Verified: At SXSW, creators roll their eyes at AI 🙄

AUSTIN – AI was the buzzword on the ground at SXSW, mentioned at nearly every panel, party and event … to the extent that I noticed some eye rolls and grimaces by the end of the weekend when the topic came up again and again. Creators expressed skepticism that AI – particularly generative AI – is at a level that it will actually revolutionize the creator economy at large. 

“The history of this industry is littered with the tools that were going to change everything. And that's not me saying AI isn't gonna change everything, it's just saying it's what you do with it,” said Kenny Gold, who heads up social and creator at Deloitte Digital. “We've had NFTs. We have had location-based gamification, we have had video first – we've seen it a hundred times.” 

Creators were much more excited to chat about the IRL activations they’re planning for their communities, the new types of content they’re piloting and how they’re strategizing around platform diversification than how they’re using AI. Some said they are eager for tools that can help minimize certain business-side operations or time-sucking production tasks. 

Fewer were concerned about generative AI, a surprise given all the recent chatter about AI-generated creators. Some creators told me that AI, at least at this point, is unable to replicate the authenticity and creativity that drives the trust and rapport they have with their audience. If someone is using generative AI to make a fake creator, they said, it’s easier for a copycat to do the same and harder to maintain an edge and audience. 

The bigger concern among creators is AI ripping off their content. Many were less worried about it threatening their livelihoods but were broadly wary about AI’s broader societal impact, such as on the environment and privacy. 

“Creators are scared. They want to understand more how it's being used against them, and they want the tools to be able to speak on it,” said Cheyenne Hunt, a political content creator I spoke with on a SXSW panel. Hunt leads Gen-Z for Change, an organization that launched the “Eyes on AI” campaign, which created a tool to spotlight the surveillance impact of AI. Hunt said creators across different verticals were “deeply uncomfortable” about AI's impact on society writ large. 

From the brand perspective, marketers see AI as a tool to help creators scale, find collaborators, analyze metrics, or match them with a sponsorship campaign. Some said that AI search has also led to shifts in the types of content their teams are pushing out, such as an increase in press releases to train LLMs. No one at SXSW we met was jumping to collaborate with generative AI creators.  

I moderated a Female Quotient panel on Saturday with top marketing and partnership leads, and I think their thoughts on AI use summed up the broader sentiment well. Krista Dalton of Tecovas said, “I love AI for back-end process automation and dashboards. I cannot stand it for generative AI. … We want our marketing to be as handmade as our boots.” 

Yunice Emir of Moët Hennessy said the competitive advantage comes from remaining authentic, and Yahoo’s Shannon Shae Montoya told me, “it can accelerate the pace at which we push out content, but you still need the humanness to really bring it to life.” NBCUniversal’s Ann Scheiner McCarron said, “the greatest storytelling is still human, but we're using it to help actually deliver our content, to deliver better scale to more people.” 

I want to hear from you: Is the AI x creator hype overblown? How are you using AI in creative ways? Or are you bypassing it altogether? 

Dylan Wells: What new content are you most excited about that this partnership is enabling?

Cole Bennett: It's the idea of expanding beyond music which is most exciting for us, being able to have different series that touch on travel, food – different crevices of culture. That's something that we've always had our hand in.

When it comes to building out content, it's free rein to really step into all of our interests in a way that expands on it all more than we've been able to in the past, taking that same integrity that we've applied to music-related content, and then slowly but surely expanding on it. But it's always rooted in music.

Even guests and the talent that we're gonna have on shows, we'll start with a lot of musical guests, but we have actors lined up, politicians, athletes, and just familiar people in this space. I mean, because we built such cache across all mediums, it's fun to kind of put those things to use. We've always [approached cameos before like], ‘Oh yeah, we'll put Mike Tyson in a music video,’ right, and always finding ways to blend it all. Now we can base a lot of the content around some of those more cameo-driven pieces.

DW: When you're thinking about doing a travel show or something that's new for you, how are you thinking about maintaining the Lyrical brand? What else should we expect to see in the content?

CB: The travel show we're really excited about. It's called “No Comfort,” and it's primarily based around musicians, and we're taking them to foreign countries or places that they've never been before. We have a travel guide who's been a friend of ours for years, who's incredibly knowledgeable, very worldly, eloquent. And then we have on the ground hosts, in whatever country, that are going to help familiarize us even further.

With each trip, we're going to dice that into four episodes. With travel, it's like: How do we soak up as much culture as possible? I think Gen Z wants to learn more than we've ever seen before, and we just want to make really exciting content, but we want to be very informative at the same time. And the travel show is a good example of us checking off all the boxes.

I think the idea of this show, you can't not get someone truly in their element. I mean, they're seeing things for the first time. It's all on camera, and it spans over roughly an hour worth of footage spliced into four episodes. So I think that that's going to be the most raw, uncut look at people's favorite artists, and [the artists] get to have a hand in where they want to travel to. So it's a collaborative process. The whole thing it's like we're going on a trip together.

Read the full interview here.

🎤 Creators have turned Washington Square Park into a casting call 

💭 Agents are seeking out the “erudite elite” with more niche audiences

📺 Haley Baylee is the latest creator working with Netflix

🍜 Keith Lee is launching a video podcast with Vox Media 

🍞 Some young women are turning housework into cash as “breadmakers”

Pay to play: A secretive political organization offered influencers $1,500 for posts attacking Chicago Democratic primary candidate (and creator herself) Kat Abughazaleh, per MS NOW.

It’s not just happening on the left. This weekend, I obtained documents disseminated through conservative creator chats that appear to be offers from the firm Influenceable to political creators for thousands of dollars to deliver messaging against Rick Jackson – a billionaire who recently joined the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary – and in support of President Donald Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov Burt Jones in the race. The offer states: “Base pay is $2250 & RPM is $1 per 1000 views & View cap is 2,000,000” for deliverables of “1 x Insta, 1 x Tweets, 1 x TikTok, 1 x Facebook.”

The political influencer space is murky and lacks transparency or regulatory oversight, making it challenging to identify when a campaign, PAC, or affiliated cause is behind a creator’s posts. Influenceable did not respond to a request for comment. Jones campaign spokesperson Kayla Lott said the campaign does not work with Influenceable and “does not pay for any content creators."

Plugged In: Thanks to a canceled flight, I was still on the ground for the eighth annual iHeartPodcast Awards in Austin Monday night, where Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of “Giggly Squad” took the top prize of Podcast of the Year. We asked top podcasters and nominees which podcasters they want to see blow up and who they’re listening to to get some fresh recommendations. 

A few fun highlights: Bachelor-turned-podcast-host Clayton Echard says he’s all about self help. Podcast of the year nominee Jonathan Goldstein of “Heavyweight” recommended the short, sweet and mysterious “The Writer's Allman Brother,” which he described as “very surreal and silly” a la “old Monty Python sketches,” and said no one knows who makes it, which adds a degree of mystery.

TIL: You can just take home the Oscar’s red carpet. 

Trending now: “Why you so obsessed with me?” 

My fave microtrends: Whimsy is back, in the form of sprinkles and fairy garden content.

This week I was influenced to: Buy a pair of Tecovas.

Perceived: Who captured this footage of me harassing our beloved WP Creator community manager Savannah, who also served as our social producer this weekend?

Proof I’ll watch anything: Sometimes you just don’t know where a video is going.