Videos from virtual influencers are on the rise, according to a report from YouTube. And AI will play a significant role in the service’s offerings, with every video uploaded to the platform potentially dubbed into every spoken language, with the speaker’s lips reanimated to sync with the words they are speaking. Meanwhile, the growing flood of AI-generated content presents YouTube with a challenge: protecting copyright while maintaining a steady stream of new content. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel examine the trends and discuss their implications.

Links from this episode:

• YouTube Culture & Trends – Data and Cultural Analysis for You


• YouTube Looks to Creators (and Their Data) to Win in the AI Era


• YouTube Publishes New Insights Into the Rise of Virtual Influencers

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

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Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: [00:00:00 ] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 461 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. This month marks 20 years since the first video was uploaded to YouTube, a 19 second clip that launched a global platform now at the Center of Digital Media as the platform. Reflects on its past.

It’s also looking sharply ahead. And what lies on the horizon is a bold AI powered future highlighted in two reports published in the past week. According to YouTube’s leadership, we’re five years away from a world where every video uploaded to the platform could be automatically dubbed into every spoken language.

More than that, the dubbed voice will sound like the original speaker with AI generated lip movements tailored to match the target language. It’s a vision of seamless global accessibility where creators can invest once and reach audiences everywhere. [00:01:00 ] This isn’t speculative. YouTube is already piloting dubbing tech with hundreds of thousands of creators and experimenting with voice cloning and lip reanimation.

But with that ambition comes a fair amount of controversy. Underpinning these features is Google’s Gemini AI model trained on an ocean of YouTube videos, YouTube. Many from creators who weren’t aware their content was being used this way. Some have pushed back arguing that a license granted under YouTube’s terms of service doesn’t equate informed consent for AI training.

At the same time, YouTube’s 2025 trends report highlights the rise of virtual influencers, synthetic personas, who are building large audiences and changing what authentic content looks like. For a growing number of viewers, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the face on screen is real generated or somewhere in between.

What emerges is a picture of a platform trying to empower creators with powerful tools while, while quietly shifting the [00:02:00 ] ground beneath their feet, culturally, ethically, and. On one hand, a report by Bloomberg paints a picture of YouTube as a tech powerhouse using AI to expand creative reach, drive viewership, and reshape media, but not without controversy over how training data is sourced, especially from creators unaware that content fuels these advancements.

On the other hand, social media, today’s take focuses more on the cultural shift. AI generated influencers, fan created content and multi-format storytelling are changing the rules of what audiences find compelling and raising questions about the very definition of authentic content. Both views converge on the same point, AI is here to stay, and whether you are excited or concerned, it’s reshaping the creator economy from top to bottom.

So is this YouTube fulfilling its mission to de democratize creativity through technology? Or is it becoming a platform where the line between creator and content becomes so blurred [00:03:00 ] that the original human touch gets lost? We should unpack this. There’s quite a bit here to talk about. Isn’t.

Shel Holtz: There is, and it seems to me a relatively natural evolution for YouTube.

Uh, as long as creators are able to upload what they want, I think you will find plenty of authentic content. There’s going to be no shortage of people who want to talk into a camera and share that. Uh, people who. Themes, uh, that they think people would be interested in? Uh, I, I love hearkening back to a story I read about a, a physics grad student, uh, who started a YouTube series, uh, called Physics for Girls.

Uh, and it was aimed at the K through 12. Cohort of of students and trying to get them interested in the STEM sciences and it became very popular and she was [00:04:00 ] making, I think I read a million dollars a year in. Advertising revenue. I don’t think that’ll stop. I think people will be able to continue to do that.

What you see is in a platform where there’s no limits, there’s no constraints. How many gigabytes of of video data can be uploaded? They just. Keep expanding their data center capacity, uh, that there’s room for all of this other stuff, including the AI generated content. And as long as it’s entertaining or informative, if it serves a purpose, people will watch it.

And that’s the thing, if it’s crap, people aren’t gonna watch it. It’s not gonna get recommended, uh, it won’t find its way into the algorithm. And. Spending time creating it if it doesn’t produce the kind of results that they’re looking for. But we’ve already seen that influencers. Work, uh, on both sides of the equation, you [00:05:00 ] can tailor them to be exactly what you know your audience is looking for.

So it’s great for the consumer. Uh, and in terms of the brand or the advertiser, uh. You don’t have these loose canon celebrities that you’re, uh, using or, or somebody who’s just a professional influencer who goes off the rails. You’re in complete control. So, uh, you know, it’s not my favorite concept, but I don’t see any way to slow it down.

And I think the people behind them are gonna continue to, uh, find ways to make them. Resonate with, with the people that they’re, uh, aiming them at. And in terms of the training of AI models on all of this, you know, right now you have a, an administration in Washington DC that is agreeable to the approach that the, uh, the AI companies, uh, open ai [00:06:00 ] and like.

Want the government to take, which is to, uh, just put an end to this whole intellectual property thing and say, AI can train on anything it wants to. Uh, so I, I think that’s probably coming, uh, God knows Elon Musk is, is training grok on all of the content that is shared on X. And if you have an account there that’s, that’s your.

Implicit permission to let him do that. It’s one of the reasons that he went ahead and bought X in the first place was knowing that he had access to that treasure trove of data. So I don’t see it. I don’t see that slowing down either, and I don’t see the fact that people are unhappy, that their content is being used for training, being an impediment to having that content used as training.

It’s gonna continue to happen.

Neville Hobson: That’s part of what worries me a lot about this. I must admit, if I took, if takin