YouTube’s greatest individual creator, Jimmy Donaldson, known for his Nadinik Mrbeast, faced a return reaction in the community after launching a AI thumbnail generator that could repeat other creative styles, forcing his team to make changes to the disputed tool within a few days.
Promoted in the now deleted videos, an 80-month tool with AI drive has allowed users to generate thumbnails mimicking visual style, logos, and even the faces of other YouTubers, setting immediate concerns about consent, originality and creative ownership.
Responding to the alleged “feedback” to the tool, Donaldson, who has over 400 million subscribers on YouTube, said On the X, his team “pulled it over and added a creature stream to find the right artists of the thumbnail into a commission.”
The turning point came after the prominent creators, including Jacksepticee, discovered their logos and visual styles used without approval in the promotional tool materials.
“What really fuck … and he used my logo in promotion for that. I hate what this platform is turning. Fuck Ai,” Jacksepticeye specified on the X.
Donaldson faced Viewstats at the end of 2023 with Chucky Appleby as part of the juice, launching a Creator tools that also helped start. Although not only owns Viewstats, it remains closely related to Juice, which cites the platform as a basic product and helps the development and promotion of the AI thumbnail tool.
Despite the clarification that the features of the face movement would be limited to creatives that use their own faces on their own thumbnails, the tool remains available on Viewstats despite the deleted promotional posts.
Viewstats and Donaldson did not immediately respond Decipherptic Commentary requests.
A moment of calculation
Controversy reflects deeper tension within the creation of content regarding the role of AI. While some claim that AI democratizes access to smaller creators who lack production teams, critics take care of the effects of human creativity and intellectual ownership rights.
“This is the moment of calculator over and over: what begins as controversial in the end becomes common practice,” Renz Chong, Executive Director of Modular Platform on A16Z A16Z chain Sovrunsaid Decipher. Such tools “may now feel unfair, but it will soon be too common to neglect,” he added.
A bigger challenge, Chong claims, lies in the protection of the creatives after the imitation becomes commonplace.
“If we know that these tools are inevitable, the boundaries must focus less on the limit and more to recognition,” Chong explained. “Creators must retain visibility and value, even when their style mimics or remixed.”
This means building an attribution system directly into the AI tools, ensuring that creatives can “decide, have to be remedied, or even licensed their work and aesthetics,” Chong said.
“We need to build an ecosystem in which creativity remains visible, guided by consent and quite rewarded,” he claimed.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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