Hello, happy Friday.
I’ve been noodling on this idea of AI and viewer behavior over the last few weeks, and last week I read an interesting piece about it. More below.
Featured Video
Pulling one from the archives today. This is a super short silent film I made with a friend fifteen and a half years ago. Enjoy.
How AI is changing viewer behavior on YouTube
Up until a couple of years ago, getting started as an educator on YouTube was fairly simple. If you had some expertise, you just took a video of yourself teaching something to the viewer.
This used to be my approach when helping others get started on the platform. And at this time we also saw a huge rise in talking head videos.
But then something changed.
ChatGPT got better. Claude could search the internet. And people started mass-adopting these tools.
Suddenly, LLMs could teach you how to do anything and answer any question you had. You no longer had to watch a video to get answers.
It’s around this time I started seeing talking head videos drop in views. This was around the beginning of 2025. And I wasn’t the only one noticing. YouTube analysts began talking at large about this and asking if the algorithm had changed.
But it wasn’t an algorithm thing. It’s a behavioral thing that’s affecting all sorts of media.
Tim Ferriss is an author known for books like The 4-Hour Work Week, The 4-Hour Body, and Tools of Titans. And in a recent blog, he released some of his own data showing this downward trend in how-to and educational media consumption.
There was a gentle -5% slip in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use.
As he puts it, why scrub through a 24-minute how-to video to find the 40 seconds you need, when AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
This is the question we should all be asking ourselves when we’re making video content. No matter the platform. In other words,
How do we stand out and make our videos watchable in the age of AI?
The approach I’ve been taking, and teaching, is personal story and personality.
Those are the two things AI can’t replicate.
Sure, it can make up stories. Or it can cite stories from other people. But we know they’re not real, and that knowledge is enough to treat AI as a tool rather than a point of connection.
Same with personality. LLMs like those in ChatGPT and Claude are made to “speak” with a human personality, but again, we know they’re not real. And they make mistakes. And that keeps us from connecting with them.
But we all still want to connect with real humans. We still want to feel like we “know” somebody new when we listen to them speak. We want to feel like they truly understand us.
And the way to do that is through personal stories and personality. The two things AI can never fool us with.
I think that’s how we make our video content watchable in the age of AI.
Kelsey took this of me at Milo’s Cafe in Morrisville. I like the ice cream in the back.
If you have questions about YouTube or video production for your business, book a call with me :)
Talk soon,
– Matias