YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
Nah thats correct kurzgesagt is slop
is Youtube/Google speed running their death?
that’s what happens when your AI slop detector is AI slop
Reminds me of that comic the other day
Kurzgesagt: Let’s keep our art human made.
Google: Kurzgesagt, your content looks like this low quality AI slop!
🤖: I’D LIKE TO THANK KURZGESAGT FOR BEING A BIG INSPIRATION TO ME.
Vacuum up the internet, provide generative “AI” for people to spew tons of garbage on to the internet. Everyone hates AI, and advertisers don’t want ads showing against AI slop. AI can’t accurately detect AI and kills real content providers that advertisers want to show ads for.
Brilliant. What will they come up with next?
Yet YouTube Music is absolutely rife with AI bullshit. So much fake-ass viking, cowboy, or other ‘badass’ AI generated slop.
thats why im always hitting the report button. be part of the solution. not passively part of the problem.
I would say that being part of the solution is not using their service at all.
I’ve been craving a feature like that. Maybe it’s because I use YouTube Music Desktop, but there’s no damn report button!
Nothing in the mobile app, either ☹️.
Or “just discovered” 1970s Berlin krautrock space stuff… it’s all nonsense
As someone who likes Tyr, Hulkoff, Skald, and Danheim I swear to fuck I want to beat someone’s head in with my musket stock. Seriously the quality just drops and I can only block so many channels, half tempted to just to download all their music and make a fucked up mega playlist on my phone.
Anyone know a good way to download YouTube music on Linux, preferably a program and not a website.
Up until a few months ago, I would normally use spotDL, a tool you gave a Spotify url and it’d search the same songs on multiple sites and download them, while tagging it with spotify’s metadata, which is quite clean. Absolutely amazing piece of software helped me build a good music library, but Spotify changed their api auth because of Anna’s archive scraping, requiring you to have premium just to have a useful api key, breaking spotdl for pretty much everyone.
I currently use just yt-dlp to pull from yt music, SoundCloud and bandcamp. It’s alright, metadata is bad tho, yt-dlp doesn’t tag very well out of the box. I’ve tried torrenting and soulseek, you can get some good quality (and big!) files, but can be hard to find niche artists (Argentinian hardbass sure is niche as hell)
I’d too be interested in a tool like that if anyone knows one.
YT-DLP is my go-to now. Can download one track or a playlist.
At the same time YouTube offers a prompt to generate more AI content.
No, this is just a stunt to claim that it is difficult to detect AI slop, when in reality they want that content as it is more addictive, especially to kids.
Intentional stunt? That’s highly unlikely.
It is difficult to detect AI slop, probably exponentially so when it’s a video compared to image or text. I don’t know why you said it like there’s a ready to use solution YouTube isn’t using for some reason.
I was recently accused on Lemmy of using AI to write up a post (laced with links to appropriate Wikipedia articles).
I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
That’s because machines don’t have feelings. /s
Oh you used a big word, AI phony!
Nah dude, I just . . . know how to write?
This comment aims to illuminate the complexities of being seen as a sesquipedalian. Let’s delve dee … (token limit reached)
real human intelligence seems utterly alien in this world
It really doesn’t help that in the US there’s a major literacy crisis.
This is the shit state of the world now. Everything gets accused of being AI by someone. The AI tech bros have well and truly won. They’ve poisoned everything.
I’d argue that the Fuck_AI crowd who slanders and also sexually harasses people are helping them. I hate this big tech companies just as much as they do. I’m not going to sexually harass someone I think is using their service though.
Did you use an emdash
Huh — Now that you say it.
No, I did not- 🤖I do use them, yes. Sometimes I’ll use them similar to parenthesis to insert an aside comment – a use case noted in Wikipedia. – though I add spaces before and after each one.
Well back in the day I when playing competitive fps in european ladder my own clanmates accused me of cheating
Its kinda of flattering, isnt it?
This is exactly why I hold anti-AI folk in low regard, because they have yet to demonstrate their “detection” abilities to discern between human and generated creations. They are basically psychics and ghost whisperers.
This seems like an overgeneralization. Just like they do, you do here.
It’s worse than that. They’re not just pretending about their abilities for clout. They’re actively following their emotions and attacking people they don’t like with AI accusations or just plain old harassment. I’ve been sexually harassed by these assholes.
deleted by creator
As AI gets better this is increasingly true too. Back when it was irregular fingers it was a lot easier. And tbh, there is plenty of AI content I don’t really mind.
Its often ok. It doesn’t have to be great if there is little to no high quality human made content to compare it to in the same niche. I don’t think any human artists have made an album about the Isstvan massacre.
I don’t think any human artists have made an album about the Isstvan massacre.
How on Earth are there warhammer fans who haven’t heard of Bolt Thrower?
