One Flap of AI's Wings Is Transforming the World of Creators
In creators' workspaces, AI is no longer optional. In a 2026 survey by Adobe of some 16,000 digital creators across eight countries including South Korea, 75 percent of creators who had used generative AI (artificial intelligence that produces text, images, video and more on its own) called it an essential part of their work, and 93 percent said it had made production faster.
The gains in productivity are just as wide. Put to active use, AI means a single shoot no longer ends as one YouTube video: the material is repurposed into Shorts, Reels and newsletters, and automatically translated, broadening the subscriber base. As a result, one-person media now commands productivity rivaling that of a small media company, and individuals have gained the room to grow into sustainable brands beyond the platforms.
Amid all this, AI has stepped in front of the camera as well. Granny Spills, a global influencer in a pink designer suit who doles out life advice, had 920,000 TikTok followers and 2.11 million Instagram followers as of August — yet she does not exist. She is an AI influencer created by creators Eric Suarez and Adam Vaserstein, who say they develop ideas and scripts with Claude and then produce the videos with video-generation tools such as Veo and Sora. In South Korea, too, virtual characters such as “Kim Hamjji,” an emotionally anxious hamster, and “Nangman Baeksudal,” a romantically jobless otter, are AI-made.
High productivity, however, does not translate directly into influence. Some of Granny Spills' videos have been judged unoriginal content on TikTok and excluded from monetization. Spotify, too, has announced it will tag nonexistent artists with an “AI persona” label and drop them from music recommendations — examples of AI hitting its limits in an influencer ecosystem built on trust.
AI can render a flawless image of lipstick-painted lips, but it cannot share the experience of a day when lips start to dry out at 3 p.m. It can compile dozens of must-eat spots in Tokyo, yet it holds no private tip like the dish you order every time on your third visit. Followers seek out a particular creator to watch what that person loves and gives up, and which standards they maintain over time.
The calculus is changing for creators, the technology's actual users, as well. Hank Green, who runs Vlogbrothers, a YouTube channel with 4.09 million subscribers, recently published a “personal AI policy” after taking stock of his career. Admitting he had come to rely too heavily on large language models (AI trained on vast amounts of text to write sentences the way a human does) in his research and editing, he set principles that content must be made by a person and that he will not use LLMs for scriptwriting or editing — concluding that making more is not necessarily better, and that audiences must be able to trust that a creator's opinions are truly their own thoughts.
The question itself has changed. Only a few years ago the buzz of the content world was “What can we make with AI?” Now that AI use in production is taken for granted, the question has shifted to “How far do we take it?” In an interview with Allure, the Korean YouTuber Ppoyongnyong said that with no capacity for a proper photoshoot, posting AI-generated images on the feed drew a warm response, and that AI is useful for realizing an intended vision when you already know exactly what to make.
