YouTube always had a slop problem. Previously it took time, people, money and effort to create a slop channel. That’s why it was mostly run by content farms based out of Eastern Europe. For example 5 minute craft based out of Cyprus. With AI creating slop and content farming is easier than ever. Now it can be run at scale by anyone.
As such the only purpose is to make money.
YouTube has started banning some AI channels and maybe with time put serious restrictions. Or maybe not, at least not for big channels because 5 min crafts continues to exist despite producing most bizarre, outrageous and down right dangerous content. YouTube needs that sweet advertisement money.
What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?
Can't say I relate. I think their recommendation engine got worse this year and their search sucks, but I only ever get recommendations for things I normally watch or have watched recently. If anything, its gotten too strict and never branches out anymore and just keeps recommending things ive already watched.
There are a lot of AI generated shorts around animals.
A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable.
I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI
> A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable.
Ohh the deep rabbit hole I went on this. There are so many variations of this like using trademark toys like Labubu, Spider-Man etc. I don’t suggest anyone looking for these unless they want their short feeds to be populated with AI nonsense.
Skimmed through the article, some interesting numbers but not a single statistic is per capita (or per million, whatever). How do I understand the scale of the phenomenon without the per capita figures? Sorry but seems a bit useless.
How can I block AI generated videos (especially AI generated scripts) in my browser? Youtube has to give the viewer an option or the website is going suffer greatly from AI slop...
Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...
Look forward to further increases in pricing, whether through subscription rates or ad frequency or anti-ad-blocker measures, I guess.
I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.
Youtube is horrible, specially the force-fed "shorts". Its 95% AI slop with the same generic graphics and voice-over. From the actual videos most are also AI generated, making me quit the video as soon as i see it.
And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
> And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
Which also reinforces already declining literacy rates.
There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now.
I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven...
Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
That ain't exactly a study as people think of, something scientist do and that get published in a journal, peer reviewed, approved, etc.
It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted.
Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers.
And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.
At a societal level [if that's what we should be worried about], it's not what percentage of results are slop. It's what percentage of people believe the slop. Arguably, that seems to be decreasing proportionally. What I mean is: Slop is on a parabolic, hockey stick upward, and trust is on a logarithmic decline. So, good? - let it blow itself out? Bad information is worse than no information, and evolutionary pressures have many ways of proving that.
YouTube promotes slop and "brainrot" irrespective of AI use, this through the client being tuned for clickbait title presentation, forcing back shorts after every relaunch and promoting clickbait select single frame thumbnails.
This is definitely true for my mom's feed because she watches so many random pet videos.
Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too.
Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess.
Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.
Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules.
Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine.
YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader.
You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.
It has really become horrible in the last some days, probably weeks
now. It is not just fake-videos AI generated, without Google having
any decency to mark it, as it wastes my time and the time of others -
but there are now also videos where some videos are real (I know
because some of these videos came from years ago), mixed in with
AI fake crap. Now, I am able to spot many AI videos, but I bet many
other people simply don't have the knowledge. That is also a generational
problem, where people have a harder and harder time to separate real
from fiction. But I have no desire to waste my time with fake, so
Google now has started to kill youtube. I still have use cases of
youtube without this problem, e. g. good music (here, whether it is
AI generated or not, makes no real difference IF the music is good;
but most AI music is crap anyway but I can not listen to it and only
focus on good music), but this is getting more and more of a dead end
here.
Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing
on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had
problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by
Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing
the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently
gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine.
Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here.
AI is OK. I used to ignore AI stuffs on YouTube but in recent months the channel “Napoleons Hill Notes” helped me tremendously. It is an AI voice reading channel.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadAI sloop ads for dating apps full of ai chat bots , YouTube watched by AI bots.
I was a bit surprised Spain has the most subscribers to ai sloop. Kinda weird considering the population size compared to the US
As such the only purpose is to make money.
YouTube has started banning some AI channels and maybe with time put serious restrictions. Or maybe not, at least not for big channels because 5 min crafts continues to exist despite producing most bizarre, outrageous and down right dangerous content. YouTube needs that sweet advertisement money.
A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable.
I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI
I've posted an article on this matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121555
Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...
I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.
YT has hit rock bottom. Just sad.
Which also reinforces already declining literacy rates.
There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now.
I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven... Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted.
Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers.
And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.
Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts"
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too.
Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess.
Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.
YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader. You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.
Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine.
Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here.
Google, you are the guilty party.
I do worry that yt will intentionally break that functionality in their quest for maximum enshitification though