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My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.

Something, something, people want to see this, therefore GenAI and algorithms are good (no joke, someone actually replied this to me on the forum).

The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.

The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.

And unfortunately the other way around could be about as bad:

“Don’t believe what you just saw — That’s just AI propaganda!”

I've found a curious variety of AI videos: releases of motorbikes that don't exist, brought by Youtube algorithm. I guess the point is just clicks or ads money. Some comments, by bots or gullible users.

No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)

Gen Beta is soooo cooked.

tbh those brain rot videos pre-date AI generation, i know because my little BIL used to watch those kind of random non-stop action and movement vids in like 2020

> Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds

I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.

kids simply shouldn't be looking at a screen, AI-generated or not.

Screen time for kids (and adults for that matter!) should be way way scaled back. That falls on the parents.

Bad parents give their kids phones and tablets and that's a hill I will die on.

What's even worse is that these videos are being used for shady purposes as well. I start to fear a lot for our future elections. I have heard parents/grand-parents mention videos they have seen from politicians that are simply fake. They totally believed claims they said these politicians made, but when you look it up you discover these things were never said and that they fell for AI deep-fake style videos. So far most of these videos have been made to promote scams. I'm sure many of us have seen these videos. Like the classic Elon Musk promoting some crypto scam videos.

This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos.

And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war.

Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.

My girlfriend mindlessly watches those sometimes. I think they are from China maybe.

I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this:

"A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!"

Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.

I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.

> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.

An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.

What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.

> But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.

In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.

That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.

You know its not that much work to learn a couple of open chords on the guitar and be able to play some songs and participate. And its so so rewarding to play a song, even one you aren't really excited about, and to sing and accompany yourself even if its a song that's like 2-3 chords (like "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones). Just because its YOU making the music and the sounds, its immediately your interpretation and has your soul in it. It becomes so meaningful to you to people around you.

You don't have to say I wont be a rockstar, therefore let me use some AI to make a song, and in doing so give up on the joys of touching and making sounds with an instrument, a very old human thing we've been doing all over the world, having someone show you a song, or look up a youtube video and learning it from some random stranger.

Even better, being in love with a song and finally being able to play it yourself!

Maybe AI could've sufficed for Paul McCartney's interest in music, and provided a creative outlet. But we wouldn't have had something as great and as human as the legacy of the Beatles.

Trying to “level the playing field” is antithetical to what art is. Art is about self-expression and communication.

If we viewed art as some sort of competition or race, then someone using neural–network-based generative tools could avoid losing the race; however, everybody would be participating in some sport A and the person using ML participates in a completely different sport B. Everyone is running, but one person is riding a scooter.

However, art is not a finite zero-sum game[0]. Despite what formal music education for kids sometimes tries to make it look like, it’s not a competition, there is no global ranking and scoring system for your skill. Many people have an intuitive understanding of that; try going to a live jam to see people participating regardless of their hypothetical skill level.

[0] As further reading on this topic more generally, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.

I’m really in the middle of what I should think about Gen AI, and to be honest, it disturbs me.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.

Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.

But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.

So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.

AI is the latest brick in the wall separating human beings from one another.

Your argument is like "people have been killing each other for centuries so when you think about it hydrogen bombs are not the problem"

>> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.

This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!

All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.

That sounds fantastic but it's essentially a different subject.

You seem to be dismissing any music that you don't have some pretty close participation in. Did it all start to go downhill with the invention of the gramaphone? Listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Vera Lynn or Elvis or Frank Sinatra was irrelevant for those that weren't actively jamming along with them?

I'm being facetious, I know you don't really mean that. My point is, listening (on your own, with no musical skill) to good quality music made by a real human is a valid activity. That's under threat, and the fact that making your own music with your friends isn't (or at least is less so) shouldn't detract from that.

On the other hand it allows teleportation. When I'm vibing in an Infected Mushroom concert with a few hundred people I can feel as if I'm on a beach stroll listening on my headphones, just the other people can actually hear what I hear and being neurally activated the same way I do.

