With 2.57 million subscribers and more than 800 million views, a YouTuber named Bloo is swiftly becoming one of the biggest gaming personalities in the biz.
But unlike his human peers, this blue-haired vlogger is a cartoonish AI-powered avatar — perhaps the clearest sign yet of AI’s deep and industry-shaking inroads into the world of entertainment and influencers.
In an interview with CNBC, Bloo’s creator, Dutch YouTuber and AI enthusiast Jordi van den Bussche, said that he decided to unleash his blue-haired avatar to lighten his own workload.
A longtime gaming vlogger himself, van den Bussche — who is better known by his handle, Kwebbelkop — started to get burnt out as he racked up his 15 million-odd followers. As the 30-year-old content creator told the website Tubefilter a few years ago, he found a solution in 2021 with the then-burgeoning “VTuber” trend, in which humans do the voices and actions for virtual avatars.
“Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human,” van den Bussche told CNBC in his more recent interview. “The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that’s where Bloo came from.”
In videos with names like “Weakest To STRONGEST SHARK EVER In GTA 5!” that feature Bloo attempting to become a ripped, anthropomorphic shark-chad in “Grand Theft Auto: 5,” the goofy-voiced avatar does what most gaming YouTubers do — that is, play games and prattle on about them. Instead of having to be camera-ready, however, van der Buscche can essentially hide behind the avatar, replicating his own work and dividing it between two “personalities.”
“I’ve always been in love with Lady Shark,” Bloo says in the video,” but she only wants to date strong animals.”
As dumb as that gambit may seem, it’s obviously working. That video alone has more than 11 million views, and as the content creator told CNBC, Bloo has already racked up more than seven figures in ad income with those sorts of clips. Not bad for a guy who looks like one of Mark Zuckerberg’s abandoned metaverse avatars and sounds like Max Goof from “A Goofy Movie.”
While Bloo is not fully autonomous just yet and is still “puppeteered” by van den Bussche and his team, everything else about the avatar’s channel, from voice-dubbing into other languages to video thumbnails, is AI-generated. Kwebbelkop listed off OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as the software he uses for Bloo.
Despite testing out fully-automated Bloo videos, van den Bussche said that the technology just isn’t there yet — but once it is, he’ll be all-in.
“When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans,” he said, “that’s when we’ll start using it permanently.”
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