In most countries, journalists can use portions of copyrighted materials under fair use. For example, a science reporter could use quotes from a published study to summarize their findings. That's not the same as a bot scraping a journalist's copyrighted work in it's entirety.
It is not so easy to correlate income with contribution in the modern economic system. I am really good at making more datacenters and populating them with servers but it gets kinda nebulous when you try and relate that with direct benefit to society. Yes large corporations can get their compute and storage cheaper than if they had their own servers, but does this actually net benefit humanity? Not sure.
It's easier to realize you make money because its making other people money ( nothing to do with benefit though ).
I've seen those videos around for a few years now. Altough the one linked in the article is of a high quality (relatively speaking). Does anybody know how to create those? I tried it with FFmpeg and espeak but never actually got anywhere fast.
This could be a preview to the future where content is generated on the fly by bots that gather events on their own (and hence no content ripping). At present, most of the financial content of day to day events like stock price movements is already auto generated.
People still use YouTube for non specific search results?
All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite literally waste your life as it makes you dumber.
Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds.
I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every device I access YouTube on.
If you remove a recommendation, it has a link saying "tell us why", and you can say "don't recommend me videos based on video X" (X being the video that YT used to generate that suggestion).
I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap videos, it's actually pretty OK.
Recommendations engines seem to be pretty myopic in general. Buy shoes on Amazon once, and you are a shoe aficionado. Listen to a single metal album on whatever streaming service, and that's all it'll recommend for days or weeks.
I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.
I do get slightly annoyed at the repetition of adds I don't really need to see the same Barclays bank add 5 times when watching critical role.
A cute funny gorilla is funny the first time after the 100th time not so much - now if you had an actual good ISA rate I might engage as my current cash isa form Santander is a bit crap.
I have to admit, for better or for worse, YouTube is getting better at predicting new things for me to watch. That is probably because I consistently follow very narrow types of channels and watch those channels as my main form of video consumption.
If I watch an abnormal video linked from a friend or something, that does tend to drastically alter what it recommends.
"Oh you watched a weird cartoon edit dubbed with an old song? Here, we have thousands of those to recommend!"
Honestly, I'm just glad it has mostly stopped only recommending videos I've recently watched. That's worse than a bad recommendation.
Me too. I recently went to YouTube to see examples of a specific type of stone fruit grafting and was not disappointed. So many great examples for such a niche thing.
Instructional content from passionate hobbyists is where YT shines, I think. My recommendations are full of great content from niche channels, plus some music videos.
I feel the same way with reddit. But lately I've been hearing of the term "filter bubble". Social media is showing us exactly what we want and nothing else. We live in it, but have no idea what we're missing. The messages that are pushed to us probably does not paint the whole picture -hence we like it-.
For example I only read HN and tech related sites. I have no idea what's going on in the world outside the world of tech :).
Lately I've been trying to read the printed version of the economist in PDF form, it surprised me that it didn't feel like reading a news site. Everything was structured, well written etc. I can recommend following periodical publications for news, rather than only looking at feeds and visiting sites.
It’s eye-opening to start a brand new Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or reddit account and view the feed and recommendations they give to a fresh account.
For instance, on Instagram I followed one middle eastern celebrity and my Explore tab became filled with pregnant ladies’ bellies and babies.
> Social media is showing us exactly what we want and nothing else.
But the bubble is not what I want.
> The messages that are pushed to us probably does not paint the whole picture -hence we like it-.
This is why I don't. I hate it. I talked to a Microsoft guy who wanted to sell me on the great future of AI recommendations a few years back. His argument was that when the AI know I like to discover things it'll recommend me new stuff. That hasn't happened to far. I only start getting recommendations for things I have searched for, usually. Sometimes, rarely, I get some new stuff that I'm incredibly happy about.
But what they can do apparently is recommend me favorite topics of somebody I spend physical time with (the creepy "oh we just talked about this yesterday" moments).
Just because common usage allows us to call two practices "growth hacks," doesn't mean they are the same in most or even many respects.
One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own content.
Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they are not very different.
I found most of them too cheesy to watch for very long.
What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot - usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le.
I've seen a lot of those since a couple of years. Either when searching for very recent events or Autoplay. Autoplay ones would get a full view when I'm not looking at the screen, sleeping etc.
