Good morning. Candidates in yesterday’s closely watched New York City mayoral primary leaned heavily on creators to promote their campaigns—from incumbent Eric Adams sitting down with Kai Cenat to Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani taking his message to Subway Takes.

If last year’s presidential race was “the podcast election,” then NYC’s primary might just be “the Instagram Reels election.”

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Here’s the latest in creator x AI headlines →

First up: MrBeast’s analytics platform, Viewstats, launched an AI thumbnail generator for its $80/month Pro plan. The tool offers features like face swapping and recreating other creators’ thumbnails. 

Pushback was swift. Some creators claimed MrBeast was being hypocritical for building a tool that lets users copy other creators (something he’s complained about in the past), and others criticized the price tag.

Big picture: More sophisticated AI tech makes protecting creators’ work from copycats increasingly difficult, according to creators like TheBentist and Dan176. One proposed solution? YouTube’s Content ID tool, but for thumbnails. Ludwig suggested that YouTube should flag when creators' thumbnails are copied in YouTube Studio and give original creators the option for removal.

Next: Former Vice journalist turned creator Sophia Smith Galer released an AI video scripting app called Sophiana to help journalists and experts turn their articles and research into short-form video scripts.

The app is free to download and costs $6/month for unlimited use. Smith Galer hopes to roll out multilingual versions and make it available on Android soon.

Finally: Google is allegedly using YouTube videos to train Veo 3 and Gemini—without giving creators an opportunity to opt out.

“We all know what it’s like to not have a seat at the table, so we’re going to build the table and we’re going to build some seats,” political strategist Ben O’Keefe told us.

O’Keefe, along with RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Yvie Oddly and pop culture critic Ryan Mitchell, is launching HIGHKEY! With Yvie, Ben, and Ryan, a culture podcast led by three Black, queer creators as part of iHeartRadio. 

“Every sort of success in the social media age comes from building up this parasocial relationship,” Oddly said. So? In addition to distribution on iHeart, the creators are offering exclusive content on Patreon to strengthen their relationship with the audience.

Why Patreon? After being courted by several platforms, the hosts of HIGHKEY! chose Patreon for their paid subscription tier largely because of how it elevated other Black creators—citing Recho Omondi’s The Cutting Room Floor as an example. As executive producers on their show, having a partially fan-supported model was a non-negotiable.

“The decentralized nature of [Patreon], and the fact that we quite literally carved it out in our contracts to ensure that we have that control, means that this is gonna be a space where you're going to get the most unfiltered takes and the most unobstructed access to us and our thoughts,” O’Keefe said.

Zoom out: YouTube Trends and Culture reported that 47% of Gen Z claim they belong to a fandom that no one they know personally is a part of. Moves like this one suggest that platforms and large networks like iHeart recognize the power in building niche audiences with fan support.

“We all contain multitudes and this is an opportunity for us to show our multitudes, but also to create a space where people feel safe enough to explore their own, whether they're our listeners or our guests,” O’Keefe said.

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Have you submitted your application for Press Publish NYC yet? 

ICYMI, we’re hosting a one-day summit for the creator economy on September 4 in Brooklyn—with food, drink, one-of-a-kind networking, and workshops—and we’d love to see you there.

We’re finalizing our list of speakers as we type this and can’t wait to share with you soon. Reserve your spot here.