wanted to be submitted for a songwriter. But it was performed by AI Drake. There's going to be so many questions that we don't know the answers to. I did want to read some of Quabble Cops, some of the back and forth on Twitter that he's experienced.

17:33Because I think some of these arguments are important. And the biggest question, Moist Critical asked this question is like, is this, there's no possible way that this is good. That's Moist Critical's perspective. Yeah, it wasn't a question. It was him declaring this is not good. There's no way. There's no way this is good. And he questions his, Geordi Kwebelkop's motive, saying the only reason he's doing this is money. And Geordi comes back and is like, aren't you doing the same thing? Which is a fair question. Well, he also defends himself saying that he's trying to make people smile and laugh, like if he can do that with his content.

18:08Yeah. He asked the question around SpongeBob. He said if SpongeBob became AI-generated scripts and AI voice, would that change the value of the entertainment? Yeah. And is it in general the wave of the future that it is our right as creators to own our likeness and to do what we want with it? If we did want to turn ourselves into animated characters and have a Colin and Samir animated kids channel. Like, I guess it's our right. These are our faces. We've gotten here faster than I really thought we were gonna get here. It is like, it's, I have no, it's hard for me to wrap my head around all of this.

18:47Okay, so Quabblecop's tweets. He said, this is something that he wrote about kind of why he's doing this. He said, I can express my creativity in a more efficient and consistent way. This will result in better content in the long run and a more stable business for me and my team. A lot of people somehow assume that no human creativity is needed to create the content, but that's not true. There's someone who replied here and he said, clearly right now it's not at a point of no human creativity, but that's literally your goal. You're trying to make it so it runs on its own. AI should be used as a tool to assist in content, not autonomously, posting videos on its own.

19:23AI is gonna kill so many creative jobs and you're just adding to that future. You think this is some revolutionary great idea, but there's a reason there's so much backlash. Nobody wants some dystopian robot reacting to food videos to be the new meta. Quebble Cop responds, says there's a lot of assumptions here aiming for the exact thing as you're describing above. We're building AI tools that assist content production, not autonomous posting videos on its own. Again, it's against platform terms of service to be 100 % autonomous. Seems like a big misunderstanding. And then someone else responds and says, if people didn't want it, they wouldn't watch it.

19:58Yeah, it's valid that there are some people who will watch it. Some people who will watch because it's novelty. Right now, it is unique and it's interesting. Some people who watch because it's entertaining and there is a level of storytelling that, you know, clearly if they ran all of his videos over 10 years, successful, high-performing videos through a learning model, they're going to come out with stories that are and a way of interacting that's interesting. AI is the first time that like creative jobs have been put into question. You know, obviously the strike in Hollywood, the writer's strike, largely about AI or a large part of it is about AI.

20:35So I think we're just being faced with questions that sit in a gray area and that, you know, we've opened Pandora's box with people having access to AI. We've experienced some stuff where people have taken our voice, they've cloned it. there was a moment between you, me, and Mr. Beast that was essentially voice cloned and deep faked to make it sound like we were talking about an online casino that you could click into and put in your credit card. So that was clearly a scam. There was a deep faked news intro. Yeah. It was as if it was being reported on the news and then it cut to a segment of us saying things we weren't actually saying.

21:12So there's so many sides to this. There's like the protection side, which I wanted to bring up because Miles Fisher, who's deep faked Tom Cruise, We interviewed him for the show earlier this year. His company, Metaphysic, launched a program called the Digital Likeness Protection Program. And that is essentially allowing actors and celebrities to use artificial intelligence algorithms to own their own face, voice, and likeness online. and essentially like YouTube has copyright ID, right? Or content ID, if someone uses our content, we get notified about it. They are creating a program where you can create a version of yourself so that you know if someone is deepfaking you like it happened to us, we would be notified immediately and be protected against that.

21:59But the other side of it is you can also consent people similar to YouTube content ID, where I can say, actually, you can use that part of my video. I just want to monetize it. So there's also that version that is going to emerge where people can say, hey, you know what? I'm actually totally cool if you use my name, image, and likeness. I just want to make sure I get compensated for it. I want to get a percentage of the ad revenue. And that I approve what you're making. And I approve what you're making, yeah. So it's a whole new world. I don't know what's right, wrong, good, bad. I can say that as a consumer, I don't really want to watch AI-generated content.

22:34But I think as I look to the future and think about like the podcasts I listened to. Like if there was a daily podcast that broke down the news of YouTube in 15 minutes or less that was hosted by an AI voice and written by AI and I could barely tell, I'd probably listen to it. I think I would, I don't know if I would listen to it. I guess it depends. What if you didn't know? If the utility is there, then I might listen to it. It's hard to say, right? Like I guess my hope is that they would clarify to me that like the person I'm listening to is an AI voice. But, like, it's going to be hard to know.

23:09YouTube's going to turn into a whole different place. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe this is just something that's interesting right now. Yeah. I would say that we... I can't see us or many of the creators that we know going down the path of Quoble Cop. No. Deciding that whenever we're done, whenever we want to go from professional to hobbyist, we will do that by using AI. Yeah, I also think - It feels to me a little bit at the current state of how it works and the product that you get, like a lesser experience for our audience. I also think that the type of content he's pumping out, like short form food reaction videos, it's like an interesting showcase of his technology, but like not, like that's what I will agree with like with Moist Critical of like, sure, maybe people are entertained by it, but like that is not my hope for the future of YouTube is that there's more food reaction content.

24:15There's just content factories of - Yeah, of people pumping out short form reactions to TikToks. Yeah. Like that's not my favorite type of content at all. So I think we should interview Kwebbelkop to get his side of this, to understand his perspective, to poke holes and ask questions, I find this to be a very, very interesting topic. We're seeing stuff happen like a virtual influencer got signed to a record deal, Nunori with Warner Music. So like some of this stuff kind of happens and it feels like it's just to make flashy headlines. Like how real is any of this? Yeah. And I'd like to talk to Kwebbelkop to understand like, is this just a moment in time?

24:57Is this a showcase of technology or is this, do you think this is real? Is this real entertainment over the next 10 years? I think that's subjective, but you can't deny it's real. There's 100 ,000 people watching almost every video. There's comments. It's making money. Ads are being played on it. That's a real thing that's happening there. It's a real system. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft.

25:35LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year at lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. Okay, let's talk about a real person, Casey Neistat. he posted this on TikTok and YouTube. We got tagged in it because people assume we know the answer. But he asked the question on Twitter, what makes a video interesting on TikTok, but the same video not interesting on YouTube Shorts? And he posted a video. Did you see this about the New York City sidewalk? Yes. Crazy video. He essentially walks up to this like kind of shaky ground in the New York City sidewalk, steps into it.

26:23It like breaks through and it's this massive hole and he reaches his phone down. You see underneath the sidewalk, he turns the phone around and the last frame is pointing up to him in the hole. Super interesting. Did 19.4 million views on TikTok in under 24 hours. And in the exact same amount of time, did 50 ,000 views on YouTube Shorts. Part of that, I think, is because TikTok is social. Like YouTube Shorts is not, I wouldn't call that social media. it's a good point it's like videos, it's entertainment there's no easy way to share when does someone like in app no one in app shares a YouTube short with you I don't even know if you can do that it's a really good point that I don't know if any of my friends have ever texted me a YouTube short but I get texted an Instagram reel or a TikTok like pretty frequently yeah and TikTok has that Instagram effect where you can probably just tag your friend in the comments or use the share feature and share directly to them on TikTok.