Casey Neistat’s new AI-generated vlog has no soul

If there was anyone on the internet who could find a creative way to show how AI isn’t ready to replace humans, Casey Neistat would be the one.

Today, the filmmaker posted a new video on his YouTube channel called “AI Made this VLOG.” As explained in the video, Neistat told ChatGPT to write the script for an entire episode of a vlog in the style of Casey Neistat. From the shots to the dialogue, everything was determined by artificial intelligence.

Casey Neistat, if you haven’t heard of him, grew to YouTube fame after being one of the first people to pioneer the art of daily vlogging. The filmmaker spent almost a year and a half creating and posting a video every day on YouTube. The vlogs were iconic, so it’s definitely a formidable challenge for AI to get that style right. If you want to check out the video to see how ChatGPT did, you can do so by watching it in the video embedded below:

As you can see from the video, GPT-4 didn’t do a great job recreating a Casey Neistat vlog. The video turned into a very boring tour of random locations in New York City, and the dialogue sounded like a generic voiceover. As Neistat said at the end of the video, it was likely the worst video he’s ever made.

Neistat ended the video by talking about how, while AI could get better, it currently “has no soul” and that the video created by AI felt like a “photocopy of a photocopy.” He also said that he hopes AI doesn’t get better as he prefers creativity created by human expression.

While AI might not be at the level to recreate a Casey Neistat vlog with the same quality, there are many AI projects looking to create tools that could eventually do just that. Runway AI is attempting to create a text-to-video generation tool, and even Levi Strauss began replacing human models with AI ones.