Online creators have evolved from amateurs shooting iPhone videos they hope will find an audience to beloved personalities playing a vital role in today’s marketing ecosystem. Creators can grab people’s attention—and devotion—based on their on-camera charm, subject matter and entertainment value. According to statistics compiled by Salesgenie, four out of five marketers say creator content outperforms brand-created assets, and a third of marketers are spending more than $5 million on the influencer channel.

This week, Forbes named the 50 Top Creators of 2026, our fifth-annual rundown of the most powerful and influential personalities in social media today. I take a deep dive into the list later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

In a move that was a surprise to many, Getty Images signed a deal this week with OpenAI. The agreement brings Getty’s digital image libraries into ChatGPT, and its licensed content libraries will appear across OpenAI search, as well as in ChatGPT “discovery experiences.”

“High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy,” Getty CEO Craig Peters said in a statement. “This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will deliver richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users.”

It’s unclear whether the deal will allow ChatGPT to use Getty Images for functions other than search, though throughout the AI age, Getty execs have touted the company’s commitment to authenticity.

Getty isn’t the only company that’s in the mix about AI use. Forbes’ Richard Nieva talked to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan about how to prevent AI slop from taking over the online video behemoth. Users tend to be turned off by low-quality AI-generated videos, and a Forbes test found that about 17.5% of YouTube Shorts videos shown to an existing account were AI-generated. Mohan told Nieva he thinks the company’s user-preference-set algorithm, coupled with an aggressive labeling campaign for videos that are “meaningfully AI altered or generated,” will keep users from being inundated with AI slop.

Meanwhile, the Google-owned platform is rolling out its own AI features. Some let viewers do a deep dive and ask questions about videos, as well as a search that’s similar to Google Search’s AI Mode. But there’s another tool that lets users create AI avatars of themselves to insert in different videos and........

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