I watched a video just last night, regarding the F35 vs. the SAAB Gripen, it was junk, so naively I clicked on a promising title in the recommendations. The voice-over read the EXACT same script, line by line.
There are also innumerable CG videos on YouTube, targeting children, which appear to be algorithmically generated. Using a combination of popular kids characters (Elsa, Spider-man, etc.) and ostensibly canned animations, the results are often strange, bizarre, and even entirely inappropriate for the intended audience.
The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure nightmare-fuel.
There is also an entire genre of children's nursery rhyme videos and toy videos which are not so obviously inappropriate, but which also have an uncanny algorithmic quality to them - I remember seeing those before I even heard of Elsagate.
Sorry for self-replying, but I remember what I was referring to now, the "Finger Family" type videos[0] particularly Toys in Japan[1] who is apparently now streaming Fortnite.
I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. A few years ago I looked up their profitability and came across an article claiming they were about breaking even bringing with about a billion dollars in revenue with about a billion in costs to run the service. If anyone has any recent / real insight into this I would be grateful for a link.
300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018
A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore).
If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
> He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand.
We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly.
We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :)
One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies.
Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
And these days i think Google builds their storage solutions from the board up. And i seem to recall reading about Facebook doing something similar (including experimenting with cold storage on burned blu-ray).
> I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times.
I spoke recently with an engineer at Youtube. He said that encoding and storage costs for algorithmically generated videos are a serious concern internally.
The writer makes it seem as if society itself is at risk from being ruined because there are crappy videos on YouTube. I couldn’t care less. It is YouTube’s image that is at risk if anything and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box.
YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
> and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box.
I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky.
Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
> YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
You're not a parent, are you?
EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly).
From one parent to another: Parents need to stop asking the world to accommodate for them!
If you don't think your kids should use YouTube then don't let them...easy as that! It's like with cookies...if you really want to I'll bet you find a way to stop you kids from eating them.
Except that “online video” is now a synonym for YouTube. Most people are not aware of this and think “just don’t use YouTube” is as extreme as “then stop watching TV”.
No, it's more akin to "don't watch these channels on TV". There is plenty of content served on sites/apps where preventing children from seeing inappropriate things is a primary focus. It's like locking down your TV to only show cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Besides, putting your child's productive energy into more productive activities that are not watching either TV or online videos will serve them better.
> No, it's more akin to "don't watch these channels on TV".
Sort of. If I let my kid watch Peppa Pig on the TV, I can be reasonably assured that it won't suddenly take a turn (while I'm in the next room washing dishes) into Peppa Pig having sex with Barney just before they're both ground up into sausage.
Thanks for the parenting advice, 21savageaf. I think you underestimate how big YouTube is for the average person. It is pre-installed on most android devices (2B+). Outside of the US and a few european countries, there is no HBO Go/Amazon Prime/Hulu.
O no, do you mean that there is YouTube pre-installed on my child's stuffed animals and the books I read to her? What can I do against this? Or did you mean some other object that is suitable for children?
I think this ignores whether or not YouTube has a moral obligation to create better experiences for children.
You can have millions of parents address the issues themselves or you could have one company with massive resources fix the program for millions of parents.
Aside from morality, I think it's a clear product / business issue for them.
I see no obligation for YouTube except with their “Kids” app. That one really does need to be appropriate, and from what I’ve heard they are failing at it. But as long as they fix it (or even discontinue it) I see no reason why they need to accommodate children on their adult-oriented site and app.
The issue with the "Kids" app is they changed it's content filtering -- what used to be a human-moderated whitelist of content is now determined algorithmically. And that algorithm has been unable to filter "satirical" content that features characters from children's shows from actual children's shows.
Agreed. Don't just dump a tablet into your kids hands and get upset when they find their way to dangerous content.
I can totally empathise how easy it is. I can give my one year old the wiggles and he's calm and quiet for hours if I want. Holy crap it's quiet. I can clean. I can rest. I can do my taxes. But it's just not a panacea. And as he gets older he will naturally try to control the content flow himself. That's fine. But I need to parent this to protect him from what he can't yet regulate himself.
I am considering blocking YouTube. It’s like the mindless TV of the 1980s, but with a much shorter dopamine cycle. I wish my kids never saw it in the first place.
If you are affected by this as aparent, you are the problem. Youtube is unregulated, and full of much worze than this. Take some personal responsibility. Very suprised to see this old opinion parroted here.
