Bernie Su and DeStorm Power were there for YouTube’s first wave, and at AI Creator Day they said the backlash against AI looks familiar.
People hated YouTube and Vine too. The creators who stayed curious came out ahead.
“I think when you know you’re doing right, everybody’s hating you. That’s just what it is because people wouldn’t hate it if they didn’t fear it,” Power told What’s Trending founder and CEO Shira Lazar, who moderated. He’s seen it before. “I got OGs of so many waves. I should be a surfer.”
Power showed “The 90s,” an AI series he built almost entirely on his own. It adds about 10,000 followers a week.
Su, the Emmy winner behind “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” now runs creative at Pickford, an interactive AI storytelling company founded in 2024. He showed “Whispers,” a detective series the audience steers live. Viewers send in the voices the detective hears, and the story is rewritten and rendered as it plays. “What tickles my imagination is like, all right, how does the art form change? How can I get the audience to be in it?” Su said.
He thinks creators have never had more leverage. “You are, as a creator, more armed today than in the history of creation,” he said.
TheWrap and What’s Trending presented AI Creator Day 2026 at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 29, the day before TheGrill. Sponsors included Artlist, Cantina, CapCut, Fairground Entertainment, Native Foreign, pocket.watch, Rebel Audio, UTA and Wispr Flow, the official voice partner, whose Notetaker captured the quotes in this story.
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