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YouTube's biggest individual creator, Jimmy Donaldson, known by his moniker MrBeast, faced community backlash after launching an AI thumbnail generator that could replicate the styles of other creators, forcing his team to make modifications to the controversial tool within days.
Promoted in now-deleted videos, the $80-per-month AI-powered tool allowed users to generate thumbnails by mimicking the visual style, logos, and even faces of other YouTubers, raising immediate concerns around consent, originality, and creative ownership.
Responding to supposed "feedback" on the tool, Donaldson, who has over 400 million subscribers on YouTube, said on X that his team has "pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission."
The reversal came after prominent creators, including Jacksepticeye, discovered their logos and visual styles being used without permission in the tool's promotional materials.
"What the actual fuck... and he used my logo in the promotion for it too. I hate what this platform is turning into. Fuck AI," Jacksepticeye stated on X.
Donaldson co-founded ViewStats in late 2023 with Chucky Appleby as part of Juice, the creator tools startup he also helped launch. While he doesn’t solely own ViewStats, he remains closely tied to it through Juice, which lists the platform as a core product and helped develop and promote the AI thumbnail tool.
Despite clarifying that face-swap features would be limited to creators using their own faces on their own thumbnails, the tool remains available on ViewStats despite deleted promotional posts.
ViewStats and Donaldson did not immediately respond to Decrypt's requests for comment.
Calculator moment
The controversy reflects deeper tensions within content creation regarding AI's role. While some argue AI democratizes access for smaller creators lacking production teams, critics worry about impacts on human creativity and intellectual property rights.
"It's the calculator moment all over again: what starts as controversial eventually becomes common practice," Renz Chong, CEO of a16z-backed modular on-chain platform Sovrun, told Decrypt. Such tools "may feel unfair now, but they will soon be too common to ignore," he added.
The bigger challenge, Chong argues, lies in protecting creators once imitation becomes commonplace.
"If we know these tools are inevitable, then the boundaries have to focus less on restriction and more on recognition," Chong explained. "Creators need to retain visibility and value, even when their style is being mimicked or remixed."
This means building attribution systems directly into AI tools, ensuring creators can "opt in, monetize, or even license their work and aesthetic," Chong said.
"We need to build an ecosystem where creativity remains visible, consent-driven, and fairly rewarded," he argued.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair