Good morning. In an unexpected post across social platforms, music creator bbno$ has decided to “stop making music for the foreseeable future.” 

We’re hoping this is all an elaborate prank and he still has a long career ahead of him—otherwise he might just live up to his name. 

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Agency acquired. News creator Uptin Saiidi recently sold his brand video agency, Up10 Media, to Dubai-based Augustus Media for an undisclosed amount.

How he got here → Saiidi was a CNBC journalist who was laid off in 2020. He went indie with his own news videos, amassing a following of 3 million across platforms. International fintech brands started approaching him to make videos, so in 2022 he started Up10 as a way to help brands make creator-fronted ads.

“We only focused on filming with phones, UGC-style, with creators,” Saiidi told us. “We focused on niching down and doing that really well.”

With the acquisition, Up10’s team of eight will use Augustus’ resources to expand client work beyond UGC videos into commercial shoots and marketing.

Why sell? “I could do either two things pretty well, or one thing amazing and so it came to a point where I felt like I had to choose between my content or media company,” Saiidi said. “And for me, my true passion is in storytelling and scaling that.”

Saiidi plans to double down on his Youtube channel and business podcast, Uptin & Thomas.

His advice to creators looking to sell: Leverage in-person events. Saiidi listed his media company on Acquire.com, but it was meeting Augustus founder Richard Fitzgerald at Computer Electronic Show (CES) and building a relationship over time that led to a deal.

“It took me by surprise. When I went to [Rich] for advice I never imagined him being the buyer,” Saiidi said. “I think it’s good for creators to attend events, both for learning, speaking, and getting advice. It’s great for knowledge sharing.”

The days of smoothed-over faces and extra fingers are gone with Google’s new AI image generator, Nano Banana Pro. It creates images with normal, everyday imperfections that look like they were taken with a smartphone.

And AI creators are running with it. One creator runs two AI-generated Instagram accounts that use the life-like tech, reaching a combined audience of 1.2 million. They also run accounts on Fanvue (an OnlyFans competitor) using the same AI women.

Other examples include an AI male beauty creator selling peptides on TikTok and a Marvel fan posting a fake cast photo on Reddit—almost undetectable to the untrained eye.

So, is there a way to tell if an image is AI? Sort of. If the sparkle watermark is removed from the photo, all Google AI images have SynthID embedded into the photo (think of it as a digital watermark). 

Users can screenshot or save an image and enter it into Gemini with the prompt, “Was this image generated with Google AI?” Google will scan for that SynthID, but it will only confirm if the image was made with one of its models—not including OpenAI or other image generators.

Big picture: As AI becomes less detectable to users (and to social platforms themselves), creators are competing against generators for audience attention—leaving consumers to decipher if what they’re watching is real.

Ever wondered how long it would take to run a 5K in a washing machine? For Jacob Abrams Cohen (aka NotReallyWellness), it’s around 35 minutes.

Cohen has uploaded fitness parody videos running a 5K every day for the past 30 days—barefoot in an airport bathroom on a hobby horse, in an elevator, and on his bed (to name a few). And it’s paying off: He’s gained 30K followers in 30 days, and his videos have hit tens of millions of views, including the attention of fitness brands like Whoop and stunt creator Michelle Khare.

Why he does it: “I think people over complicate fitness to a point where you want to be watching your macros and all this stuff, and it's not that serious,” Cohen told us. “You can get a six pack by doing random stuff.”

Zoom out: Increasingly absurdist content from creators like Suave and Grant Beene is gaining views and shares on short-form. Cohen is tapping in by merging two already-popular niches: fitness and comedy.