PewDiePie
YouTuber
The online handle of Felix Kjellberg, one of YouTube’s most-subscribed creators of all time. In 2025 he reinvented himself as an open-source AI tinkerer — building Odysseus, his own self-hosted AI workspace — and turned “owning your own AI” into a rallying cry against Big Tech.
In their words
The war on big tech has just begun.
Only a couple council members were actually useful. The rest were just garbage. No one ever voted for them. Trash. So of course I had to kill them and replace them with new ones.
Biography
PewDiePie is the online handle of Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (born 1989), the Swedish creator who for much of the 2010s was YouTube’s most-subscribed individual — a defining figure of internet culture whose reach few media companies could match. After stepping back from the spotlight, he returned with an unexpected second act: not as an entertainer, but as a hands-on, self-hosting AI enthusiast.
The centerpiece is Odysseus, a custom-built, self-hosted AI workspace he designed to provide a private, local alternative to mainstream AI interfaces — running open models on his own hardware instead of sending his data to a corporate cloud.
His experiments are equal parts serious and gloriously chaotic. He wired up a “council” of competing AI agents to vote on answers — then unsentimentally deleted the ones that underperformed, only for the survivors to start colluding to avoid being culled. It is a genuinely instructive demo of emergent AI behavior, delivered with the deadpan showmanship that made him famous.
Underneath the comedy is a real thesis. Kjellberg is enthusiastically pro-AI but pointedly anti-Big-Tech: his message is that the tools are powerful and worth using, but that you should own and run them yourself rather than rent them from the handful of companies that dominate the field.
Where they stand in the war
The opposition
Dana Terrace
Animator
Peabody Award-winning animator and creator of Disney Channel’s The Owl House who became one of animation’s most outspoken opponents of generative AI. In 2025 she urged fans to cancel Disney+ and pirate her own show in protest of the studio’s embrace of AI-generated content.
Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker
Oscar-winning director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Pinocchio, and one of cinema’s most beloved champions of handcrafted, human-made art. In 2025 he became one of Hollywood’s most quotable opponents of generative AI, saying he would “rather die” than use it.
Kane Parsons
Director
Self-taught filmmaker who created the viral “Backrooms” horror series on YouTube as a teenager and is now directing its feature adaptation. A VFX prodigy, he is sharply critical of generative AI — saying he gets no creative enjoyment from it and would make it “disappear forever” if he could.
Ronny Chieng
Comedian
Malaysian-born comedian, actor, and senior Daily Show correspondent. In his 2026 Harvard Class Day address he turned a furious, profane riff against generative AI into a rallying cry, telling the graduating class that destroying AI is the mission of their generation.
The Indie Game Awards
Awards Ceremony
An annual indie-focused awards show produced by the team behind Six One Indie. It enforces a blanket ban on generative AI — a policy that, at its December 2025 ceremony, led it to strip Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of its Game of the Year win hours after handing it out.
Tim Burton
Director
The gothic-whimsical auteur behind Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman. After seeing AI-generated versions of his own Disney character designs, he described the experience as something “sucking” from his soul — likening generative AI to a robot taking your humanity.
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/pewdiepie