4 ms·

YouTube cracks down on synthetic media with AI disclosure requirement

53 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

corobo 3y ago
Hopefully there's a search filter that comes with this disclosure requirement. I'm all for people expressing creativity however they go about it, but I still have a preference for actual human content.
- ingen0s 3y ago
  With you on this one!
ape4 3y ago
I've noticed a lot of AI narrated videos lately
- 542458 3y ago
  Honestly that doesn’t bother me very much, so long as the script is human-written. YouTube has always had videos with TTS narration, and I’d rather be listening to that than an incomprehensible accent or $0.50 microphone. There’s one clever channel that makes content about the Deus Ex games that uses voice synths trained on the games’s characters - which, in addition to making the narration a bit more interesting is very on-brand for a cyberpunk game. Here’s a video. You can see that the translation from “real” JC Denton dialogue in the first few seconds to fake AI voice is surprisingly smooth (helped by the admittedly weird voice acting in the game), although there are always a few spots in the video where it breaks down (which the author usually leaves in for laughs): https://youtu.be/jDYVx3nqgxw https://youtu.be/jDYVx3nqgxw
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    I was prepared to criticise this video - but upon inspection, it really captures the low quality[0] of the voice acting in an authentic manner! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGE2ZB_3ZO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGE2ZB_3ZO0
  - taneq 3y ago
    Do you actually want a human-written script, or do you just want a good script, and use 'human-written' as a proxy for 'good'? In a hypothetical future where most AI generated content was qualitatively better than most human content, would you feel the same?
    - 542458 3y ago
      Oh for sure, my problem is primarily one of misinformation. If we managed to solve the hallucination problem such that AI content was more reliable than a reasonably smart human I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But for now AI has a bad habit of telling me that “mayonnaise” has four letter Ns or that you can melt eggs.
- wincy 3y ago
  I really hate when the top result for something on YouTube is an obviously AI narrated video. Even weirder when I realize it halfway through because it makes a mistake no human narrator would. I feel like someone cheated me out of my time. If you can’t spare the time to actually narrate something, why should I listen to it?
  - cthor 3y ago
    Maybe the author is a good writer with interesting things to say, but has a bad speaking voice?
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      Write a book then? Blog? If I can't throw a baseball, then a career in baseball isn't for me. Trying to be a baseball player with a pitching machine to do the work for me isn't the way.
    - gs17 3y ago
      Or someone like Stephen Hawking who has great ideas but no other option for speaking.
    - tivert 3y ago
      > Maybe the author is a good writer with interesting things to say, but has a bad speaking voice? Possibly, but it's more likely the author was trying to make a quick buck by spamming low-quality content. Especially since the GP left the experience feeling cheated. AI narration also could probably be used to launder stolen content to make a buck off it. Did you find a good writer with interesting things to say? Steal his work and run it through AI narration and collect the clicks.
- techterrier 3y ago
  The David Attenboro 40k lore channels were hillarious
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  A bunch of "review" videos are just a referral link to aliexpress, a slideshow of aliexpress photos, some AI thing that takes the item description and condenses the data to a few sentences and text to speech that reads the text... Although, even with actual humans reviewing stuff, there is a very very high chance that the review is "influenced" (=paid by) the seller/manufacturer of the item.... there are only a few youtubers left, whose reviws I'd actually trust...
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
this is the kind of thing that algorithms are really good at (determining provenance/AI traces, at scale). search has been trying to fingerprint users forever, its time to point their agorithmic guns at something far more useful for the actual end user. it makes sense for search algorithms to spot these and then flag them accordingly if they have not been disclosed.
- criley2 3y ago
  Algorithms are NOT good at detecting AI, and every attempt so far has been laughably terrible. For example the internet is already filling up with students complaining about teachers failing their school work for false positives on AI text generation. And there's the reality of the Survivorship Bias when it comes to examples: the only times you see AI art are the times it didn't fool you, not the full set of all AI images you saw. Similarly, if the algorithm can find the easy ones but miss the same better ones, is it really that useful? Or is it just training more realistic AI to evade both you and the algorithms detection? The idea that people will fundamentally be able to differentiate AI and human works is nonsensical from a future perspective and is an aberration of AI quality for the next few years at most. If you're not preparing for fully indistinguishable AI text/image/video/audio, then you're not preparing for the future.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    Realistically I think the only way to create verifiably-human-made digital content is basically a end to end chain of trusted computing DRM from keyboard or camera lens to final product, which seems dystopian in its own way, impractical, and a high value target for people to try to bypass.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Authoritarians: "Go on, I would like to know more"
