😺 The AI invasion of YouTube (and Hollywood) has begun...

PLUS: New US-only TikTok app on Sept 5th...

Welcome, humans.

So, the job market is officially weird. Really weird.

As Axios reported, June brought 147K new jobs, but its estimated 85% came from just education and healthcare. Everyone else? Crickets. We're living in what economists call a “frozen job market.” Companies won't fire you, but won't hire anyone new, either.

What's making it worse? AI. Employers are too busy making current workers more productive with AI tools to bother hiring fresh blood.

Speaking of AI, Sam Altman chose July 4th to drop a patriotic manifesto about “techno-capitalism,” declaring technology should make everyone richer and put us all in the "up elevator" together. Beautiful vision, Sam.

But the job market data suggests AI is doing the exact opposite: if you're employed, you're golden. Looking for work? You're stuck on the ground floor while everyone else rides up.

Unsurprisingly, the comments on Sam's post blew up: not about his economic philosophy, but his sudden use of capital letters and ~gasp~ em dashes!

Sam famously never capitalized anything for years to prove he wasn't using AI. Now he's writing like a proper human, and everyone's convinced ChatGPT took over his account.

So AI might be freezing people out of jobs, but hey: at least it gave Sam proper punctuation for Independence Day!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Hollywood (and YouTube) begin their “AI slop era” with Cat Biggie.
Isomorphic Labs began first human trials for AI-designed drugs.
ByteDance built a new TikTok app for US users.
EU publishers filed antitrust complaint against Google.

AI is taking over YouTube… and this South Korean production company just proved Hollywood’s next

AI for Humans is a fantastic podcast (and friends of the newsletter!) and they just released a great episode recapping a ton of interesting (and funny) stuff that happened in AI this week.

Our favorite segment was this one on Cat Biggie, a “100% AI-generated” short animated series from the Korean movie studio CJ ENM.

Here’s why this is a big deal: Because CJ ENM is a big deal; they produced some of South Korea's biggest movies (Parasite, Snowpiercer, Old Boy, you name it).

They’ve apparently already produced 30 two-minute episodes, using 6 people, in only 5 months, via their internal “Cinematic AI” system. For context, a typical 5-minute 3D animation usually takes 3-4 months.

So what’s the premise of this Slopaganza? A cat (Mr. Biggie, we presume) accidentally becomes a dad to a baby chick… What could go wrong?

While it sounds like something my nephew would pitch after watching too much YouTube Kids, that’s exactly the point: Cat Biggie premieres this July on YouTube.

YouTube's become the perfect AI video testing ground: no gatekeepers, low barrier to entry (anyone can upload), so AI content is dominating the platform:

Four of the top 10 YouTube channels by subscribers in May featured genAI in every vid.
In June, the top four AI channels combined got 23M+ subscribers and 800M views.
One channel, Masters of Prophecy, went from hundreds of subs in Feb to 30M+ in June—all with AI-generated content (which TBH, is a lil’ spicy).

Perfect example: Last week’s third most watched YouTube video, with 130M views, was THIS “baby accidentally gets boarded on plane and becomes pilot” video…

And creators are cashing in:

CNBC reported Bloo, a fully AI gaming YouTuber with 2.5M subscribers, has generated more than seven figures in revenue.
Another creator, GoldenHand, publishes up to 80 AI videos daily across multiple channels and launched his own platform that lets anyone auto-generate faceless AI videos.
According to Sherwood News / Garbage Day, AI solves YouTube's creator economics problem as “not every creator has the time, resources, or skills to make Netflix-level content” but “AI videos all tend to be a certain standard and cost sometimes cents to produce.”

This isn’t straightforward, though. A16z partner Olivia Moore spent ~$350 across 25 videos, and found you need to copy existing trends, stick to one consistent style, monitor algorithms constantly, and invest tons of time or get lucky, especially with the high costs of Veo 3 (the best AI video model behind ByteDance’s Seedance 1.0).

Our take: Even if this leads to the sloppification of YouTube, the money's too good for them to ignore.

Sherwood / Garbage Day reported YouTube’s already set to be the world’s most profitable media company, with the highest TV viewing share (ahead of Disney and Netflix).

AI flips the current content economics upside down. You get closer to Netflix/Disney production values at TikTok prices, and on the same TVs where people watch, well, Netflix and Disney.

So the real question is: how long until AI content jumps to premium platforms like Netflix, HBO, or Disney+? CJ ENM proved it's possible to deliver TV-quality content at YouTube costs. Now Cat Biggie will show us if it's actually successful… and its performance will test whether the old guard can hold out against the fancy feast of AI's “Biggie” profits.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Here's a micro-adjustment that makes your AI way more responsive: instead of telling your AI what NOT to do, like saying “don't do X”, turn the negative framing (“don’t”) into a positive framing, like: “avoid.”

So instead of “don't use jargon,” try “avoid jargon.” Instead of “don't be wordy,” say “avoid being wordy” or even better, “be concise.” It's the same instruction, just reframed in a way that the AI’s training responds to better.

Remember: It's not about going fully positive. Sometimes you need to give negative instructions. The trick is reframing the instruction into a positive action the Ai can act on. This is not unlike directing actors… giving the AI a positive verb to “act” on.

Check out all of our Prompt Tips of the Day from June here.

P.S: Completely new to AI? Start here!

Treats To Try.

*Asterisk = from our partners. Advertise in The Neuron here.

*Guidde turns your screen recordings into professional video tutorials with step-by-step narration and voiceover in 100+ languages.
As mentioned above, Seedance 1.0 is the top AI video model right now (ahead of Veo 3); to use it, go to Dreamina.Capcut, make an account, and go to the video generator (Video 3.0)—here’s more about it.
Portia lets you build agents that pause for human approval and show their plans before acting.
Mirage allows you to generate and modify entire game worlds on the fly with text commands while you play (research preview atm, but very cool).
Lazy captures any idea, link, or tweet with one keyboard shortcut from anywhere on your desktop so you can chat with it all to connect the dots between everything you've saved.
Agnes enables real-time team co-editing for docs and slides with shared memory across projects (video).
Skala handles global incorporation, fundraising, and legal templates for startups in one platform.
Zuck’s Haul is a hilarious site that tallies how much Meta has spent to date ($247M across 17 experts from 7 companies) to systematically poach top AI talent from its competitors, tracking each hire's comp package, previous company, and key contributions.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, is preparing to begin its first human trials for its “AI-designed drugs.”
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance built a new version of the app, internally called M2, which The Information says will launch on Sept. 5th for US users.
Google was accused of abusing its market power in an EU antitrust complaint filed by independent publishers who claim its AI Overviews feature caused significant revenue and traffic losses without letting them opt out.
YouTube tested AI search carousels for Premium users that works like Google's AI Overviews, but for video clips; search “best beaches in Hawaii” and you'll see AI-generated highlights from multiple videos, complete with descriptions.
Researchers are sneaking hidden prompts into their papers to get “positive reviews only”, while AI “fingerprintsa” have been detected in millions of research papers.
Here are the top AI paper of the week, the top AI agent news of the week, and a handy guide to context engineering from Elvis Saravia.
The Velvet Sundown viral AI band saga keeps getting weirder…apparently, someone pretended to be the spokesman for the band, then confessed they weren’t, growing the AI band’s following to 1M monthly listeners.