Good morning. Short-form video app Vine is getting rebooted as DiVine thanks to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The app will notably include videos from its archive and exclude AI uploads. 

We’ll be happy crying on a six-second loop for the rest of the day.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

This week, two Hollywood unions—the Editors Guild and Writers Guild West—notified creator media company Theorist about their intent to unionize the media company.

Quick catch-up: Theorist, owned by LunarX, is home to YouTube channels including The Game Theorists and The Style Theorists that collectively have over 40 million subscribers. The company has more than 20 employees.

This is the first time that Hollywood unions have initiated a bargaining group at a creator-led media company. The aim of the Theorist union? To “change wages, working conditions, and their voice on the job,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Context: Some creator studios, like Nebula, work with union actors and writers. And orgs like the Creators Guild of America and Creators.org advocate for creators in front of platforms and lawmakers. But for the most part, creator-led companies run outside of union operations.

What do creators have to say about unions? Some claim unions are part of what’s made Hollywood unsustainable and argue they can’t adequately adapt to (or regulate) the varied roles across platforms and formats like video, podcasts, livestreams, and newsletters.

“Traditional union models are incompatible with online content creation’s diverse decentralized nature,” education creator Roberto Blake wrote on LinkedIn.

Others see unions as a necessary step toward setting up structure and protections for a new industry.

“YouTube has grown exceptionally. These days, big channels only exist thanks to a passionate collective. In other industries, those workers are given a voice. Now it's our time,” Theorist video editor Tyler Mascola said on X.

Big picture: Hollywood jobs have been on a steady decline in recent years, and unions are looking to work in other entertainment verticals. SAG has made new contracts allowing union actors to work in the growing microdrama niche, and this union effort marks a step toward unionizing creator teams.

Three years ago, the US Air Force missed its recruitment goals for the first time since 1999. Enter: creators like aviation creator Sam Eckholm, who are bringing Air Force education up to speed.

Eckholm recently wrapped a nine-video series with the Air Force in a year-long partnership. So far it’s received 56 million views and 354 million impressions. Plus? The Air Force hit its recruitment goals in September—three months earlier than expected.

Quick context: Eckholm served in the Air Force for five years and left in 2023 to make aviation and defense content (like videos exploring spy planes, fighter jets, and the US Secret Service) full-time. He has over 320 million channel views and 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube.

“The military is and isn’t for a lot of people, and when I was 18 wondering if it was right for me, there wasn’t really anything out there,” Eckholm told us. “There were corporate videos but there was nothing authentic and nothing that gave me a sense of what it would be like if I joined, so that’s what I try to do.”

Business jet stream: Eckholm works with brands like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the US Army. He also runs a course to help students get into the Air Force Academy. He recently signed with CAA, which he said will help with speaking engagements, products, and marketing.

“At the end of the day, we try to make the sponsor perfectly in line with what the audience is watching because that affects watch duration, that affects audience, that affects everything,” Eckholm said.

As AI information (and disinformation) grows, creators are stepping in as educators—helping viewers discern what’s generative AI and what’s not.

One such creator: Jeremy Carrasco, the creator behind Showtools AI. Since he started making content in June, Carrasco has grown 400K followers across Instagram and TikTok. Videos involve identifying a real food creator that looks AI and debunking AI videos. One video about a North Korea account that blocked him earned him 50K followers alone.

“AI tech companies just roll [updates] out and want us to figure it out, which I think is irresponsible. That's what I'm here for. I'm trying to figure it out,” Carrasco told us.

Carrasco says he won’t accept brand deals from AI companies and is looking for other ways to monetize, like subscriptions. He said he’s made around $10K in the last five months from platform earnings. 

Zoom out: Carrasco joins creators like CatGPT and Harper Carroll in the AI education sector—which is projected to grow 30% each year over the next five years. 

His advice to creators considering using models like OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3: “I would encourage creators to be very, very hesitant to adopt [AI versions of themselves] because once you cross that line, it's really hard to fall back,” Carrasco said.