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It's Monday and AI scandals are getting wilder by the day. The latest deepfake trend to trigger a celebrity cease-and-desist: AI videos of LeBron James going into labor.

Today's News

🤨 Why did CBS cancel The Late Show?
💰 South Park triggers a $1.25B battle
🏧 A TikTok trend spawns a $17M scam
🗞️ Substack creators disagree on AI
🎙️ This week on the podcast…

BY THE NUMBERS

CBS said The Late Show had declined. It seems to be doing well on YouTube.

The cancellation: On July 17, CBS announced its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. A wave of criticism followed close behind, with fans and late-night vets alike speculating that the move was a political one.

While the timing of the announcement is convenient (Colbert's program frequently targeted Donald Trump, and CBS parent Paramount managed to close a merger with Skydance just days after the cancellation), CBS has insisted that the move was purely a response to declining revenue. According to The New York Times, CBS President George Cheeks claimed that the program simply had no path to profitability.

Advertising data firm Guideline predicts The Late Show lost CBS roughly $50 million in 2024. Nielsen ratings for the season that ended this May estimate 1.9 million viewers on average, down roughly 38% from The Late Show's highs of 3.1 million viewers on average during the 2017-18 season.

Colbert's YouTube traffic, however, is solid. Even before its cancellation was announced, The Late Show was one of the most popular programs of its ilk online—and according to Gospel Stats, its digital viewership has only risen in recent days.

So, how does the show compare to other late-night programs? Here's what the data had to say:

The Late Show's official YouTube channel claimed a total monthly view count in June 2025 of 73.5 million. Across 90 days, the channel's long-form library averaged 586,484 views per video.
In comparison, NBC's The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon had a much lower 90-day average long-form video viewership (309,832 views per video) and a lower overall total of 59.5 million monthly views.
ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, meanwhile, pulled in an average of 848,184 views per video across its long-form library in June.

The question: Stars like Kimmel have been upfront about their fears that late-night is dying. And realistically there's not yet a way for networks like CBS to make up tens of millions of dollars in budget deficits from YouTube viewership. But with the world's largest video sharing site gobbling up TV watch time and advertisers adjusting their budgets in response, maybe a future where YouTube meaningfully helps a program like The Late Show stay solvent isn't too far off.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

The FCC has officially signed off on Skydance's acquisition of Paramount, clearing the way for South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to seal a $1.5 billion streaming deal. (Forbes)
Instagram's child safety features are in high demand. In June alone, the platform says teen users "blocked accounts 1 million times and reported another 1 million after seeing a Safety Notice." (Meta)
A study conducted by Global Witness found that 90% of surveyed environmental activists have been harassed on Meta-owned platforms, with Facebook allegedly fostering the most hostile environment. (The Verge)
India's latest crackdown on digital content involved the banning of 25 streaming services accused of promoting "obscene" content. (TechCrunch)

MONEY MOVES

The scam: Every week or so, another sensationalist news story seems to emerge about a dangerous social media trend. In many cases, those 'trends' add up to one or two mostly harmless videos—but sometimes, a wave of illicit content does send shockwaves through social media.

That's what happened earlier this month, when a flaw was discovered in New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program, which works with community-based organizations to place youth aged 16-24 in six-week jobs that pay $16.50/hour. Those wages are paid directly by the city of New York, often through SYEP-specific payment cards that dispense a week's worth of earnings through ATMs.

From July 11-13, however, a flaw in the system allowed ~30,000 SYEP cards to dispense lump sums up to $40,000 from an account presumably operated by New York City itself (per The New York Times).

Word of that flaw spread quickly across TikTok and Instagram. After just three days, $17 million had been taken. A spokesman for NYC's Department of Youth and Community Development suggested that most of the theft was committed by fraudsters who—like the creator of a TikTok video that encouraged SYEP kids to "hit me up"—bought SYEP cards to make large withdrawals. Officials said some program participants sold their cards for up to $1K.

The context: If all this sounds familiar, that's because a similar scam took off on TikTok last August, when a glitch allowed ATM users to pull tens of thousands of dollars from JP Morgan Chase's system. A year later, the banking company is suing people who exploited that glitch. NYC officials haven't indicated what awaits those who took part in this month's scam, but they did confirm there's an ongoing investigation.

SURVEY SAYS

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Substack creators are divided on gen AI

The survey: We've known for a while now that AI is a polarizing topic among creators, but new research published by Substack shows just how wide the chasm is. The platform recently surveyed more than 2,000 newsletter publishers, and found that those creators were deeply divided on the utility, ethics, and pitfalls of generative AI models.

One of the simplest questions in the survey is also the most demonstrative of that divide: 45% of respondents said they're not using generative AI, while 52% claimed to employ it. 2% of publishers were unsure if they were using it, which points to one reason AI use could be higher than initially reported: some creators rely on systems that quietly employ artificial intelligence.

If we take the reported percentages at face value, however, some telling patterns emerge:

Publishers over the age of 45 are more likely to use AI than their younger counterparts. 51% of respondents aged 45+ said they use AI, compared to about 38% of the under-45s.
More men use AI than women. The percentage of men who reported using AI was 17% higher than the equivalent figure for women (55% to 38%).
AI usage is far more common in fields like business, tech, and finance than in more artistic genres like music, literature, and visual art.

The takeaway: Substack's findings are a reminder of gen AI's contentious status in the creator world (as demonstrated by the recent controversy surrounding MrBeast and AI thumbnails). While some digital creatives are eager to benefit from AI and are willing to share their data as training material in exchange for compensation, others remain troubled by the realism of recent AI-generated videos and the ownership issues that come with unauthorized AI training practices.

LISTEN UP

This week on the podcast…

"YouTube's Top Trial Channel": On the most recent episode of Creator Upload, Law & Crime President Rachel Stockman joined hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper to reveal the inner-workings of the top trial channel on YouTube.

From its extensive coverage of the Diddy trial to its innovative use of AI to recreate courtroom scenes, Law & Order's "YouTube-first" strategy has earned its flagship channel more than 7 million subscribers and 5 billion views. Tune in for details about the channel's upcoming Tupac trial coverage and to learn how Stockham's team decides which cases to follow.

It's all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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