When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.

A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.

> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.

I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.

More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.

This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.

I was in a park today, and I watched a man play a saxaphone. Other people had stopped to listen to him play.

It occurred to me that we appreciate this kind of public performance, but we get annoyed if someone plays their boombox too loud in public.

I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.

Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.

I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.

> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.

There's probably more original music being created now than any time in history. Constant promotion of AI music is why you think it's not the case.

> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.

If you think being a DJ is more consumption than shouting cover songs near a lake, maybe you should try learn be a good DJ

> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.

If you are a musician you know there're absolute geniuses who have ZERO formal music skills completely self taught. Some are world famous names we all know. That was never the problem.

> I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.

You contradict yourself. If music really doesn't matter then why AI? The crippling fear of supporting a real human musician somewhere?

https://fuckoffaimusic.com/

Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?

A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?

Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves

A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?

I loved reading this, thanks for sharing your take

Imo where I am from, asking people not used to dance to dance in public was always tall order.

And when you look at broader culture, people dancing seem to welcome only small or bigger mockery, unless they dance really well.

I think many people do see value though in the knowledge that a human took the time to create a creative work though. Its the same sort of difference you see between music made by someone who makes music because they like making music, and corporate music. The latter was historically kept in check though by the amount of talent necessary to get taken seriously to make anything.

People can do whatever they want, but they shouldn't expect an audience.

To be honest, this comment reads to me like LLM output.

You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.

I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.

A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.

> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser

Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it

I personally like an AI cover version of Nirvana's "In bloom" song in country style [0]. Just because it is AI generated doesn't mean that I enjoy it less. Labelling videos as AI is fair and I welcome youtubes changes in that regard nonetheless.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNImbw1TABo

That's actually how I fell down the rabbithole --- found these long mixes and started listening, enjoyed what I heard, then tried to find out more about the author and realised it was AI-generated.

People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).

I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".

YouTube music doesn’t seem to care much about where the music comes from. They do have formal album libraries but not everything is carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify. That’s what makes it good, because you can find tons of lost mixes, old unreleased track and vinyl rips, leaks of new stuff from current artists

I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos

There are completely fake bands, who are 'on tour', 'giving interviews', cranking out albums. Like "Shunned at a Funeral" [0] for instance, an AI Christian rock band. Mentioning nowhere that it is all fake.

Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@ShunnedataFuneral

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKOtpdDzwyA

I was at the gym the other day with my bf and there was some godawful lame crap on the playlist. I asked my bf if it was AI generated in his opinion, he laughed and said it was Harry Styles…

Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.

People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.

I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.

So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!

Curious to see if this will apply to music.

I imagine it'll apply to anything with a SynthID watermark. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/

Music may be a special case because generative/algorithmic music has been a thing for much longer than AI (in the 2020s sense) has existed. So it's more a question of how/whether it gets integrated into an existing generative market than it being a new category.

Add “before 2024” to searches.

enough music was made already, we don’t need more.

There is a third option. We don’t care how the music was made.

I wonder about false-positives too, or just disagreements with what is stated vs. "detected". In what I guess is a reaction to the huge amount of AI music, I notice a lot of other music gets posted with titles or tags saying in extent "made without AI". Yet when I listen to it, at least half the time I suspect AI was used, and they are just lying to get increased reach from the AI-hater crowd...

Yeah this is why I'm sceptical of just about any video game covers or remixes posted in the last year or two. There's just a flood of blatantly AI generated content in this niche, with many of the channels involved pumping out dozens of videos a day.

They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.

I mean the whole point of music like that is you're not really listening to it and it's kind of on/blocking out noise, right? It's hard to think of a situation where completely AI-generated music would be more competitive or less objectionable.

You can tell when a song is not AI generated these days because people put "no AI" in the title.

> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).

I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).

Easy to solve: just label ALL music uploads after 2024 as AI.

