When he launched the AI thumbnail tool last week, MrBeast said, he “thought people were going to be pretty excited about it”.
The small preview pictures are a key part of any YouTuber’s strategy, and are used to catch the eye of potential viewers as they scroll through a sea of content.
Mr Beast’s tool was advertised as “taking the guesswork out” of designing eye-catching images for an $80 (拢58) per month subscription.
It gave users the option to insert themselves into existing thumbnails and recreate the work of other creators.
Generative AI – or GenAI – tools such as this are trained on mountains of exisiting data, which are then used to create outputs in response to user prompts.
There are several current court cases examining accusations of copyright theft against companies that make AI models.
PointCrow, real name Eric Morino, accused MrBeast of making “something that can steal… hard work without a thought” and alleged that the AI model was “clearly trained on all our thumbnails and uses them without any creator’s permission”.
While the US streamer said the intention of making content creation more accessible was a “great idea”, the tool “fundamentally hurts creators as a whole”.