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The dream for many content creators is to ultimately have a Mr. Beast-level team, who can help edit, pull thumbnails, or promote their content across platforms. But for many creators, all of that work is on you, on top of creating your content in the first place.

Roberto Blake, founder of the Awesome Creator Academy, knows this struggle well, having started on that path 21 years ago, when YouTube was in its infancy. In 2016, Blake earned the Silver Play Button from YouTube, commemorating reaching 100,000 subscribers. Ten years later, on stage at VidCon 2026 for his panel, How to Be a Value First Creator: Winning on Authenticity in an AI World, Blake said of AI, "If I had these things 10 years ago, it'd have made it a lot easier."

"The creator who works 40 to 50 or 60 hours a week at a nine to five job, overworked, underpaid, just like I was," Blake said at the half-hour panel, where he was the sole speaker, "and then has to figure out how they're going to create content with the little scraps of energy they have left and the little scraps of motivation, creativity that haven't beaten out of them by a bad boss. That's the reality of the majority of creators."

Blake argued that AI is a way for creators like this to thrive without a team.

How could AI help content creators now?

Roberto Blake presenting his panel How to Be a Value First Creator: Winning on Authenticity in an AI World at Vidcon 2026. Credit: Kristy Puchko/Mashable

Blake told the VidCon attendees that AI tools exist that could help creators more swiftly edit their videos, create thumbnails for those videos, and fix audio issues.

"You can use something like Opusclip, for example," Blake said, "And you can repurpose across all your platforms and formats. You can get horizontal videos. You can get vertical videos, and you can be posting them instead of having to wait for it to come back from your editor three days later and not the way you passed. You have what you need, and it's instant."

He championed 1of10 for creating thumbnails and Adobe Creative Cloud for audio fixes, saying that those mixing tools can salvage audio, and allow you to recreate your voice to change the recorded audio, "instead of having to reshoot the thing and conjure up the energy and get in front of the camera again."

Could AI steal jobs? Roberto Blake says no.

Roberto Blake presenting his panel How to Be a Value First Creator: Winning on Authenticity in an AI World at Vidcon 2026. Credit: Kristy Puchko/Mashable

While other panels at VidCon dug into the ethnics of using generative AI, Blake skirted that controversy, telling his audience to focus on audience, "The majority of people don't care how a sausage gets 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 instance isn't taking work away from another creative. However, then he went on to suggest that sometimes other people are an obstacle rather than an asset to a creator's vision, saying, "Even if we could hire people, even if we had the unlimited budget, sometimes the reality is we can't always trust other people with our creativity."

He continued, "Sometimes the truth is many of us, especially those of us who might be introverts, our deficit isn't that we don't think we can find people more talented than us. It's that we don't necessarily think we can find people that we can trust with something we put so much more heart and soul into, and not feel like it might not be disrupted or argued against, or that we're going to have to defend the decisions that we make creatively when we have another cook in our kitchen. And so for those people, sometimes they would rather work with a tool [rather] than another person, and that doesn't disqualify or mean anything bad for artists out there. It just means that that was never a job that someone was going to have, because it was never a relationship that was going to work, and that's okay."

SEE ALSO: YouTube AI slop is a generational threat, child safety experts warn in new petition

As to AI slop — a phrase he eluded to rather than used — Blake said, "Youtube has always been saturated by low effort, low value, low quality content in the sense that 88 percent of long form videos don't get to 1,000 views on the platform, and that's not going to necessarily change because of AI, and that should actually not discourage you. It should mean that you should understand this, we're early." He added, "I haven't seen a single AI channel that's purely AI hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube. And I'm not sure we're going to see that anytime soon."

After urging his audience away from human collaboration, Blake argued "human value" and authenticity paired with AI is the future for creators.

Roberto Blake says AI can help with energy management.

Credit: Roberto Blake / Awesome Creator Academy

Blake repeatedly stressed the importance of a creator's energy in shaping their online authenticity, and the importance of protecting that energy.

"People talk about time management, productivity," he explained, "Very few people talk about energy management. They don't talk about how draining some tasks are, and then how emotionally fulfilling other tasks are. What if you could take 80 percent of your time and put it into the things that you care about the process most — you care about writing. Would you love to keep all of that for yourself?"

Blake went on, "With AI, we should look at the idea that maybe this isn't taking something away for us so much as giving us back time to be more human. That was kind of the point of my presentation, that we can be more human if we actually are able to move faster. But the thing that takes away our real humanity is not our technology, it's the lack of our time that we will never ever ever get back."

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

Mashable is reporting live from VidCon 2026 in Anaheim. Follow our coverage for creator interviews, panel highlights, and the biggest moments from the convention floor.