OpenAI shut down the Sora app in late March, citing pressure over deepfakes of Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mister Rogers that forced reactive takedowns before family estates and an actors’ union intervened. The same week, YouTube permanently deleted 16 channels under its inauthentic content policy, a July 2025 rename of the old repetitious content rule; those channels had a combined 35 million subscribers and 4.7 billion lifetime views, producing mass-generated, templated video with no human editorial input. Two days before Sora’s shutdown, Google announced Veo 3.1 Lite, its most cost-effective video generation model, priced at less than half of Veo 3.1 Fast for the same speed, allowing developers to generate four-, six-, or eight-second clips at up to 1080p. Craig Billings, who runs a science channel called Doctor NOS with 1.7 million subscribers, told The Hollywood Reporter that faceless channels covering his territory are getting hit hard by the crackdown, with most getting demonetized, while creators who never touched AI but also never showed their face are caught in the same net. YouTube’s policy page states that the platform requires creators to disclose when AI was used.