AI Made It Nearly Free to Make Content. AMermaid Showed Me What It Didn't Make Easy.

AI made it nearly free to make a song, a video or a whole YouTube channel. It didn't make anyone want to watch it, and getting one AI mermaid to swim showed me where the real work went.

A side project that used to need a team

On October 27 I started a YouTube channel of calm study music called Nex Study Music. The music and the visuals are made with AI, mostly on my own computers. Not long ago, a side project like that meant hiring a composer and an animator.

I wanted one mermaid gliding through the ocean behind the music, the same character in every episode. Getting her to swim took a lot more than typing a prompt.

The first versions moved like a puppet

Her arms waved around while her tail did its own thing. When her tail moved, her upper body and hands stayed still. When her arms did move, she was just waving them around.

Having the computer make up smoother arm strokes still looked like waving. Each try was a little smoother, and each one still didn't look like swimming.

A real swimmer fixed it

What fixed it was under three seconds of a real woman swimming underwater in a YouTube video, arms out like wings. The clip was 2.6 seconds long.

My AI assistant and I traced her movement as a stick figure. We merged her two legs into one tail, slowed the motion down to about 0.4x, and told the video tool to follow it. When I watched that clip, my reply was "this is perfect."

Two more things I caught by watching

An AI research tool also talked me into animating the mermaid and the ocean separately, then layering one over the other. I liked the idea and approved it. She came out looking like a paper cutout pasted over the water. We went back to drawing her and the ocean together, which is how my running videos already worked.

Later her tail fin kept flipping between a wide fan and a thin spike. The stick figure was the cause. The tool followed the swimmer's feet too faithfully, including every time they turned sideways. The fix was to lock the fin into one shape and let only its angle move.

I caught each of those by watching her swim. No score from the software flagged them.

The numbers behind the AI content boom

I think that gets lost when people talk about AI content.

In April, Deezer said that about 44% of the songs uploaded to its service each day are fully AI-generated, almost 75,000 tracks a day. Those songs drew only 1 to 3% of listening, and Deezer flagged up to 85% of those plays as fraud.

Part of that gap is Deezer's own doing. It tags AI tracks and keeps them out of its recommendations, so fewer people stumble onto them. Still, YouTube drew a similar line in July 2025. YouTube said channels that use AI can still earn money, but mass-produced, repetitive videos can't, however they were made.

AI took away the cost of making things. Someone still has to decide what's good and send it back when it isn't, and that's where most of my hours on the mermaid went.

If you've been sitting on an idea

So if you run a business and you've been sitting on an idea, like a how-to series about your trade or a podcast about the thing you'd talk about for free, there's no better time than now. The tools are cheap. The part you bring is knowing what good looks like in your trade.

Three things from the mermaid that carry over to any AI project:

1. If AI keeps handing you something that's almost right, stop describing what you want and show it a real example. Paste in three real customer emails that worked, not a paragraph about your tone.
2. Check what it copied. It copies the flaws in your example too, the same way my mermaid copied the swimmer's sideways feet.
3. Watch the result yourself before anyone else sees it. My mermaid's problems never showed up in a tool's score.

Her two hour-long swims are up on Nex Study Music if you need some focus music.

What's the idea you've been sitting on?