AI-generated video is here. What will happen to your TikTok feed?
OpenAI’s launch of Sora 2 sent shockwaves through the social media economy. AI slop was already rampant, and now there was a more realistic form of video with even narrower tailoring. Then came the lifelike images of Google’s Nano Banana.
How will creators fare in the age of AI? Lightspeed Ventures partner Michael Mignano takes a more extreme view: that it signals the “end of the creator.”
On “Sourcery,” Mignano described a future of social media where content is generated instantaneously and artificially to best suit the viewer. It comes down to keeping the user’s attention, he said.
“That’s why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful,” Mignano said. “But it still requires human beings to make the content, and there’s a cost to that.”
That “cost” is the human labor and payments that go into creating your feed. AI could mean costs go down, but that spells bad news for the influencer.
“The individual creator becomes far, far, far less valuable in that dynamic,” he said.
Mignano is well-versed in the online media space. He cofounded Aviary, a photo editing tool that was acquired by Adobe. He then cofounded and ran the podcasting platform Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify.
At Lightspeed Ventures, Mignano also invested in Elon Musk’s xAI. The investment was made in 2024, before xAI acquired X, formerly Twitter.
Mignano acknowledged that the “death of the creator” — as he called it on his Substack — was “devastating,” but that it marked a “whole new chapter for the internet.”
AI-generated video hasn’t yet reached the point of on-demand, perfectly tailored content. Some users are perturbed by its current iteration, and TikTok allows users to choose whether to keep AI-generated videos out of their feed.
But some of the change is already here. AI influencers have emerged on Instagram, and TikTok Shop is inundated with AI scams. That cute video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline? Yeah, that was AI.
We may not need perfect AI tailoring to reach an inhuman internet. Industry leaders, including Alexis Ohanian and Sam Altman, have referenced the “dead internet theory,” which says that there is more bot activity than human activity on the web.
Meanwhile, the era of the social media megastar may be on the decline. Reed Duchscher, MrBeast’s former manager, told Business Insider that it’s now easier to build internet businesses with “hyper-niche” audiences.
How can creators stay afloat? In an email to Business Insider, Mignano wrote that quality will win out.
“Platforms will no longer reward humans posting the same old, tried and true formats and memes,” he wrote. “Instead, true uniqueness of image, likeness, and creativity will be the only viable path for human-created content.”
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