Personal AI Avatars and my YouTube Experiment

Creating your own personal avatar and voice clone is easier than ever. Does it mean they should be used on YouTube? I'll tell you about my experimental channel using my personal AI avatar (and if it was successful).

I also want to point out that when I uploaded a video to YouTube I clearly identified it as "altered or synthetic content." In other words, at the beginning of each video YouTube shows this message to the viewer. I also shared the fact that I was using my personal AI avatar in my channel description area. I was fully transparent about using AI.

I used Heygen to create my avatar. It takes just a 15 second video of you talking to produce an extremely lifelike personal AI avatar and voice clone. And they are getting more lifelike with each software release. Essentially, you create a written script and your AI avatar delivers it. It sounds pretty simple. It sounds like you should be able a ton of videos much faster. And it can. Sort of.

While part of me wondered if people watching my channel would brutalize me in the comments, I did have a justification for using a personal AI avatar. How is a personal AI avatar delivering fully scripted content any different from a live presenter reading off a teleprompter? In my mind there isn't much of a difference. They essentially look alike and are reading from a script. There are some nuances to this and I'll share a bit more on that as well.

It's not lost on me that people subscribe to YouTube channels for a couple of reasons. They like the content and they think the person delivering the content is trustworthy. This is probably more true when it comes to channels that are primarily talking head style channels, where the person delivering the content is on the screen for the majority of each video. And that just happened to be the style of channel I experimented with.

The experimental channel I created with my personal avatar was in the retirement lifestyle niche. I wrote my own scripts about various retirement topics and ended up creating about 25 videos. Here's what I found fascinating. Most people that viewed the videos either didn't know or didn't care that it was my AI avatar. In six weeks I gained 265 subscribers. One video received over 10,000 views. I was really shocked at just how well the channel did.

On the flip side, I didn't really save that much time using AI. It wasn't my AI avatar that was the issue. It was my voice clone. It just didn't always sound "real" enough. Heygen does have an ElevenLabs voice model that allows you to tag the script so it adds more feeling to the voice. Here's an example: "[excited] I was really happy to learn I had one the lotto!" Or this: "[whisper] And then the whole room got quiet."

While this type of tagging helped, my voice never sounded uniform from video to video. I ended up having to physically record the script and pair that to my avatar. While this made the voice sound real, it was almost as much work as just filming it live. Ultimately, using an AI avatar didn't really save me the time that I thought it would. In other words, I could have just filmed myself presenting the script and it would have taken about the same amount of time.

Let's talk about the comments I received on my videos. While most were positive, the negative comments were very negative. In fact, some were downright nasty. They ranged from "I hate AI" to "this sucks" and even a few I won't repeat LOL. Even though my channel was completely transparent about the use of AI, some people felt the need to go out of their way to let me know that they hated it.

What do I think about using a personal AI avatar for YouTube after this experiment? I think you could be creating a channel on a house of cards. I think it's possible that viewers could turn against you once they understand you are AI, even if you are completely transparent in its use. Another thing I've come across is other channels "outing" competing channels that use AI avatars. So while it can work, I'm just not sure if it's a good long term strategy.

Ultimately, I ended the channel because I got bored with it. But, I was definitely surprised that it gained over 1000 hours of watch time and 265 subscribers in six weeks. I would expect to see more AI avatar influencers on YouTube. The technology is just getting too good. If a channel is transparent about using it then you have a choice to watch it or not. But, AI is rampant on YouTube right now. Many channels still do not mark their content as AI. Will YouTube police this more carefully? Time will tell.