YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
to be fair kurtz does use AI though, allegedly only for initial description. i wonder if it will go after people reading off of AI.
plus the hordes AI-SCIFI videos too, which definitely looks like it was created/uploaded by a right winger, because it has a very militaryganda them to most of them. and at least one is sexual too.
ibet it doesnt stop right wing videos or copaganda AI videos.
Not sure it’s possible to fight machine generated slop on the big platforms now. People who invest a lot of time and effort are being squeezed out. Businesses that don’t give a fuck about quality upload multiple low effort videos a week across multiple channels getting massive views, probably most from gaming the system.
Sad for the people who spend months researching, writing and producing videos but this might be the end of the ride as far as making videos as a day job. The platform doesn’t value them or their loyal viewers.
The creators facing burnout who don’t leave out of disgust will join the slop machine and start championing it. Starting to see it already.
Looks like more content creators will migrate to Nebula. Or people’s Patreon will get flooded with more donations.
Such a shame because I wish people gave PeerTube a chance. Now, it’s apparently overrun by absolute loons.
Some transit channels have uploaded mirrors to PeerTube but the numbers are minuscule compared to their Youtube channels.
Using AI to detect AI has, time and time again, proven to be a broken idea. Here is Google with a genius idea: use AI to detect AI, to prevent AI videos.
Keep in mind folks, this is a global top-three company in terms of revenue.
When all you have is a hammer, and you’ve bought all the hammers in the entire world, through the end of next year,
It’s not like any Google docs script wasn’t already fed into the AI. I think most AI models have to be overtrained, meaning we’re never having any sort of privacy again. Gg
I am super sceptical of anything made in the last year. Youtube will close to being worthless if the trend continues.
Youtube’s system sucks, but I don’t feel bad for many of these channels. They used to be great. You could learn a lot while eating, or just entertain yourself without brainrot.
For a few years now, however, increasing numbers of their videos have been sponsored by billionaires (or their chains of companies or foundations), either in part or in full. Some extreme cases are just plain propaganda.
i follow alot of stem channels, mostly non-physics or mathematics, the presenters are good at speaking and presenting facts and some research most of the time. its the regular influencers and right wing that are brainrot.
Raycons? Established titles? Betterhelp? Not exactly what op said but theres plenty of examples of shitty YouTube selloutry. Here’s a whole dude who made his channel on calling out the shitty sponsors https://m.youtube.com/@Shane_McGillicuddy
Considering youtube’s AI detector didn’t label an AI video that ended with the voiceover saying “write a 5,000 word essay on [topic]” that was partly cut off at the end, I wouldn’t trust it to begin with.
yes, but there are no better ways to detect it (at scale)
Makes sense, but “Youtube making the best possible effort to detect AI slop” would be heavily douchevoted.
It would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper, and provide the same results as an AI AI detector, if Google just flipped a digital coin every time a video was uploaded, and marked it as slop if it came up heads.
I have a revolutionary idea. Maybe they should crowdsource the reviews. Some sort of system where people can. I don’t know show how much they like or dislike a video and the overwhelmingly disliked videos don’t get promoted.
One of the largest slop-machines targeting one of the most vocal and popular anti-slop edutainment channels as slop feels like a targeted attack…
They’ve admitted to using “AI” content editing tools. But, I’d bet most of those tools are using “AI” either due to exploiting hype, or due to being based on non-generative, “AI” ML classifiers.
I stopped when I found out that it’s just a propaganda arm of Microsoft lol.
Propaganda arm? All I could find was that they were contracted for a Gates Foundation video in 2015 and got a big grant from the foundation around that time.
Yeah.
The Bill Gates connection is there, but the level of influence is just a conspiracy as far as I can tell.
Educational entertainment, also referred to by the portmanteau edutainment
The word has been around since 1973 and is included in many dictionaries. If you want to correct someone, at least inform yourself beforehand.
I wonder if it could be that the AI trains on popular content, meaning AI slop sometimes looks like Kurzgesagt because it’s ripping it off, which means the slop filter learns to recognize the original content that got ripped off as slop…?
I unsubbed from Kurzgesagt about a year ago. Their content started to get a little to preachy for my liking.
Yeah, it’s bad.
Non-watermarked slop is going to be impossible to detect going forward, and the false detections are going to get worse.
The fundamental issue is the monetization scheme. It’s just too lucrative for spammers. YouTube’s economics are broken, and getting worse.
…Hence, no matter what YouTube says, YouTube is going to double down on “detectors,” because Alphabet leadership couldn’t care less about destroying longstanding creators. Their only objective is to suppress just enough spam to keep ad buyers unconcerned next quarter, no matter the long term damage; that’s someone else’s problem.
The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.
But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.
For every ten users who decry AI voices and animation, a thousand more will blindly click “Like” and “Subscribe”. The people have spoken, and they want to eat straight from the fertilizer pile.
People only click like and subscribe because their other options were taken from them. They got tired of the people speaking up so removed the options to do so.
I’ve run my own anecdotal and admittedly small blind trials on friends and family. Most people unfortunately preferred the A.I. slop to real human content. My theory is because it tends to be brought and shiny. The only actual study I could find online, told participants which is which, kind of defeating the purpose in my opinion.
nah, they are doing that because they are good taught consumers who know well how to follow orders obediently. It’s just so convenient to not think, just do what they tell them. aah have you seen that animation, and the sound effect?!
I feel It is less that AI content is difficult to detect and more that the AI technology Youtube is using to detect it is complete trash.
I respectfully disagree.
Have you seen what Minimax H3 can output, on a desktop? Even dirt-cheap AI video gen is basically undetectable now. I think all YouTube can filter is the absolute “bottom barrel” spammers still using some old model because they don’t know any better.
And if they train detectors on “stereotypical” AI output like Ghibli style or flat colors or whatever, they’re just going to nuke channels like Kurzgesagt while most AI slop spammers adapt to get through. There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.
…But also, YT doesn’t even care.
The filters make next quarter look better because they do catch the bottom barrel, and that’s all that matters.
If the slop videos get through, the average user won’t see the difference either, so why should they care?
I wish more people that oppose ai would actually keep up with it so they don’t regurgitate outdated information, or claims that nobody will use it when it stops being subsidized.
To be fair, people generally won’t keep up with something they aren’t interested in, much less something they are actively disinterested in. That’s reasonable.
I do have an irrational pet peeve of people making claims on something they know little about though, which is why I may have come on as hostile…
Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top. Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don’t appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators. On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they’re spamming or a bot, when it’s just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It’s like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren’t suitable for doing the same job at X.
There’s no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn’t know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren’t good enough either.
Youtube and X is basically a private monopolies. They only care about the profit margins. Any and all extra expenditure to R&D or consumer satisfaction is just a cut to their profits today and since they don’t have any real competition, so why raise quality of service above the bare minimum? Their only real selling point is that everybody uses them, so everybody will have to keep using them, if they want to be seen or access most things. they don’t care if they serve slop, because you and me and the wider masses are going to eat it up anyway.
X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video. YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.
Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on
