One of Gaming’s Biggest YouTubers Wants to Replace Himself With AI

02.08.2023 - 12:13 / wired.co.uk / Ai

Jordi Van Den Bussche used to devote every waking hour to building his presence on social media. The gaming creator, better known as Kwebbelkop, would labor 24/7 on his YouTube channel coming up with video ideas, shooting them, distributing them. He did this while courting brand deals and doing the other work integral to his survival on the platform. Five years ago, he ran into a problem. “Every time I wanted to take a holiday or I needed some time for myself, I couldn't really do that, because my entire business would stop,” he says.

It’s an issue known as the “key person problem.” Without Van Den Bussche on camera, the entire Kwebbelkop enterprise didn’t work. He was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, and too tired to create videos. He needed a break: Around 2018, like many other YouTubers, he experienced significant burnout.

By Will Bedingfield

By Madeline Ashby

By Amelia Tait

The burnout sparked a change in mindset. He began thinking about what would benefit him and what would benefit the creator industry—which often relies on milking the on-camera presence of an individual until they reach a breaking point, then finding another person seeking fame and fortune. He came up with a solution: a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos, practically without his involvement. “I'm retired from being an influencer,” he says. “I've had a lovely career. I had a lot of fun. I want to take things to the next level. And that means making this brand live on forever.”

Van Den Bussche’s AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator’s likeness—their on-camera performances and what they say in videos—and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices, the controversial AI tool behind the CarynAI virtual influencer, which outsourced maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators.

The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts—such as “turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people”—and producing the end result. (The latter is similar to a tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption.)

Van Den Bussche won’t reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they’re coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche’s way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.

The ideas that went into the AI tools took years to form. Prior to building them, Van Den