YouTube has shut down two notable channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, for persistently violating its spam and misleading metadata guidelines by uploading AI-generated, fraudulent movie trailers, as reported by Deadline. The channels had a combined total of over 2 million subscribers and in excess of 1 billion views. They gained fame for producing highly convincing “trailers” for unreleased or imaginary films by merging official studio footage with AI-created imagery, frequently misleading viewers into believing that the projects were authentic. A notable instance is Screen Culture’s 23 versions of a counterfeit Fantastic Four trailer, with some even outpacing Marvel’s official release in rankings. Currently, their pages display a standard YouTube removal notification. Earlier in 2024, YouTube demonetized the channels following a Deadline inquiry into the surge of AI-generated fake trailers. Deadline indicates that the creators subsequently regained monetization by categorizing videos as “fan trailers,” “parodies,” or “concept trailers,” but ultimately eliminated those disclaimers and reverted to their previous methods, resulting in their termination. The investigation also uncovered that rather than requesting take downs, some major studios, including Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony, covertly asked YouTube to reroute ad earnings from these AI-laden videos to themselves. Compounding the situation, Disney recently issued a cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging that its AI training models violate Disney copyrights “on a massive scale.” The channel closures have been positively received by segments of the fan-trailer community, with one content creator stating to Deadline, “The monster was vanquished.”