AI startups are pitching a new passive-income side hustle: automated videos for YouTube and TikTok

But if you think there’s a lot of AI content on TikTok today, buckle up. A new crop of AI startups like Faceless.video and Autoshorts.ai could be poised to turbocharge the amount of generative AI on the web. Those companies, along with a slew of competitors like StoryShort.AI, offer products that automatically post AI-generated content to social-media accounts for a fee. The output rate ranges anywhere from three auto-posted videos a week to 120 videos a month for a single TikTok or YouTube account.

It’s set-it-and-forget-it — but for the creator economy.

Faceless.video launched a little less than a year ago with a goal to automate “the entire process of being a content creator,” cofounder Jacob Seeger told Business Insider.

“What traditionally used to take somebody tons of hours to dive in and learn how to edit a video or search through Reddit and try to scour some good stories to find, now, essentially the platform handles all that for you,” Seeger said.

The company asks users to choose a story theme for their daily video series. Stories can be scary, motivational, designed as bedtime tales, or meant to inspire a “success grindset.” They can also be drawn from a web search or a subreddit. In one example shared by the company, a creator posted a religious video that garnered close to 400,000 views on TikTok. The same creator also posts an AI-generated video series on their account centered on examples of cheating on one’s partner.

Once a topic is selected, the company generates daily videos with a story script, a voiceover, a background track, and accompanying AI-generated images formatted to qualify for monetization on TikTok or YouTube shorts. The company charges $30 a month for daily AI-generated videos and $45 to post twice a day.

So, who is this product for?

The biggest cohort of Faceless.video’s users are looking to monetize via TikTok’s rewards program or affiliate linking, Seeger said, though some users also simply want an easy tool to grow their social-media account. The company said it has around 10,000 daily active users.

Auto-posting taps into a passive-income mindset that has spread across the digital economy as people look for a side hustle like content creation or dropshipping to make extra income. The beauty of a faceless video is that you can remain anonymous, which means you don’t have to let your boss or coworkers know that you’re posting “success grindset” videos twice a day on TikTok.

A quick search for “faceless videos” on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok unearths a ton of videos and subreddit discussions on how to use generative AI to make money on social media. It’s not clear whether these faceless videos actually lead to meaningful revenue, or if these YouTube evangelists are simply selling snake oil, as a few creators have suggested. TikTok’s creator rewards program can be quite lucrative for some users, but it often requires creators to generate millions of views on videos in order to contribute meaningfully to their income.

“My view is that YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, they’re not going to really show organically a lot of automated AI content,” Sanket Shah, CEO of the video-creation platform Invideo, told BI. Shah’s platform offers a bunch of AI generation tools for creators, but specifically does not offer automated posting, which he said doesn’t make sense.

“It comes down to strategy, creativity, and consistency, and I don’t think that the world needs automated content,” he said.

Creator-monetization platform Spotter is making a similar bet that equipping human creators with AI tools is the best path forward when trying to compete on social media with a surge of AI-generated videos. The company last week announced a new AI tool for generating video ideas that its product lead said was meant to help “creators come out on top in the wave of infinite AI content that’s coming.”

The major platforms are also embracing generative AI tools as a content-creation aid. For instance, TikTok offers a suite of generative AI editing features via its sister app, CapCut.