I am a parent and I do not see the relevance of YouTube to raising children nor any other tech. What I said is that YouTube is not a public service, you just upgraded them from 'public service' to 'an parental service' and yet you slam me instead of parents relying on entertainment companies to raise their children.
I am trying to raise an interested and independent child with her own interests who goes through this world awake, not a member of the phone-zombies you see everywhere who have a never ending hunger for flashy videos and other entertainment. That there are parents who put their babies/toddlers in a stroller with a phone in their hands is just mind boggling to me.
My daughter is almost a year old and the only time she has ever looked at a screen (including TV) for longer than 10 seconds is when we video call her grandma who lives in another country.
Yet somehow, despite all your valid criticisms of the media and technology in general, you argue that neither YouTube nor the people who upload these kinds of videos may be held accountable for their exploitative behaviour.
Impressive bit of cognitive dissonance there. Although I suppose it can be explained with
> I couldn’t care less.
Which is fine, but then there is no logical reason for anyone else to care about your point of view either.
I didn’t say nobody should be held accountable. My main criticism was with the article’s tone of ‘the world is coming to an end’, or as if people were spraying graffiti all over Van Gogh’s paintings. While in the end it is just YouTube that has some more crappy videos. Don’t get me wrong, there are many many useful videos on YouTube as well.
The accountability for YouTube would come in the form of less users or less advertisers. Until this happens though, these ‘crappy’ videos are appertently just what the users want to see and the automated advertising bots don’t care.
Accountability for the video-makers? I don’t see why. The copyright system is broken and counter productive in many cases to our ability as humans to create more knowledge. One could always argue that it is an art project anyway.
There’s nothing admirable about lowest common denominator tactics like this, and it isn’t that out of the box. You just have to be desperate enough and sleazy enough to want to do it. Are these videos an existential threat? No. Are they a net negative for the internet and everyone who gets value and utility out of good content? Absolutely.
Idk I think this is just a poor implementation of a really good idea. Don't get me wrong, spam videos aren't a good thing.
But I do think removing the role of an editor and cinematagrapher and being able to programmatically convert a script/screenplay instantly into a useful video content seems like a great idea; the right approach. In addition, something like this could also create internationalized video content very quickly.
IMHO, automating the artistic process of everybody/thing you think less important defeats the purpose.
Why not go further? Once we can determine an affordable way to programmatically stimulate every necessary region of our brain to bring about emotions and the effects of nostalgic or sentimental introspection traditionally stimulated by beautiful artwork, then we can just plug in and go for the ride and get on with our daily work.
But seriously, that is not what art is. Art is not created automatically by a machine. We can program a 3d printer to spit out an exact copy of the veiled virgin, but will we find it as beautiful? Certainly not.
Part of the charm of the artistic process is that a human being's perspective becomes illuminated, in part, in the medium. The natural imperfections of that perception are made beautiful and become less like imperfections and more like variations. A machine, as of yet, cannot do this. A computer program cannot have this multiplicity of perspective which is at once flawed and beautiful. It cannot understand the human emotive experience beyond what is input-output-- and the human emotive experience, as we can all attest, is not composed of input-output events.
If we let the machines make our art for us, or to artificially induce the emotions in us, we have lost all understanding of what art is. Art is not utilitarian. We cannot have machines perform art.
The key phrase is "as of yet". There are ML algorithms called generative models that try to understand the underlying probability distribution that is producing the data. All we need a better generative model that matches the internal state of humans and produces "Art" after interacting with the randomness of the outside world.
I think there is nothing magical about being a human. We are complex machines with lot of processes, but nothing that can't be replicated.
I think you're again missing the point. What matters is not even the act of creating in this case. It's the notion of shared experience communicated [in a variety of forms] when we undeniably experience a range of emotions and states that can make us feel endlessly apart from anyone or anything else. It matters that another human was responsible for the creation.
What society? You mean YouTube? That isn't society, it is a company that has a business model that is based on getting people to waste as much of their time as possible on YouTube so that they can earn money by selling ads to those people. I find it hard to see how YouTube == Society.
> it is a company that has a business model that is based on getting people to waste as much of their time as possible on YouTube
Society = people. There is good stuff on youtube, and there is bad stuff on youtube. Why do you want to be part of the problem? Seems pretty selfish to me.
