One of YouTube's biggest stars is an animated character with wavy blue hair named Bloo. A virtual YouTuber, or a VTuber, Bloo has more than 2.5 million subscribers and has amassed over 700 million views on his play-through videos of popular games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "Minecraft."
The character was created by Jordi van den Bussche, a 29-year-old who lives in Amsterdam. He brought Bloo online in 2021 after feeling that he could no longer keep up with the demands of creating content for his own channel. Four years later, the character has generated millions of dollars in revenue.
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"Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human," van den Bussche told CNBC. "The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that's where Bloo came from."
According to van den Bussche, Bloo is puppeteered, meaning that a human is behind his actions and words using motion capture technology or something similar. Everything else on the channel is handled by AI technologies from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The long-term goal, the creator said, is to have the entire content creation process handled by AI.
"When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans, that's when we'll start using it permanently," van den Bussche told the outlet.
That time may be closer than we think.
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Hedra is a tech startup that offers a product called Character-3, which allows users a way to make fully AI-generated videos. In May, it raised $32 million in a funding round. "We're doing a lot of research, accelerating models like Character-3 to real time, and that's going to be a really good fit for VTubers, CEO Michael Lingelbach told CNBC.
Between products like Hedra's and generative AI applications like ChatGPT, an increasing number of content creators are using AI as the foundation of their platforms. Spain-based creator GoldenHand told CNBC that he published up to 80 videos a day across multiple channels thanks to generative AI.
"People think using AI means you're less creative, but I feel more creative than ever," he told the outlet. "Coming up with 60 to 80 viral video ideas a day is no joke. The ideation is where all the effort goes now."
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Of course, as AI-generated content is on the rise, concerns about its existence are increasing.
"Even if the content is informative and someone might find it entertaining or useful, I feel we are moving into a time where … you do not have a way to understand what is human-made and what is not," Latent Space Advisory founder Henry Ajder told CNBC.
He's especially frustrated by the low-quality, randomly generated AI content, often referred to as AI slop, that's flooding feeds.
"The age of slop is inevitable," Ajder said, "I'm not sure what we do about it."
But AI creators push back, saying that as long as their work continues to receive clicks, there's no reason to stop making it.
"There's never been a barrier to people making uninteresting content," Noah Morris, a creator with 18 AI-generated YouTube channels, told CNBC. said. "Now there's just more opportunity to create different kinds of uninteresting content, but also more kinds of really interesting content too."
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