"B-b-b-but what if I create genuine wo—“

You won’t.

NEXT

Note that the uploader apparently still retains control over labeling in most cases; uploaders that intentionally misrepresent AI-generated content might not be discouraged by this. Whether youtube will (and can) ban accounts that do that might determine in practice if this matters or not.

Oh so that explains the recent explosion of "old man gives life advice" videos!

> in fact it was 100% AI

And you know that how?

And, how do you know news itself is not 100% ai? News corps may simply fail to disclose that it was ai, be taken in, remove watermarks, etc.

The fact is no one can say what one sees on a screen is a true representation of reality. People are acting on a consensus feeling.

This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.

What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.

When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.

If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.

I suggest stopping any and all interaction w/ the algorithm. Get a library card and be intentional about your media consumption choices.

Or just use Channel Surfer.

https://channelsurfer.tv

This is exactly how I consume YouTube as well. I do keep the side recommendations on since they mostly contain music or videos I've already watched, which I don't mind.

I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.

I use Unhooked on desktop and UnTrap on iOS for this. Both work flawlessly, and reduced my YouTube usage to almost zero.

Their recommendation engine has surfaced awesome obscure content I would have never found otherwise so I value it.

Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.

It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.

I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"

Same for me. Godsend. It also switches off showing me a follow up "short" after I watch the one I want to watch.

Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)

This ^

This reminds me of this recent video by JHS pedals about a dire AI video. https://www.youtube.com/live/aQSOWFS6lzE

plot twist, your friend actually created the video and was testing it out on you.

some people seem to be completely unable to detect AI slop

At least for now, YouTube honors the uploader’s label of whether or not the content was AI generated. Only when it’s left unset do they do any automatic labeling. And those labels can be overridden manually by the uploader if they get it wrong.

I'd say that if anything AI generated ends up in the final product then it should be labeled as AI made. So using AI as a prototyping tool would be fine but using it either to generate the end product itself or using it to generate a script would require tagging.

I watched a documentary recently that had an indicator in the top right corner when the content was AI generated. I found it incredibly helpful.

Every online video platform should let you label specific segments as AI generated, even better if it is a requirement with validation checks for certain kinds of content.

It's about information, not one all encompassing yes or no. All of those are good pieces of information to include in a disclosure.

Plenty of big artists like Kanye use AI to experiment with ideas before releasing the full studio recordings. That’s going to become more common. Just like how developers use LLMs to make a POC to test new ideas before putting the hard work into making it real.

More scenarios:

- AI generated VFX on top of non-AI video

- AI upscaling of low res footage

- AI frame interpolation for synthetic slow-mo

- Modified / composited AI video

- Footage created by "Extend Scene" features in Premiere Pro and others

- Word correction from tools like Descript

- AI relighting or colorization

- Reaction video to a video containing AI-generated content

And in general, what amount of combination of any of these applications constitutes as "AI generated"? If I have a 30 minute video with a 3 second AI generated clip, do I get the same label as full-blown AI slop video?

Other than your last bullet point I don't see anything ambiguous. It's a very clear line. I do not want to see an explainer video with AI generated content, end of story.

Deepfakes in VFX is another borderline one.

There's a reason why they led with simply labeling author self-reported AI videos as AI, and then casually mentioned they'll also try to detect AI videos automatically. They're not confident in it working reliably and want people to have low expectations. This is probably realistic. Using AI to detect AI is not reliable. Detecting AI videos is likely to become an arms race and will require an ongoing commitment of resources.

This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.

Considering YouTube's current level of detection of absolutely anything, this will likely be an absolute disaster with no way of appealing to a real human.

In theory you're right, in practice you're not.

We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.

I don't know how YouTube's detection will work, but if it were based solely on watermarks, there would be many false negatives, but there shouldn't be false positives.

If it simply costs more time and money to generate videos that pass the filter I'm all for it. The time and money cost of creating videos has tended to zero so there is a lot of low quality stuff now.

It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.

