C (63:09)
We're going to have this conversation next year and we're going to. It's going to be a completely different conversation. I will put money on it and I'm all for it. I agree with what Nick says. This, you know, YouTube already has a low barrier to entry. If you have a phone and an Internet connection and you can borrow the Internet connection, you can borrow the phone, you have a voice, you can tell your story, you can share your message. It doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are, if you have something to say and you have this, a phone and an Internet connection, you have a voice. Voice. You can tell the world what's happening, share all of your stories. Whatever you can dream up, you can do it. And now, with the help of AI, you don't even have to be on camera. So there are people who don't want to go on camera, or maybe they can't go on camera for whatever reason, or maybe they can't speak, maybe their accent is too heavy, maybe they hate the sound of their voice. There's a million reasons why somebody doesn't go on camera or make a podcast and all of those hurdles are gone. You can now create video through AI that looks real. Now. You can't sit down and make a 20 minute video with it yet, but you can make 5 second clips, 10 second clips, you can edit them together, you can make creations that you can't make otherwise. Just, you know, forget the fact that it's, you know, a talking head video. Just something that's incredible, something futuristic. This, this is what the world might look like in 20 years. And you're, you can make this AI creation something that Hollywood would have spent millions of dollars trying to make. You can now do that on your laptop while you're drinking a coffee. That is incredible. And while we talked at the beginning of this podcast about how this is a. There's no better time to start YouTube than now. I fully believe that. Not only because it's the best time to start, but we have access to so many tools now. There's literally no excuse for you not to make videos. If you can access a phone or a computer, you can make content one way or the other, either by getting in front of the camera or by speaking to microphone or by making prompts that can create videos or prompts that can create audio. That sounds pretty passable, you know, for 99.9% of the people I know, Dusty, you're a professional voiceover actor, so you can hear that. You can hear the nuance between an AI created voice and a human voice. But the average, the average person, they don't know. They're not going to be able to tell. They probably can't tell already. So I'm super excited about this. To your point, yes, humans are going to gravitate towards real humans, but at what point are they not going to be able to know? And I have a love hate relationship with this. Nick and I were talking about this at the end of our coffee. Sora. There's an app called Sora and you've probably seen this where it's short form video, it looks real, it sounds real for most people and it's so real that they've had to put their watermark on it. So people know that it's, it's made by AI. But if you're using the API, you can get that, you can take the watermark off. And here's where I have a problem with that. And this is why I think we're going to have some crazy lawsuits happening in the future. They are using the likeness of people of like Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers. People who have built a legacy on being home, wholesome and being kind. They're icons and they've built a legacy of this and they're no longer with this. And Sora, the AI Sora, they are making AI videos by the thousands of these people who have built this legacy and they're tarnishing this legacy, having them do things that are just inappropriate, incredibly inappropriate. My love hate relationship with this is. I love it. We have, we essentially have a blank canvas with all of the tools that we could ever dream of to create anything we could possibly imagine. If you can just learn how to prompt it, that's powerful. You still, like Nick said, you still have to know what's good. You know, I can give you a set of tools, I can give you a tape measure, I can give you saws, I can give you hammers, I can give you nails. That doesn't mean you can build a house. It means that you've got a bunch of tools that I can direct you towards a pile of wood. You might be able to make something. Maybe you can, you can't. The same thing applies with AI. You have the tools, but you still have to know how to make things and how to make something that actually looks good, that people respond to. So on that side, it's incredible and I'm super excited. The other side of that, I think there's going to be lawsuits that are going to change copyright law, trademark law, and just fundamentally how we view intellectual property moving forward. I just saw today that digital Disney is now getting in on AI. They're going to allow Disney characters to be made in AI, and they've been known to protect their intellectual property. And now they're getting in on the AI game. YouTube has built in VO3 into shorts so people can now create AI on YouTube shorts. So you can't get away from this. And just yesterday I saw the headlines that I don't know how organic this is, or I don't know if it's been manipulated, but apparently the number one country song and the United States is an AI created country song. That's wild. We're at the stage where it's passable and it's only going to get better. So I'm excited for it. I'm terrified about it. I'm split. But we can't get away with it. So harness the tools that have been given to us. You can use these tools to work faster, to work more efficiently, to help you brainstorm, to help you visualize things and come up with concepts that you could have never dreamt of a year ago or two years ago. I use AI a lot. I use ChatGPT, I use Claude, I use Midjourney. I use these all the time. They've become part of my workflow. And I know, Dustin, you wanted to talk about workflow, but that's my take on AI. I'm here for it. I'm scared of where it's going to go. As creators, we thought that we were going to be the last one standing when, oh, AI's coming. AI's come in, coming. It's not going to touch creators. AI is never, ever going to be able to do what we do. We were the first ones to be taken down. They came and swept the leg of creators. So our understanding of what's happening with AI, I think, is a little bit off. And for people who say, oh, I hate AI, I'm taking a stand against AI. Let's be clear about something. You're not against AI because you use AI every day in your life. The YouTube algorithms are AI. The auto predict on your. The spelling correction on your phone is AI. The little robot that Vacuums your living room is AI. Like we use AI every day and we don't complain about it, but when it comes to creativity, it's a problem because we're threatened by it. And to be fair, AI was built on plagiarism. So let's just call that for what it is. AI has learned how to do this stuff based on plagiarism. Plagiarism. We've taught it how to replace us or try to replace us. So I can see where the pushback comes from. But it's not AI slop anymore. And embrace it. Embrace it or ignore it at your own peril.