Marques Brownlee

There’s a running joke that if you want to sell a new product, just say it’s AI-powered. But YouTube gadget reviewer Marques Brownlee has been careful not to get swept up in the hype.

After the release of the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit r1, products which sought to rethink the smartphone, Brownlee became one of the loudest voices to critically pan the new gadgets. This April, he described the respective devices as “the new worst product I’ve ever reviewed” and “barely reviewable” to his audience of over 19 million. His complaints ranged from a “brutally bad” battery life to half-baked features. 

The reviews sparked criticism that Brownlee was too harsh, but Brownlee says being honest with his audience is key. “These companies already know about these downsides," Brownlee says. “At best you could say I'm accelerating whatever is already happening.”

While Brownlee isn’t afraid to call out products that don’t live up to their hype, he believes generative AI is a meaningful change in the tech industry, including his own patch as a content creator. He’s already using AI to help edit thumbnails or brainstorm video ideas. “In the future, it gets pretty existential, man,” Brownlee said in a February video discussing OpenAI’s Sora. “If this is trained on all videos that have ever been made by humans, then surely it can’t be innovative and creative in ways humans haven’t already been. Right?”

OpenAI has repeatedly declined to say whether or not Sora was trained on material from YouTube, but other tech companies have been siphoning videos, including Browlee’s, against the platform's terms of service to train their models.

“On one hand, I don't love it because it feels like I'm donating this material against my will, " Brownlee says. “But another part of me kind of already accepted it years ago.” In the future, Brownlee would like to see creators compensated by AI developers for using their videos, similar to how YouTuber’s receive a cut of the platform’s revenue from ads.

Buy your copy of the TIME100 AI issue here