I mean, between SynthID and C2PA don't you already have labels and watermarks that covering a lot of major players like Google, Adobe, ElevenLabs, NIVIDEA? No real concern about false negatives there.

As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.

It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.

This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.

videos and images have non-ai methods for detecting if its ai, its easier than text. There are some image artifacts in AI that can be found statistically.

All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.

Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.

> I feel cheated and deceived

Why? Not trying to argue against AI labeling, but if you are enjoying the music, why does it matter?

I hope same happens with software. Big unremovable warning if AI was used in generating. Allows us to avoid software with very real risks...

Spotify has every incentive to cut out the middleman (the musician). This will never happen.

I heard rumours they're the ones quietly funding some of the AI music. Spotify probably see the most popular musicians flying around in jets and want to redirect all that listening to their own slop.

No appeals combines very poorly with any detector that sometimes has false positives.

As nice as this would be, one classic problem with the internet is that enforcing a lifetime ban is basically impossible.

Maybe they're just going for "disclosure" as in people understanding it's AI, and hopefully mitigating fake news. Don't know if it impacts monetization?

If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.

Is it really any different than Google wants advertisers on YT, but still labels ads as ads?

Google is not a monolith. For all intents and purposes YouTube might as well be a totally different company than Deepmind. Everyone in there own respective google fiefdom is trying to maximize their own metrics.

Why are they saying to not distribute on YouTube they just want to give an indicator. Same with labeling if a video is an AD. I find some of the obvious AI content to be funny or informative .

I mean, here's what I don't get: why does YouTube care? We're already uploading an entire human lifespan worth of videos to YouTube every day, do they really benefit from more content? Or is this content somehow inherently more monetizable than what people are already uploading?

And, as always, flagging will be abused to downrank content that people/bots/spammers/scummy-businesses/etc. would prefer you not to see.

I suppose it all depends on the false positive and false negative rates. But better to start now, before AI ruins the platform.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...

I know they can identify them because if I click on one by mistake that's all I get until I go to about:blank, close YT tab, clear cache, close browser, run bleachbit and start browser. I never log into their site.

So far all it does to the video is add a small tag in the corner. It doesn't affect rankings or monetization. A false positive might annoy some subscribers at worst.

I think that is significantly harder to solve for without false positives ruining UX.

I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.

Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.

Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.

Twitter has community notes which fills the role pretty well. If an AI gen tweet goes viral it will get noted pretty fast

The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.

You have a point, but as a musician and programmer, I'm far more fond of AI generating things of a "no wrong answers" nature than things that are ostensibly correct.

Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).

The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint#Species_counterpo...

Only if you view the label as accurate, which you really, really should not.

I wish HN would do the same for submissions.

I find that most "AI" content I see is an obviously genai script, obviously genai narration, and genai "b-roll", all of which are mostly trash.

I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.

The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.

That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.

It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.

What bothers me even more than AI narration is human narration of AI content. I come across so many videos now, especially in the genre of video essays about TV shows, that seems promising at first glance and then after listening for a couple minutes the AI patterns become obvious (it unfortunately takes longer to notice when spoken vs written). It is getting trickier to intentionally find good new channels; the algorithm does a surprisingly decent job as long as you’re consistent about what you’ll tolerate.

> I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.

As someone who doesn't use youtube, this seems conceptually wacky.

i.e. Why aren't those video simply RSS podcasts? Yeah, incentives, but if the video doesn't matter, they'd be a better product as a podcast.

Even if you're acquiring b-roll, a cheap subscription or even free content is a lot better in my view. Throwing in AI content is false precision.

I've thought about making explainer videos for math and CS concepts (with animated diagrams etc., you know). But I really don't want my voice and image out there any more than necessary / they already are. Now I'm wondering if this kind of work would be better off silent than with TTS…

I've resorted to lowering the quality of my recordings because of this. People are fantastically bad at discerning AI from properly produced audio. So now I leave in a couple of breaths and a little environmental noise to tap the brakes on the "AI slop" comments. Thing is, it would be trivial to add those to an AI narration.