It took me a while to realise that what everyone is talking about (peppa pig / r/elsagate) and these are not AI produced videos but script kiddie stuff. The peppa pig stuff i have seen looks more like someone with one tool has been trying to make something "funny" but i suppose the point being made here is that if you can make a video for effectively free, and youtube pays you 10 bucks, you can scale that forever.
surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with robo videos on it with the one bank account?
this is what fascinates me - how do people actually monetise this stuff
I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the country.
(see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM)
But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are we missing here?
Personally, I think Youtubes recommendation algorithm is to blame. It's probably to easy to fool; have a nice clickbaity title, some clickbaity thumbnails, and you're much more likely to get hits. YT should eliminate those factors, as it only lowers the bar, but they don't.
1. Publish higher-quality content on the verified channel, and lower-quality closely related content on unverified channels. Suggestions on the unverified channels are more likely to include content from the verified channels than content from elsewhere, as that content is more closely related.
2. Get multiple channels verified! If it can be done once, it can be done multiple times.
It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.
YouTube is more famous than Jesus. I tried automated videos on YouTube twice. Nobody watched them. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be successful on YouTube. Politicians using you as an example of society falling apart certainly helps to make you famous though.
Haha, I made my own bot a while back ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ ). It makes videos out of wikipedia pages, so I figure it's not terrible. If you're thinking about doing such a thing, take note from me, and make sure the voice sounds okay from the beginning.
Had something like this with a whitepaper: Someone took the PDF from our website and generated a video from it - crappy music included. That was 9 month ago. While we had some laughs, I'm a bit afraid potential customers find it and mistake it for one of ours :/
102 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadYou can use excerpts to comment on a work (e.g. review), but that's about it.
Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing videos contributes anything to society?
It's easier to realize you make money because its making other people money ( nothing to do with benefit though ).
2. read text using text to speech, produce audio file
3. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them
4. auto upload to youtube
5. profit!
1. hope and dream of success
2. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio
3. read text using text to speech, produce audio file
4. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them
5. auto upload to youtube
6. get depressed when you realise nobody wants to listen to a computer speak.
7. go back to day job
:)
You can do a lot with ffmpeg.
All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite literally waste your life as it makes you dumber.
Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds.
I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every device I access YouTube on.
There's also a ton of bot-generated podcast spam on YouTube where bots will pull podcasts from feeds and then dress them up with cheesy video content.
I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap videos, it's actually pretty OK.
I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.
I do get slightly annoyed at the repetition of adds I don't really need to see the same Barclays bank add 5 times when watching critical role.
A cute funny gorilla is funny the first time after the 100th time not so much - now if you had an actual good ISA rate I might engage as my current cash isa form Santander is a bit crap.
If I watch an abnormal video linked from a friend or something, that does tend to drastically alter what it recommends.
"Oh you watched a weird cartoon edit dubbed with an old song? Here, we have thousands of those to recommend!"
Honestly, I'm just glad it has mostly stopped only recommending videos I've recently watched. That's worse than a bad recommendation.
For example I only read HN and tech related sites. I have no idea what's going on in the world outside the world of tech :).
Lately I've been trying to read the printed version of the economist in PDF form, it surprised me that it didn't feel like reading a news site. Everything was structured, well written etc. I can recommend following periodical publications for news, rather than only looking at feeds and visiting sites.
For instance, on Instagram I followed one middle eastern celebrity and my Explore tab became filled with pregnant ladies’ bellies and babies.
But the bubble is not what I want.
> The messages that are pushed to us probably does not paint the whole picture -hence we like it-.
This is why I don't. I hate it. I talked to a Microsoft guy who wanted to sell me on the great future of AI recommendations a few years back. His argument was that when the AI know I like to discover things it'll recommend me new stuff. That hasn't happened to far. I only start getting recommendations for things I have searched for, usually. Sometimes, rarely, I get some new stuff that I'm incredibly happy about.
But what they can do apparently is recommend me favorite topics of somebody I spend physical time with (the creepy "oh we just talked about this yesterday" moments).
One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own content.
Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they are not very different.
I wasn't equating anything.
What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot - usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le.
But the British butler voice isn't too shabby.
Who is earning that kind of money? The pros I know bank $1/1k (excluding sponsorships, referrals, Patreon, random demonetisations, and so on).
The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure nightmare-fuel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw
300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018
A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore).
If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly.
