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One of gaming’s biggest YouTubers wants to replace himself with AI.

Jordi Van Den Bussche, known as Kwebbelkop, used to invest hours, days, and months in building his online presence in the new era of social media. For over 10 years of his career, Jordi spent time coming up with viral video ideas, shooting them, and sharing his work on YouTube.

Over the years, he built a successful business model as a gaming YouTuber and would hustle brand deals, merchandise, and other means of making money — everything crucial to his development and survival on the platform. But, eventually, he ran into an unusual problem for him.

He couldn’t afford himself a vacation. If he stopped uploading even for a day, his business would suffer from losses in viewership, likes, and even revenue.

The issue is known as the “key person problem”. As he built his personal brand on the platform, the entire business wouldn’t work without him on camera. Eventually, Kwebbelkop put himself in a situation where he was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, but too tired to even create videos.

The burnout kicked his door away and changed his mindset. He started thinking about what could replace him, but bring the same benefits of his career, which relies on his presence.

After thorough brainstorming, he came up with a unique solution.

He used a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos without his involvement in the process. But the key part of it all is an avatar that adopted his looks and personality to assist in creating videos which mimicked reactions to various events that were happening in-game.

Although not everybody was happy about this idea, he managed to score thousands of views and in revenue, which proved that AI can replace his personality while he takes a rest.

Is AI a Threat to Journalists?

But Jordi’s case is extraordinary, as no one has tried anything like this to create videos with his AI presence. So what about other people working in the creative industry or, better yet, journalists

One event in particular caught the attention of the journalist community. This event was about the German tabloid Bild, Europe’s top-selling newspaper, planning to replace editors with AI.

One of the leading staff members, Axel Springer, in an email, wrote next, “Unfortunately, part with colleagues who have tasks that will be replaced by AI and/or processes in the digital world. The functions of editorial directors, page editors, proofreaders, secretaries, and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today.”

While the community took this news with a fair share of criticism and negativity, some media analysts noticed how AI can take over mundane tasks and free up journalists to focus on investigative reporting and deep analysis.

“I think we’ll start to see more and more news organizations being able to punch above their weight”, said Nilesh Christopher, South Asia correspondent for “Rest of World”, an online publication covering the impact of technology.

Other than that, AI can be a really good tool to source basic information before going deeper into the topic, which can be helpful both for starting journalists and experienced investigators.

The Real Picture

However, as much as AI is on the headlines of media outlets across the world, people overestimate its global impact on the world.

Sure, this top-notch technology can execute magnificent and hard operations, such as learning algorithms, taking over simple tasks, and controlling vehicles. However, AI can’t replace everything at once and can show failures, just like any technology.

Although Kwebbelkop had reported immense success with his AI tools, he was met with opposition from the creator community who bashed out his AI nonsense. Many of them were telling the simple truth — AI cannot replace what’s been created by humans for humans: art, philosophy, and something as trivial as creating videos for video hosting.

This backlash made the top YouTuber reconsider his approach to content creation and move to another idea on how to improve his online success without sacrificing his personal life.

The same backlash Bild met after their controversial plan to reduce editors in favor of AI. In their defense, they weren’t planning on cutting editors out but wanted to make their jobs easier.

AI shouldn’t be considered a unique pill that will solve many of our societies’ troubles and help companies cut their expenses on humans. Instead, AI should be treated as a tool, an assistant, a helper — nothing more. It proved to be an effective tool for students, journalists, video makers, and other professionals who can outsource the most simple task to their AI companion.