AI Harry Potter Vlogs Are an Unholy Combo of Fanfic and Veo 3 Slop
There are lots of ways to make a generic vlog on YouTube nowadays, but only one way to make a vlog using the likeness of Harry Potter characters—or at least only one way to do that without technically doing it at all. Thanks to Veo 3, Google's newest video generation model, smooth-brain YouTube content is getting a lot smoother. Loads of people have already demonstrated ad nauseam how Veo 3 can generate man-on-the-street-style vlogs or unboxing videos that look fairly close to the real thing. Naturally, people seem to have gotten bored with that genre pretty quickly, though, and they're now taking that idea to the next level.
In case you haven't already been subjected to the phenomenon on TikTok, here's what I'm talking about.
"Vlogwartz" is going insane on TikTok right now. 2 week old account, 15 million views.
Justine thinks this will be more popular than HBO's $900M Harry Potter remake.
We're talking with studios right now to do this for new IP.
Daily vids are 👑pic.twitter.com/GloHQsUmtU
— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) June 23, 2025These Harry Potter vlogs aren't a totally new phenomenon. Just a couple of weeks ago, the flavor of the week was Stormtrooper vlogs, which take the same YouTube-style content and give it a Star Wars spin. What makes a Harry Potter spin special, though, is the fact that it's really blowing up. As noted by PJ Ace, who just made a primetime, GTA-inspired ad using Veo 3, Harry Potter vlogs have racked up 15 million views in just two weeks. It makes perfect sense. These Veo 3-enabled videos take two things that people, for better or worse, love: Harry Potter and mindless YouTube content. Of course, that's going to blow up. But what's more interesting than the popularity is the fact that it also opens up a new frontier for fanfiction writ large.
As recently noted by The Verge, AI is coming for your fanfiction, but it's not just the words, apparently. I guess we need to get ready for a generated video accompaniment, too. Think about it: what's to stop fanfic writers from really visualizing their creations now that tools like Veo 3 are available to the masses for free? My vote for the next victim is the robust, colorful, and furry-coded world of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction. That'll really teach us all a lesson. Though, I guess now that I'm really thinking about it, there is one thing that could stop us from getting washed away in a wave of AI-generated fanfic: copyright.
Listen, I'm no legal expert, but I don't think the owners of all of this wildly profitable intellectual property, nor the actors that portray characters in said properties, will be super happy about new videos being conjured from thin air without their approval or the ability to profit off them. Then, there's the added element of TikTok being monetized that makes matters even worse. If 'creators' of these video generations are now making money off the likeness of very copyrighted material, then methinks there could be some legal implications incoming. But the further we go down this rabbit hole, the more we start to see the huge, vacuous, money-shaped pitfall that is video generation in general.
At the end of the day, video generation models are copyright infringement machines designed to suck up IP, mash it up, and spit it back out as a borderline legal simulacrum. Sure, there are some models (like this one from Adobe) that are supposedly not trained using copyrighted material and are designed to be more brand-safe, but most training data is still a black box. I'm pretty sure the more we peer into that box, the more we'll recognize some shapes, and—oh look, that one looks a lot like the stuff George Lucas made! So, enjoy your animated fanfiction for now because it may not last. At least we get to reclaim Harry Potter from the transphobic claws of J.K. Rowling just a little bit in the interim.
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