We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :)
One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies.
Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
I spoke recently with an engineer at Youtube. He said that encoding and storage costs for algorithmically generated videos are a serious concern internally.
YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky.
Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
You're not a parent, are you?
EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly).
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
If you don't think your kids should use YouTube then don't let them...easy as that! It's like with cookies...if you really want to I'll bet you find a way to stop you kids from eating them.
Sort of. If I let my kid watch Peppa Pig on the TV, I can be reasonably assured that it won't suddenly take a turn (while I'm in the next room washing dishes) into Peppa Pig having sex with Barney just before they're both ground up into sausage.
The same isn't true on YouTube.
You can have millions of parents address the issues themselves or you could have one company with massive resources fix the program for millions of parents.
Aside from morality, I think it's a clear product / business issue for them.
I can totally empathise how easy it is. I can give my one year old the wiggles and he's calm and quiet for hours if I want. Holy crap it's quiet. I can clean. I can rest. I can do my taxes. But it's just not a panacea. And as he gets older he will naturally try to control the content flow himself. That's fine. But I need to parent this to protect him from what he can't yet regulate himself.
And since this is a convenient excuse to regulate shit, this mentality becomes very Useful.
I am trying to raise an interested and independent child with her own interests who goes through this world awake, not a member of the phone-zombies you see everywhere who have a never ending hunger for flashy videos and other entertainment. That there are parents who put their babies/toddlers in a stroller with a phone in their hands is just mind boggling to me.
My daughter is almost a year old and the only time she has ever looked at a screen (including TV) for longer than 10 seconds is when we video call her grandma who lives in another country.
Impressive bit of cognitive dissonance there. Although I suppose it can be explained with
> I couldn’t care less.
Which is fine, but then there is no logical reason for anyone else to care about your point of view either.
The accountability for YouTube would come in the form of less users or less advertisers. Until this happens though, these ‘crappy’ videos are appertently just what the users want to see and the automated advertising bots don’t care.
Accountability for the video-makers? I don’t see why. The copyright system is broken and counter productive in many cases to our ability as humans to create more knowledge. One could always argue that it is an art project anyway.
But I do think removing the role of an editor and cinematagrapher and being able to programmatically convert a script/screenplay instantly into a useful video content seems like a great idea; the right approach. In addition, something like this could also create internationalized video content very quickly.
Why not go further? Once we can determine an affordable way to programmatically stimulate every necessary region of our brain to bring about emotions and the effects of nostalgic or sentimental introspection traditionally stimulated by beautiful artwork, then we can just plug in and go for the ride and get on with our daily work.
But seriously, that is not what art is. Art is not created automatically by a machine. We can program a 3d printer to spit out an exact copy of the veiled virgin, but will we find it as beautiful? Certainly not.
Part of the charm of the artistic process is that a human being's perspective becomes illuminated, in part, in the medium. The natural imperfections of that perception are made beautiful and become less like imperfections and more like variations. A machine, as of yet, cannot do this. A computer program cannot have this multiplicity of perspective which is at once flawed and beautiful. It cannot understand the human emotive experience beyond what is input-output-- and the human emotive experience, as we can all attest, is not composed of input-output events.
If we let the machines make our art for us, or to artificially induce the emotions in us, we have lost all understanding of what art is. Art is not utilitarian. We cannot have machines perform art.
I think there is nothing magical about being a human. We are complex machines with lot of processes, but nothing that can't be replicated.
That's just to start.
I think you are young. I hope you grow out of that state of mind.
this is repackaging and theft of real creators' content.
Are the videos the net negative, or is the net negative that we have a laxly-moderated automated platform that gives a super-large platform to crap?
Yeah, except for the whole "negative contribution to society" part.
> it is a company that has a business model that is based on getting people to waste as much of their time as possible on YouTube
Society = people. There is good stuff on youtube, and there is bad stuff on youtube. Why do you want to be part of the problem? Seems pretty selfish to me.
surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with robo videos on it with the one bank account?
i may of course be simplifying fraud detection
I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the country.
(see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM)
But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are we missing here?
1. Publish higher-quality content on the verified channel, and lower-quality closely related content on unverified channels. Suggestions on the unverified channels are more likely to include content from the verified channels than content from elsewhere, as that content is more closely related.
2. Get multiple channels verified! If it can be done once, it can be done multiple times.
"Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8
It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group