The AI Deluge: How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Content Creation and What It Means for Independent Creators

Hey there, folks. We're living in some interesting times, and there's going to be some fascinating things to unpack in today's discussion.

It's raining AI, right? That's the whole thing. Everyone is just talking about AI this, AI that. It's kind of weird how we've gone from almost nothing just a couple of years ago to what we have now, which is like a deluge, a monsoon of AI making its way into everything that we do really.

So strap in, folks. Let's get right into the meat and potatoes of independent podcasts and independent creator content.

AI: The New Creative Landscape

Some of the stuff that we've been looking at is how AI has been invading almost every aspect of our lives as regular people, as content creators, or any kind of creating aspect. It's become really a big part of what we do nowadays. Many people are looking at AI like it's the boogeyman.

I know that a lot of aspects, especially in the art community and other kinds of creation, see it as an invader of sorts really. Things like Sora or Midjourney when it first started out, Gemini, and Deep Seek, which is a new one that just came out. AI has just glommed onto everything.

Many of us have gone full circle into embracing AI to replace what we do as a creative endeavor. I think that can lead to some things that are not conducive to how we used to be creative in creating content and doing our normal day-to-day hobbies and jobs.

When Big Brands Go Cheap: The Coca-Cola Disaster

Let's take a look at the recent Coca-Cola holiday ad from a couple of months ago back in the holiday season. Normally we'd see Santa and the polar bears and the trucks and everything coming through in beautifully crafted advertisements. But this time, it was like, "You know what? Let's do this in AI. We don't want to pay people to make this stuff."

And it was really, really bad. Seriously bad. Of course, AI has a hard problem with text and words. You could definitely tell on some of the shots with the Coca-Cola logo on the truck that it was completely messed up. You'd see "Coca," but the hyphen and "Cola" was all squished and just didn't look correct.

That brought a lot of outrage from people, which they were perfectly within their right to express. Why would you do this? You used to pay people: artists, videographers, character designers, and visual effects professionals to create your advertisements. Coca-Cola just decided to go cheap and pay AI to do it instead.

You had six-fingered people and all sorts of problems like that, plus misspelled words. It brought up a backlash, and Coca-Cola deserved it. The same thing happened with the Disney Plus show "Secret Invasion," an MCU production where the opening intro was done in AI. People were furious because they knew Disney could have someone do something like that, or better.

The Poison Pill Arms Race

One thing I like to bring up is that people have been putting in what's called poison pills to make their content poisoned so AI wouldn't be able to scrape it and use their content in its learning process. This has been ongoing for about a year or two with different approaches.

There's an Ars Technica article about how one YouTuber is trying to poison AI bots stealing her content by using specialized garbage-filled captions that are invisible to humans but confounding to AI.

Unfortunately, AI is getting smart enough to detect if content is poison-pilled and can bypass it to scrape normally. We're getting into an arms race really. It's very similar to the US and Russia back in the fifties and sixties with the space race. One side launches Sputnik, which kicks America into doing something better, and it goes back and forth.

The problem with AI is that we're going to be spending more time and effort creating poison pills and trying to block AI content scraping than we're actually creating our art or content. We have to realize what's important and how far we can go with this.

The Human Cost: When Creators Get Siloed

We've seen this plenty of times: longtime YouTubers getting their channels removed without warning. I'm thinking of the Zero Warnings case, where a founder of a small music software brand spent more than 15 years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business products. He never had any issues with YouTube's automated content removal system until one day when YouTube, without issuing a single warning, abruptly deleted his entire channel.

We see this constantly. People post about how YouTube has demonetized their video or completely killed their channel. Good luck trying to get any kind of response from YouTube because unless you're a big YouTube giant like MrBeast or MKBHD, you're not really going to get any traction from YouTube support. You're just going to hit an automated brick wall with no human interaction.

This is where AI has taken over the moderation side of things as well. Yes, YouTube has made some improvements over the years, especially after the Viacom lawsuit that almost cost us YouTube entirely. YouTube spent billions of dollars and years creating their Content ID system. It's not perfect by far, but it's something that's perfectly capable of finding copyrighted material within a video and flagging it.

In that respect, AI is actually a good thing. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing and better than having no video hosting service whatsoever.

