It wasn’t until June that Jeremy Carrasco posted his first videos on TikTok and Instagram. In this brief time, he has amassed over 300,000 followers across every platform. No, these aren’t exactly Charli D’Amelio’s numbers, but it does make him one of the biggest names in social media AI skills.
Jeremy said Edge that he always wanted to try his hand at being a YouTuber. Instead, he found himself behind the camera, working as a producer and director of multi-camera live broadcasts. But he finally took the plunge when he realized that most of the dialogue around generative AI was being led by tech companies. “We need other people who will approach this more from the perspective of a creator rather than a producer,” he said. Although he maintains A YouTube page, is enabled TikTok AND Instagram that it has found its audience.
Originally, the idea was to talk about how to utilize artificial intelligence. “I named my website showtoolsai because I was quite optimistic about artificial intelligence and its ethical use in video production.” This idealism, however, turned out to be short-lived.
One thing he quickly realized was that no one was really talking about the basics, even how to identify AI video. “It’s needed… and I had all the knowledge necessary to do it,” he said. But he also knew this wasn’t the kind of conversation the current crop of AI influencers were about to start. “I need someone who comes more from the space of the Creator, who understands this.”
He quickly found his niche, posting about AI-powered videos like blurry textures, wonky eyes, or objects appearing and disappearing in the background. While Jeremy’s main focus is on AI skills and identifying Sora-generated bugs, he’s also started delving into the pitfalls and potential dangers of the increasing volume and improvement in quality of AI-generated videos, especially for creators.
- Cushioned skin textures and dreamy vibrations
- “Sora Noise” – textures that move and dance
- Inconsistent background details
- Gibberish instead of real words on signs or documents
- Unsure eyes
- Terrifyingly perfect teeth
- Hasty speech patterns
- It’s too good to be true
Ultimately, the focus turns to the creator economy. And now humans are competing with an endless stream of AI-generated content. Jeremy wants people to understand that “it’s not hard.” Sora 2 is free and has removed many of the barriers that prevent people from creating clips, it can produce sound, and it can be quite convincing at first glance.
The goal doesn’t have to be that nefarious. Sometimes it’s just about generating views and using the TikTok Creator Fund. A seven-second AI clip of a cat doing something absurd isn’t worth much on its own. However, according to Jeremy, if combined into a minute-long compilation that gets five million views, the account owner could earn around $1,000. While this may not seem like much, it can be a significant source of income for people in a developing country.
There are, of course, worse actors. Some, like the Chinese medicine AI account, Yang Mun (or Yang Mugs, depending on the site), says Jeremy, are pretty straightforward scams. It features a somewhat offensive caricature of an Eastern-style healer who espouses health and wellness advice that appears to be largely aimed at a Western audience. With over 1.5 million subscribers, you can make money just from Instagram views. The real scam, however, involves directing these viewers to a website to purchase an e-book for $11. If the ebook exists (at least one person contacted Jeremy saying they couldn’t access the book), it was almost certainly entirely AI-generated, just like the videos.
Others, like MaddieQuinnnot only are they trying to scam people out of money, but they are actively stealing other people’s content and hijacking their likenesses. Such accounts download videos, usually from female creators, and then replace real people with AI-generated avatars or faces with AI-generated avatars. In some cases, entire likenesses are stolen from creators, uploaded to an artificial intelligence generator, and then found their way to OnlyFans.
At this point, when asked if he thinks there is an ethical application of generative AI in the makerspace, Jeremy replies “generally not.” But “there are cutouts [for accessibility] and cultural considerations that prevent me from saying a categorical “no,” he says.
Some, like Lionsgate, have tried to create ethical video generation models by teaching them entirely within their own library. But there just wasn’t enough data to produce anything useful. “The only way AI video can be made generative in the way they currently are,” Jeremy says, is if “it steals a lot of people’s data… I think it’s fundamentally flawed and we should reject it.”
Unfortunately, platforms only accelerate the decline of the creator economy that fuels their growth. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube have largely become flooded with AI and don’t even consistently enforce their own AI content labeling policies. This makes it harder for creators to cut through the noise and also makes platforms less inviting for users.
Worse yet, everyone is building their own generative AI tools. “Creators are like running advertising agencies,” says Jeremy. Sponsorship deals are the main way for creators to make money, but artificial intelligence has quickly found a home where it produces advertisements (of extremely questionable quality). And when video AI takes over advertising, it will “destroy the entire creator economy.”
Meta, Amazon and DirecTV were all involved in AI generative advertising services. After all, as Jeremy says, “they intend to sell advertising services directly to customers.” Some creators may even be tempted to take advantage of the artificial intelligence trend to make money from it. Jeremy says it’s “a very rational question to ask whether this is actually a good business opportunity for creators, but I don’t think it is.”