MrBeast is wrong about AI
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
MrBeast is wrong. It’s alright—I am wrong all the time.
But him adopting then renouncing AI is a reflection of the larger debate all creative types have today, including us marketers. He released an AI thumbnail generator, got backlash, pulled it within days, then declared AI-generated content was “scary times” for creators.
That whiplash isn’t just about bad PR management. It’s about not having a coherent philosophy about what creativity actually is and where AI fits into it. If the biggest YouTube star who ever lived doesn’t have one figured out, how are the rest of us supposed to?
Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s response at Bloomberg Screentime was more interesting, even if I don’t fully agree with it. His argument—that AI will reduce the cost of producing content to near zero, just like the internet reduced distribution costs—sounds compelling until you think about what happened when distribution became free. We didn’t get a million Spielbergs. We got YouTube, where 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute and most of it is invisible.
Democratizing the means of production doesn’t automatically democratize success. What it does is raise the bar for what actually breaks through.
Creative tools have always been democratized, repeatedly, and the pattern is consistent. When Photoshop made professional-grade image editing accessible, we didn’t see graphic design jobs disappear. When iMovie put video editing on every Mac, production companies didn’t fold. What happened instead is that baseline competence became the entry fee, and taste, vision, and strategic thinking became the differentiators. AI is just the next iteration of this cycle, except faster and louder.
For you specifically, this matters because your competitive advantage is shifting again. If anyone can generate a decent video concept or a polished social asset in minutes, your value isn’t in executing the brief—it’s in knowing which brief to write in the first place.
It’s understanding why one message will land with your audience and another won’t. It’s recognizing a cultural moment early enough to capitalize on it. These are skills that require judgment, not just tooling. The question you should be asking isn’t “will AI replace my creative team?” but “is my team spending time on work that actually requires their judgment, or are they just polishing outputs that a tool could handle?”
The real shift isn’t that everyone becomes a creator—it’s that being merely capable stops being enough. MrBeast built his empire on production scale and relentless iteration, yes, but also on an instinct for what makes people click and keep watching. That instinct doesn’t come from a prompt. Yes, AI will let more people make something.
But “making something” and “making something that matters” are different games, and only one of them pays.
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