İt feels like humans have no rights to speak or dislike or express any opinion online only fake numbers matters and the best part is ai slop is feeding from ai slop to make more ai slop ı wonder when this nonsense comes to end
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.
…while offering video making AI tools.
When all you have is a hammer, and you’ve bought all the hammers in the entire world, through the end of next year,
This is also a company pushing AI
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.
It’s engagement optimized, that’s why.
That’s the whole point of the spam; being engagement bait.
Same thing applies to any human made clickbait, and people have demonstrated they simply cannot help themselves, and click it.
There was recently a study using human short stories and LLM generated short stories prompted to write a similar story. The participants where told which stories were AI generated, but sometimes they were lied to, and told a human-written story was AI generated.
The study showed that people liked the AI stories more. It also showed that if someone has a negative bias against AI generated content, they’d claim the AI story was worse, even if it were actually the human story and they were just told it was AI.
Also, another test was performed where they provided a story and asked them if it was AI generated or human generated. The participants could only tell the AI written story 45% to 50% of the time. Essentially, they were guessing.
I think many people have taken a mental snapshot of the quality of AI generated content from a couple years ago and just assumed it hasn’t improved since then.
Yeah that mirrors my findings too… my hypothesis was that everyone would clearly prefer the human equivalent art, but I was disappointed to be proven wrong. That’s the nature of science though, sometimes you get your presumptions smacked down.
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?!
We need a law that requires AI-generated videos to be watermarked and huge fines for the streaming companies that allow unmarked videos.
That won’t work for long. Generation can be hosted in a country outside the jurisdiction.
Current services do need such a law anyway, and many already are watermarked. But I’m just saying it wouldn’t even slow down spammers once they figure it out.
To be clear, it’s the streaming companies should be fined. If YouTube shows an unmarked video in the US then they get fined for doing so.
The content generation is another matter that’s more difficult to enforce.
that’s why the law shouldn’t apply to just generation. as long as something is delivered (even if over the internet) to EU places, then the EU law mandating AI labels applies.
Well that would mean holding social media liable.
That would be fantastic. But it seems unlikely, sadly.
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?
There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.
It’s harder for users as well. Even youtubers I’ve followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as “WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS” with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They’re all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it’s the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn’t answer it. We’ll end up with a new Betteridge’s Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we’ll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we’re all getting ripped off…
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.
Makes me angry my country is now split as far as AI slop awareness is concerned: some are opposed (look up so-called Pax Silica), while others are embracing the garbage full on as if it’s gonna make them more money, and still others unaware it could affect them sooner or later, especially as the government thinks AI is a boon when it’s really not.
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…
that’s extremely rational
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
What’s mostly keeping those platforms afloat is, unfortunately, people in developing countries where social media usage is very heavy to the point it’s literally its own internet such as Facebook’s walled garden.
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…
KZ feels a little sloppy at times, I stopped following it
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.
Microslop
Yeah, of you go to their page to upload content, it now has prompt where you can generate one. It is just a stunt to fool people that they fighting and that it is hard, when in reality they want the slop as it is addictive to kids.
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…?
edutainment channels
*educationing channels
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 tried to make a joke. Looks like I failed.
I’m not even sure what that joke could’ve been
Thank you, that is reassuring.
YouTube’s bullshit is having some interesting effects for sure. Have you noticed how more and more channels are now including short clips of them doing the actual voiceover? It’s usually not even that long, like a second or two or sometimes even less. But apparently that’s now needed to prove that there’s an actual human behind the channel.
I do find it a bit distracting, but I’d rather not lose those channels either…
Even that doesn’t always work. There is one channel I know of that got auto banned despite using live shots of everyone doing live introductions of their stories.
This shit reminds me of that helicopter gunner scene in Full Metal Jacket:
“Everyone who doesn’t show their face is an AI. Everyone who does show their face is a well-disciplined AI.”
Problem is that most people and automated systems are downright terrible at figuring out what’s actually AI. Even AI itself can’t always tell if it’s AI.
I’ve had people accuse my posts on social media as AI, just because I can write more than two sentences without spelling errors. Since they can’t, they think nobody can…
So now I tend to leave the occasional delibarete spelling mistake just so people don’t think this was written by ChatGPT. Unless I put that in my prompt, obviously 😂
I don’t. If they can’t read or spell, fuck 'em. I have no interest in talking to stupid people. Nor am I interested in stupid people that have no interest in continuing to learn and try new things. There are a surprising number of adults that refuse to do so.
The least they could do is have a fucking white list.
This should also be a really big sign for all these content creators to bunch up and find an alternative.
I bailed on YouTube a few years ago. I had a video with a very clearly public domain piece of music (both the song and the performance) in it, which I didn’t monetize just because I hate ads and the channel wasn’t very popular anyway. Some bot flagged the public domain song for copyright and YouTube not only gave me a copyright strike but also added paid ads into my video without my consent so they could send the ad money to whoever it was that flagged it.
