Creators Have Disrupted Hollywood. Now AI’s Coming to Disrupt Them.

As Sora 2 sweeps through social media feeds, it inevitably provokes the question of what all this will mean for influencers. How will the ability to conjure up realistic video at the drop of a hat shake up a world that’s based on creating those videos by hand?

The prospect of automation fills many influencers with delight because it means a powerful new tool to convey their content and message. But it also fills them with dread because part of what has made them so effective is their skill in shooting and editing footage, and now the barriers to that footage are so low that pretty much anyone can do it.

A grassroots is springing up to sound these alarms. Toronto artist Sam Yang has been talking for a while about the dangers of generative AI on his platforms, telling his nearly 2 million YouTube followers that “artists are fed up with AI art because their copyrighted work is being used to train AI models without their consent, leading to reputation damage, forgery and fraud.”

Model turned activist Sinead Bovell, who has about 600,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok combined, has warned about these AI effects in the modeling corners of the internet. “Eventually, we get so accustomed to it, we stop asking whether there’s a real human model being compensated for their likeness, for the hundreds (even thousands) of hours they dedicated to honing a craft that now powers the very AI engines competing for their livelihoods,” she wrote several months ago.

An Atlantic investigation last month confirmed their fears: It found that AI has been trained on at least a million how-to videos from popular influencers in areas from woodworking to beauty, presumably allowing anyone who uses these models to re-create the influencers’ hard work and build their own followings.

Meanwhile, supporters of AI in the creator world say that video becoming so push-button will put a greater emphasis on human relatability and style — exactly the kinds of things that influencers excel at.

And they note that so-called virtual influencers like Aitana López from the Barcelona agency The Clueless (company tagline: “Blurring the line between the real and the virtual”) or Lil Miquela from Vancouver-based Web 3 powerhouse Dapper Labs have long coexisted with human influencers, and they have their own style prompted by a human.

AI almost certainly will increase the slop factor in the influencer world and make the field more competitive.

But in some cases, it could also mean human influencers leaning in to the unique. Good thing so many know how to do that.

This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.