Michael Saylor pitches Bitcoin to MrBeast as AI takes over YouTube content creation

Strategy CEO Saylor told the most popular creator on YouTube, MrBeast, to buy Bitcoin after he shared concerns about artificial intelligence-generated videos doing “as good as normal videos.”

Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast on YouTube, wrote about his sentiments on X, saying AI might disrupt the livelihoods of millions of content creators who rely on content creation platforms. 

“I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact the millions of creators currently making content for a living… scary times,” he wrote.

Saylor, a long-time Bitcoin advocate known for leading business intelligence firm Strategy into becoming a crypto holding company, replied to MrBeast, urging him to buy Bitcoin before AI possibly takes over YouTube.

AI videos on YouTube worry content creators

MrBeast’s concern is a thought that most online creators share over the use of AI in generating mass quantities of synthetic videos “similar” to human creators’ work. According to a report from NPR, more than 15 million videos from over two million YouTube channels have reportedly been scraped without permission to train AI models over the past few months. 

Nearly one million of these were “how-to” videos, which are being used to teach AI systems how to reproduce human speech, gestures, and editing styles.

Developers of video-generating AI models need massive datasets to train their systems, and YouTube’s library is one of their biggest sources. 

YouTube Premium’s download feature may allow paid users to watch videos offline within the platform. However, the videos being used for AI training are copied en masse and fed into machine-learning algorithms outside the app.

Tech analysts and journalists refer to this flood of algorithm-driven content as “AI slop.” Adam Bumas, writer for the technology newsletter Garbage Day, said, “I don’t think this video exists for any creative, expressive, informational, or educational reason. It’s purely to be engaged with.”

Jason Koebler, co-founder of tech news outlet 404 Media, added that “AI is really superpowering spam.” He claimed these mass-produced clips are created to exploit algorithms and go viral due to their quantities, not to inform or entertain.

Although he now warns about AI’s disruptive potential, MrBeast himself experimented with AI tools earlier this year through ViewStats, a YouTube analytics platform he co-founded. ViewStats launched an AI-powered thumbnail generator that allowed creators to make thumbnails more efficiently.

Hey! Thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool, we pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission pic.twitter.com/ICrB8NFyuC

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) June 27, 2025

However, after being bashed by artists who feared the tool would cost them their jobs, MrBeast took it down. 

“Hey! Thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool,” he wrote on X. “We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.”

Legal action over AI-generated videos

In other related news, Bollywood actors Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan filed lawsuits last Thursday in New Delhi, India, to stop the creation and distribution of AI-generated videos infringing on their likeness and intellectual property rights.

Cryptopolitan reported that hundreds of AI-generated Bollywood videos with over 16 million views were recently removed from YouTube following the legal action. 

A judge had earlier ordered the takedown of several links to manipulated clips of celebrities, some of which included explicit or romantic scenes created using AI.

One popular YouTube channel that specialized in “AI-generated Bollywood love stories,” featuring 259 videos, now reads: “This page isn’t available.”

Last year, YouTube tech creator Marques Brownlee shared a report from 404 Media revealing that Runway, a billion-dollar AI company, had secretly used over 1,600 of his YouTube videos to train its video-generation model, Gen-3.

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