Can AI level the playing field for working class content creators?

The dream of many content creators is to finally have a Mr. Beast, which can help organize, pull icons, or promote their content across platforms. But for most creators, all that work is on you, in addition to creating your own original content.

Roberto Blake, the founder of Awesome Creator Academy, knows this struggle well, as he started on that path 21 years ago, when YouTube was still growing. In 2016, Blake earned a Silver Play Button on YouTube, commemorating reaching 100,000 subscribers. Ten years later, on stage at VidCon 2026 for his panel, How to Be the First Creator: Winning Authenticity in an AI World, Blake said of AI, “If I had this stuff 10 years ago, it would have made it so much easier.”

“A creator who works 40 to 50 or 60 hours a week in a nine to five job, overworked, underpaid, like I was,” Blake said in the half-hour parliament, where he was the only speaker, “then he has to figure out how to create content with the little energy they have left and the little, shocking intelligence of their boss. That’s the reality of most creators.”

Blake argued that AI is a way for creators like these to succeed outside of the group.

How can AI help content creators now?

Blake told VidCon attendees that existing AI tools can help creators quickly edit their videos, create thumbnails for those videos, and fix audio issues.

“You can use something like Opusclip, for example,” says Blake, “And you can retarget across platforms and formats. You can get horizontal videos. You can get vertical videos, and you can send them instead of waiting for them to come back to your editor three days later and not the way you’ve been successful. You’ve got what you need, and it’s fast.”

He won 1of10 for creating icons and Adobe Creative Cloud for audio editing, saying that those mixing tools can restore audio, and allow you to recreate your voice to change the sound of the recording, “instead of re-shooting the thing and mixing the power and getting in front of the camera again.”

Can AI steal jobs? Roberto Blake says no.

Roberto Blake presents his panel on What a First Creator You Can Be: Winning Authenticity in an AI World at Vidcon 2026.
Credit: Kristy Puchko/Mashable

While other VidCon panelists dug into the implications of using productive AI, Blake cut through that debate, telling his audience to focus, “Most people don’t care how a sausage is made. They care about how it tastes and how fast they can get it.”

He argued that working-class content creators can’t afford to hire a professional editor, so AI in that case isn’t displacing work from another art. However, he then went on to suggest that sometimes some people are a hindrance rather than an asset to a creator’s vision, saying, “Even if we could hire people, even if we had an unlimited budget, sometimes the truth is that we can’t always trust other people with our creativity.

He continued, “Sometimes the truth is that there are many of us, especially those of us who may be immigrants, what is missing is not that we do not think that we can find people who are more talented than us. It is that we do not really think that we can find people that we can trust with something that we put our heart and soul to, and we do not feel that it may not be disturbed in the decisions that we make or do. skillfully when we have another cook in our kitchen And so for those people, sometimes they would like to work with a tool [rather] than someone else, and that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate or bad for existing artists. It just means that that wasn’t the job that the person was going to have, because it was never going to be a relationship that was going to work, and that’s okay.”

Regarding AI slop – a phrase he shied away from using – Blake said, “YouTube has always been full of low-effort, low-value, low-quality content in the sense that 88 percent of long-form videos don’t reach 1,000 views on the platform, and that’s not going to change because of AI, and that’s not really something you should understand, it shouldn’t discourage you early.” He added, “I’ve never seen a single AI channel reach 10 million subscribers on YouTube. And I’m not sure we’ll see that anytime soon.”

After urging his audience to stay away from human interaction, Blake argued that “human value” and AI-paired authenticity are the future of creators.

Roberto Blake says AI can help with energy management.

Credit: Roberto Blake / Awesome Creator Academy

Blake has repeatedly emphasized the importance of a creator’s power in shaping their identity online, and the importance of protecting that power.

“People talk about time management, productivity,” he explained, “Very few people talk about energy management. They don’t talk about what it’s like to outsource some tasks, and then how emotionally fulfilling other tasks are. What if you could take 80 percent of your time and put it into the things you care about the most – the writing. Would you like to keep all of that?”

Blake continued, “With AI, we have to look at the idea that maybe this doesn’t take something away from us to give us time to go back and be more human. That was kind of the point of my presentation, that we could be more human if we could actually move faster. But the thing that takes away our true humanity is not our technology, it’s our lack of time that we can never get back.”

To read more about Blake’s thoughts on AI and authenticity, you can download a PDF of his presentation slideshow at Awesome Creator Academy.

Mashable is reporting live from VidCon 2026 in Anaheim. Follow our coverage with creator interviewsThe best photos of the panel, and the biggest moments from the meeting floor.