Is there anything worse than YouTube thumbnails? Shocked faces, dodgy Photoshop and oversaturated colours have plagued the homepage for years, with influencers seemingly competing to create the most obnoxious preview images possible. And now, YouTube star MrBeast has found a way to make them even more objectionable.
The YouTuber this week announced a new AI YouTube thumbnail generator, created in collaboration with his own company, Viewstats. But the tool has prompted a swift backlash, mostly thanks, yep, unauthorised replication of artists' work. (Don't fancy using AI? Check out our guide to the best fonts for thumbnails.)
Viewstats (MrBeast's company) has released a tool where you can use AI to make YouTube thumbnails from r/aiwars
MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has since deleted videos explaining how the tool can swap faces and styles with existing popular YouTube videos. In Twitter (sorry, X) exchange with YouTuber Jacksepticeye, after the latter complained about his own logo being reproduced by the tool, Donaldson insisted, "I’ll build this more in a way to be inspiration for artists/a tool they use and not replace them.”
As with all AI tools, the question of copyright infringement is a serious issue. But for my money, there's something else insidious about MrBeast's new tool – that is, the potential for an exponential rise in MrBeast-style thumbnails. In today's attention economy of loud and attention-grabbing imagery, there's a sense of a 'race to the bottom' about those cartoonish images. Just when it looked like the 'gobsmacked face' epidemic might be ending, it seems it's only just begun.
Thankfully, judging by the backlash, it seems I'm not alone in my distaste for these images. As one Redditor puts it, "It's interesting to see where traditionally pro-AI voices decide to draw the line in the sand, and it appears to be MrBeast using it to let people generate MrBeast-like thumbnails." Quite.