I didn’t even bother to contest that one, I just deleted my entire channel and sent them a very angry message telling them to go fuck themselves lol.
I will never use them again because of that, and I’m so glad I got out before AI became a thing. Fuck YouTube.
They are, they’re trying, they’re pushing other platforms constantly. Kurzgesagt already does, heavily.
But are users switching? Nope.
They hardly even know they exist.
Sometimes I even see such a comment on YouTube, a user questioning YouTube; yet they didn’t even watch the video long enough to see the creator promoting an alternative platform.
They’ve already scrolled to the next video, algorithmically fed to them.
YouTube has an iron grip on YT users, and they know it. Even if ALL creators band together, IMO there’s basically nothing the creators can do.
They do. Ironically a lot of users criticise particular group of people of users being in the grip of sky etc.
I know the word addiction isn’t quite right but YT is still a social media.
Kurzgesagt already does, heavily.
where are they available besides youtube? on their website they only link to youtube, written social media, and instagram
I was mistaken, I think. Apparently they used to be involved with Nebula, but that’s no longer the case.
Yeah, they left, along with CGP Grey, a very long time ago. The TL;DR of why is: as early members of Standard, they thought that they and the other early members should be entitled to take a larger share of the income from Nebula than newer creators. Everyone else thought it should be shared more equitably. Essentially, Kurzgesagt and Grey wanted to be able to leech off of the work of others, instead of operate in a worker-owned business where everyone is paid according to the value they bring in.
Even if ALL creators band together, IMO there’s basically nothing the creators can do.
Accurate. Even if everyone started uploading to a different platform tomorrow, the catalog of videos already on YT is enough to sustain them for a while
they’re pushing other platforms constantly. Kurzgesagt already does, heavily.
Do they? They used to be part-owners of Nebula but sold shares and bounced. What platform do they push now?
Oh maybe this is right. I don’t watch regularly, just remember Nebula (or something) in several of their videos.
They have directly addressed the enshittification of platforms, too.
What happened to nebula?
Nothing bad, Nebula is awesome. Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey disagreed with the direction the rest of the leadership wanted to go with it and they jumped ship. Since then it has exploded in popularity.
The only way to get users to switch if YouTube and alphabet goes bankrupt and goes out of business for good and if YouTube goes offline for good
YouTube has an effective monopoly on small scale video like this. Creators try to use other platforms be the audience just isn’t there.
Distributing video is also considerably harder compared with text or images, so it’s harder to for grassroots platforms to start up.
Yeah, instead if you try to upload video on YouTube you actually have a prompt to generate more slop.
I don’t buy it.
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.
That’s the youtube dream. Pretend to be genuine long enough to attract an audience that will attract a dark money suger daddy sponsorship gravy train and it’s all daisies from there on out.
Literally the same as a politician.
Examples?
I’d love to have a small list for class.
A perfect example is Veritasium’s now deleted video about self driving cars. Entirely sponsored by Waymo, featuring exlusively data provided by Waymo (which coincidentally contradicted all other available data), and the guy acts like the video being fully sponsored means nothing.
Once people called him out, he started acting like a victim targeted by everyone for no reason. Just read his comments under videos on the topic. It’s just pathetic.
Many other channels, like Kurzgesagt, completely source their data from billionaire-sponsored websites like OurWorldInData. Sometimes the data matches other, more reliable and trustworthy sources, and other times it’s just plain made up.
In addition to portraying various subjects from only one perspective, which, suspiciously, always seems to be the one that makes billionaires look better.
YouTube videos about the two cases I mentioned:
Oh, Veritasium actually ended up taking that propaganda down? Neat.
Regarding Kurzgesagt, it’s been obvious he’s a grifter for a very long time.
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made because his own response to K’s actions was rather hotheaded. But the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience almost all take his side.
Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.
Regarding the video about Kurzgesagt, if you look in the video description, you can find a Reddit post by Kurzgesagt where they respond to those accusations, which a lot of are refuted.
It’s important to be critical, but mindlessly blaming everone and everything to be billionare-controlled is just as dumb as being naive and believing everything u see on the Internet.
Personally I feel like that reddit post is terrible and nothing but PR. They did not ‘refute a lot of accusations’, as you claim. They cherry picked a grand total of two, one of which got twisted, and responded with largely irrelevant and misleading info.
Which is pretty much what The Hated One responded to them. Not to mention even the response to the two (out of what, 12?) points was full of holes and manipulative statements.
Naturally, no further comments were made by anyone from Kurzgesagt’s team. Just like corporate PR. Publish a meaningless statement that provides no new information whatsoever -> pretend it answers everything -> refuse to elaborate -> act like people are evil for asking questions.
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
That’s awesome. Thanks!
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.