Fighting Back: Cara and the Artist Resistance

The art community, especially on Instagram, saw that Meta was going to use all their art and posts for machine learning in their Llama AI. In response, a group of people decided to open up a new site called Cara.

Cara is a social media and portfolio sharing platform for artists and art enthusiasts. The important part is that they have built-in aspects to detect AI art, and they don't allow it on their platform.

They state: "We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won't host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation."

It's great to see a growing platform take this stance. When they first started in 2023, they had such high demand that their servers would crash constantly. But they've gotten past that point, and everything has leveled out to where it's perfectly fine now with a growing community of artists and art enthusiasts who want to escape the Meta umbrella.

The DeepSeek Disruption

Recently, this Chinese company DeepSeek came out with their machine learning platform and used ChatGPT information for their training. Everyone freaked out, saying, "How dare you steal the content that we stole from everybody else?"

DeepSeek proved that you can have a ChatGPT-like service for not even a fraction of the cost that ChatGPT was charging. When DeepSeek became public about a week ago, everything dropped in the stock market. There was an insane number: about $600 billion in market cap lost from OpenAI and other companies like Meta. The stock market was red and falling fast.

Now, it bounced back within a day or two, but DeepSeek proved that you can do what these companies claim requires massive expenses for a lot less. This Chinese AI company came in and upended the tech pros of the US, saying, "Yeah, we can do it better, cheaper, and faster."

AI as a Tool: Finding the Balance

Here's where I might get some flack, but I want to be honest about how I use AI. I use a little bit of AI for creating my written articles and cleaning stuff up. What I do is write the first draft, then have it go through AI for grammar, tonality, and structure to tighten it up a little bit. Then I go back over it to make sure it's still me.

Is my use of AI bad? In some people's minds, yes, I'm a horrible person for using AI that way. But for me, because I have very limited time between my nine-to-five job and content creation, I have to be efficient.

I could spend hours creating a blog post and editing, then have one out once every week or maybe once every two weeks. Is that a good use of my time? I'm still creating the content first. I'm still editing two or three times to make sure that what I created is part of the final product.

For video editing, I use Whisper AI to get transcripts and subtitles because paying a company to do that is very expensive and time-consuming. I use a tool to cut my workflow time down to a much more manageable process while still making sure the final product maintains my personal touch.

The Art Dilemma

For art, I can see where using AI could be perceived as cheating yourself. I create all my thumbnails myself and do all my artwork myself. I'm not the best, but I'm trying. If you looked at my older videos, those thumbnails were rough, but I like doing them myself.

AI art has that soulless feel to it. It doesn't have the human touch. You can tell it's fake. I know artists like Corey who live streams his digital art creation process to prove his work is original and to get people accustomed to seeing art being made. It's a slow process that sometimes takes multiple streams to finish, but you can see the sausage being made.

With AI, it's all done behind the screen, and then it's like, "Here you go, I got your thing." It's taking away a lot of the creativeness of an artist's work.

Looking Forward: AI Isn't Going Anywhere

What if Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso were creating their artwork today? How bad of a reception would they receive from the general public saying, "I can create something like that in less than 20 minutes. Why should I pay you thousands of dollars for a commission when I can get my $20 a month subscription to Midjourney or Sora?"

I'm not saying all AI is bad. That's not what I want people to take away from this. Certain elements of AI, especially in written form for editing or structuring ideas, can work when there's human interaction going through the process to make sure what's been created from human work is still viewable as human work.

The takeaway from this discussion should be to look at AI as something not to be feared. Don't treat it as a boogeyman. Give it a good look and ask: What is this going to be doing? How does this work? How does it work against my work? What is this changing?

AI is not going anywhere. That genie has been let out of the bottle. Pandora's box has been opened. You're not putting that away now. It's something we have to learn to deal with. Yes, it sucks, but we have to figure out a way to contain the damage as much as possible.

Take it for what you will. Whatever your AI viewpoints are, I'd love to hear about them. Whether you completely disagree with everything I've said or you agree, or you couldn't care less, let me know. It's all engagement, and we're all working with the YouTube AI algorithm anyway.

If you haven't already, we'd love to see you over on our community forums where we talk about all this stuff: indie games, AI, content creation, alternative platforms, and a little bit of everything else. We might even talk about the price of eggs. Who knows?

Thanks for sticking with me through this discussion, and I'll see you next time.

The Independent Creator