I really doubt that google will implement that filter. But I guarantee it'll be added soon to revanced and other patched youtube apps.

They could use the same data to pay AI posters less and push their content more. Which will get you a promotion at Google.

Sounds like a premium feature!

Where exactly do you want to draw the line?

If they don't it would be a relatively easy browser plugin to make.

Can't await this checkbox

Create your own browser extension to block them!

I wish the same thing for the "AI dubbed" videos.

I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.

No joke, I would pay for this more than i do for premium.

Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.

Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.

And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.

The filter is what is key. If they label all AI videos but still serve me AI slop as the first response, then it doesn't matter if it's labeled at all.

I don't know about SOTA, but Sight Engine (sightengine.com) has AI image detection which seems pretty solid. It can even identify specific image generators.

what makes you think that isnt just synthid? didnt anthropic and openai adopt it?

I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.

I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.

Isn't this literally how GANNs are trained?

"AI generated video that's impossible to detect" is already something many companies are working on; it's hardly Google-specific.

> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."

what gives you that impression?

Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.

I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.

unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.

Why is that tinfoil? That's just good business?

The ads are labeled, much more so than the AI generated content.

What google web search? It's gonna be all slop from here on out, according to Google.

That's not that helpful. For example there's thousands of 'psychology' videos with descriptive bait titles like 'the psychology of people who don't click on video recommendations' which are AI-screipted, narrated, and animated. If you look at the channels the same creator will have hundreds of videos that are micro-targeted to absurdity, like 'the psychology of women who spend too much time on youtube' or 'the psychology of people who don't watch big sports games'. Most of these seem to have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. Maybe the views are botted as well, but clop producers have every incentive to spend a few hundred $ in tokens and generate 50 or 100 new videos to just blanket the recommender engine and shut out regular content that takes time and effort to produce.

I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.

AI-generated music should be hard to detect

I think most people wouldn't care either way. On HN, maybe 95% ppl care; outside, not so much.

So the PR risk here is I think reasonably low.

> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI

Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.

It's likely still a lot better than the current situation of not having any detection.

Good movies still pack theaters.

Whoever wins, we lose.

It could be. They seem to be getting enormous amount of politics or crypto related AI fake reels that real people fall for. They probably do need means to control spams.

5 and 6 are enough of a pain point that I habitually open ALL videos in a new tab now, just so that I have the original feed view to nuke the channel from if it's shit.

That's basically C2PA: https://c2pa.org.

I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.

> There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.

I find this awful, but it's not a remotely new thing.

Watermarking and machine learning.

Your wish has been granted - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491

There's no way to switch back to the original audio track? I agree you shouldn't have to but I'm wondering if it's possible.

There are several Chrome extensions for turning that off automatically, but I agree: you should not have to need extensions to use YouTube.

You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there

try this. https://gist.github.com/Buildstarted/c6b156ec95dc012c5f3dc5e...

Even worse, sometimes it dubs ads, where there's no way to switch the audio track and no way to see if it's being dubbed. This also makes it look like the dubbed audio is the original audio from the ad, which makes the advertiser look terrible.

It's an option that individual channels can disable. Granted, it's opt-out, but YouTube emailed creators several times about it well before:

> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.

> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.

So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.

Settings -> languages and then add German as one of the languages you know and it’ll never do this again

with views

Unfortunately I'm not sure this will affect those at all...it's specifically for "realistic" AI use according to all the quotes. I'm not sure narration or illustration/slides generated by AI would be covered at all in that case.

Seems better than the alternative: "This content was created by a machine, but being pushed/promoted by a flawed money-grubbing biological organism".

This should be the original link since its the official announcement and has more concrete info, hope mod(s) can update.

I think the "weird AI processing" might have been someone misunderstanding a compression codec. When laypeople see anything advanced, it's always called AI no matter what it actually is, and that's the word that spreads around.