“Someone is making money off of this and YouTube is letting it happen”: Rhett Shull slams ‘AI slop channel’ that ripped off his videos and amassed over 600,000 views
Finding out someone has copied your YouTube videos is one thing. Discovering they’ve apparently used them to build an AI creator that’s racked up more than half a million views is another entirely.
That’s the situation guitarist and gear reviewer Rhett Shull recently found himself in after discovering an AI-generated guitar channel that appears to have been built using his content as training material, borrowing everything from his old studio setup and thumbnails to the overall style of his videos while amassing more than 600,000 views and over 5,000 subscribers.
Shull says he first learned about the channel after being tagged by The Bad Guitarist Podcast on Instagram.
“I got tagged in a story by The Bad Guitarist Podcast. [It says] ‘This week, we take a look at an AI guitar YouTube channel that popped up in the last month and has over 5000 subs, 600,000 views, and a ton of comments from unsuspecting viewers.’”
Curious, he clicked through, only to discover that the AI channel – Guitar Gems with Chase – was, in his words, “directly ripping me off in several different ways”.
“I clicked on this last night and honestly was kind of freaked out,” he says.
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According to Shull, the similarities are hard to ignore. The presenter appears in a studio designed to resemble the set Shull used before moving house in 2021, wears a jacket reminiscent of one he frequently sported on camera, and even features gear mirroring that seen in his older videos.
“There’s no question that this is someone – some content farm or some person somewhere – who’s feeding my videos to some sort of AI and having it spit out this content,” he says, before joking, “I wish I was as handsome, though, as this guy is!”
For Shull, the issue isn’t simply that his videos appear to have become AI training fodder. It’s the fact that viewers seem to believe the content is genuine.
“These are real people that are watching this and thinking that this is an actual video.”
The uploads also follow a familiar “rage-bait” formula, with titles like Eight Guitars Only Dumb People Buy and thumbnails Shull says closely resemble his own. The difference, he argues, is that some of these videos veer into outright misinformation.
“What this video is claiming is that a company like Gibson or Fender and PRS and these other companies are ripping you off because they’re using the same machines and building the same guitars but in China. It’s completely wrong information. It’s false.”
Because the videos are AI-generated, Shull believes they exist in a legal grey area with little accountability.
“If I said that stuff in a video, if I came out and made these claims that are just objectively false, I could be held liable for slander or defamation because I’m lying about a company,” he says. “But so far as I understand it, because this is an AI creator and AI is completely unregulated here in the United States, there are no rules around this stuff, at least as far as I can tell. And YouTube obviously doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.”
Adding to his frustration, Shull says the channel appears to be monetised and is even promoting paid guitar courses, meaning somebody is profiting from AI-generated content built on his work.
“I’m going to file a takedown request with YouTube and report these videos because obviously this shouldn’t exist,” he says. “The fact that this is allowed to happen on YouTube, the fact that the platform doesn’t immediately crack down on this AI generated slop really sucks… and it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me about the future of this platform.
“People are watching this thinking that it’s real and then being funnelled to buy a product that is equally as fake… someone most likely in Brazil, from what I can tell, is making money off of this and YouTube is just allowing it to happen.”
Whether YouTube ultimately removes the channel remains to be seen (at the time of writing, it is still live on the platform), but Shull suspects he won’t be the last creator to find their work repurposed as AI training material.
“I feel like this is a losing battle. The better these AI tools get at making videos and creating this kind of content, the more prevalent these type of slop channels are going to be on the platform. And that sucks, man. That really sucks.”
Watch the full video below.
The post “Someone is making money off of this and YouTube is letting it happen”: Rhett Shull slams ‘AI slop channel’ that ripped off his videos and amassed over 600,000 views appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
