> AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators

If you seriously think this, you don’t understand the YouTube landscape. Shorts - which have incredible view times - are flooded with AI videos. Most thumbnails these days are made with AI image generators. There’s an entire industry of AI “faceless” YouTubers who do big numbers with nobody in the comments noticing. The YouTuber Jarvis Johnson made a video about how his feed has fully AI generated and edited videos with great view counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRH4UBQesI

What you’re missing is that most of these people aren’t going onto Veo 3, writing “make me a video” and publishing that; these videos are a little more complex in that they have separate models writing scripts, generating voiceover, and doing basic editing.

These videos and shorts are a fraction of the entire YouTube landscape, and actual creators with identities are making vastly, vastly more money - especially once you realize how YouTube and video content in general is becoming a marketing channel for other businesses. Faceless channels have functionally zero brand, zero longevity, and no real way to extend that into broader products in the way that most successful creators have done.

That was my point: someone that has an identity as a YouTuber shouldn’t worry too much about being replaced by faceless AI bot content.