Van Den Bussche won’t reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they’re coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche’s way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.
The ideas that went into the AI tools took years to form. Prior to building them, Van Den Bussche had set up a coaching business, where he gave other aspiring influencers his blueprint for social media success. It was through that process that he developed a protocol for how to be a prominent creator. Eventually, though, even his protégés needed time off, and Van Den Bussche realized the fatal flaw in the creator economy was humans.
“In this industry, it’s like you’re starting this company, but the company solely relies on this one individual to be able to perform,” he says. “And that is absolutely a horrible business model. It’s way too high-risk.”
Van Den Bussche and his creative team began trying to reverse engineer what made creators successful. “We started testing a lot of theories on this,” he says. “We needed evidence: How much does the voice influence the performance with the fans? How much does the face influence it? How much does the content influence it?”
In April 2021, Van Den Bussche launched a YouTube channel with a virtual YouTuber (vtuber) called Bloo that he developed, powered by AI. Since then, Bloo has gained 775,000 subscribers, with each video watched by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of viewers. “He’s a completely virtual influencer with a protocol and set steps and a bunch of AI and machine learning applications involved in the system,” he says. “Now we’re applying that model to my IP and my friends’. It includes voice cloning, so it sounds like me.”
The Kwebbelkop videos made by AI—the first of which dropped on Tuesday—are powered by models trained on Van Den Bussche’s existing content. “It’s modeled after me and my creativity and my input,” he says. “Everyone thinks I’m retiring as a creator and letting this AI run, but I’m not retiring as a creative.”
While not retiring, Van Den Bussche is happy to replace himself in the creative process with the AI he’s been working on. “We’ve seen a lot of success with these systems,” he says. “I’m very confident that they can reproduce creativity—so much so that I’m willing to bet my entire business on it.” As of this writing, the AI video he released Tuesday has nearly 3,000 views. He claims to have a wait list of 500 influencer friends within the industry eager to adopt his AI tools, though he can’t give them access until the cost of creating new videos drops to an economical level, which he believes will happen as technology advances.