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  With an automatic system, what will actually happen is even more algorithmic bureaucracy, and real people being banned for false positives or for using any ML-assisted techniques at all. These algorithms are snake oil, there's simply no real way to detect it reliably. Youtube is enough of a dumpster fire already and its automated systems are being exploited left and right. Don't make any mistakes, this requirement is meant to cover Youtube's ass, not to do anything useful to you. How it will be enforced is entirely up to them. I suspect it will be much closer to "occasionally banning someone to appease the outraged crowd" rather than to "algorithmic banhammer".
seydor 3y ago
They should label misleading or fake content, not all "Synthetic content", or else that's discriminatory. There are lots of videos narrated by synthetic AI voices. Lots of users don't speak english well or don't have a good accent, nothing wrong with that.
- taneq 3y ago
  Some people just want their Warhammer 40k lore deep-dives narrated by David Attenborough, and I don't see why that's bad.
- ajross 3y ago
  Why would it be bad to have videos narrated by synthetic AI voices carry a label declaring that the voice is synthetic? This isn't a censorship proposal.
  - chankstein38 3y ago
    I'm wondering if it'd be specific like that or if it'd just say "This video has been labeled to contain synthetically generated content" and not specify. Meaning the spectrum from "Tr|_|mp sticks a turkey where the sun don't shine" and "Non-english speaker uses AI voice to narrate" would be labeled the same. I hope it's what you're talking about but I've seen enough actions by YouTube to feel like it's probably the latter.
    - ajross 3y ago
      FWIW, both of those examples are the kind of thing I think we'd all agree don't need to be labeled. No one is going to be fooled by those two videos. The worry is about misleading videos, and having a mechanism to tag them as such that doesn't require content providers to get into the business of deciding on what is true. Basically: "This video is synthetic and does not depict real babies being tortured in Gaza" is the use case in question.
      - chankstein38 3y ago
cabirum 3y ago
Why would "AI" be treated in a special way among other tools in a CG artists toolbox? Should I label a video where "AI" applied denoising or color grading? I could hire an actor to professionally fake a voice of a celebrity vs I could generate a voice with "AI". What even is a definition of "AI" vs a "simple" ML or genetic model or sufficiently advanced algorithm? Seems like another reason for arbitrary content removal because video is suspected/highly likely to be made with "AI".
- wepple 3y ago
  All of the examples you’ve given prevent you from trivially scaling content creation to flood the world with nonsense I have no idea what the intention behind this is, but I suspect it might be more to do with preventing extremely low quality content that doesn’t have a human in the loop?
  - pawelmurias 3y ago
    Meat puppets have been flooding the internet for a long time. The intent is to distinguish fake AI generated videos of things.
  - cabirum 3y ago
    Youtube is already full of low quality nonsense made en masse without whatever they call AI. Another point, AI-made content is (or soon will be) indistinguishable from authentic footage, so any effort to label it is quite quixotic and will likely result in many false positives.
    - chankstein38 3y ago
      Not to mention a whole bunch of stuff labeled as AI and then the really bad stuff non-labeled because they've worked hard enough to make it indistinguishable from authentic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
everdrive 3y ago
I think some people on HN are worried about stifling creativity. The vast, VAST majority of the AI-driven content is going to be gamed product reviews / advertisements, as well as some political propaganda. It’s going to be a hellhole for usefulness.
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  I think there are more categories than just that--e.g., kids videos.
- andybak 3y ago
  Yeah but that stuff was mostly pointless garbage before the advent of AI. Content farms, apps for endlessly generating variations of the same content, low wage and Mechanical Turk jobs etc etc. Maybe AI will speed up the process of making this stuff either ignored or unacceptable. Things gotta get worse before they get better...
  - constantly 3y ago
    “The Top 10 X You NEED in CURRENT_YEAR” has been a ubiquitous article title when searching for reviews on literally anything for years. It will only get worse for sure.
    - mtmail 3y ago
      I've seen an AI generated "top 10 list Chrome extensions for $X" submitted to HN. Those didn't exist, I searched, those extensions were all made up. (The user is now blocked.)
  - everdrive 3y ago
    That’s true, but I think there are few points of concern here. Currently, I can detect content farm garbage. Will I be able to when AI starts churning out videos? Volume is also a concern. If 10x more videos are AI trash, it functionally just becomes harder to find what you want. WRT propaganda, I think the past few years have proven that people are just absolutely terrible at resisting political manipulation. I don’t support censorship as a solution to this issue, but at the same time it seems impossible to imagine AI doing anything other than making this problem significantly worse. I also wonder how much worse AI will make the filter bubble phenomenon. I don’t just mean with regard to political extremism, but also when it comes to basic alienation from your peers. Too much homogenous culture wasn’t a good thing, but infinitely personalized culture is pretty alienating as well.
andy_ppp 3y ago
I predict a return to private communities on the Internet and bulletin boards where verified humans hang out, away from the rest of the garbage the Internet will become filled with.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  Unlikely. Most people care about network effect more than they care about authenticity. Small enclaves of hobbyists like HN will always exist but they aren't and won't be the mainstream.
  - toldyouso2022 3y ago
    The small enclaves are gonna become a little less small, the plebs are gonna keep plebbing (now with AI) I am an optimist
    - andybak 3y ago
      How about small select enclaves of people using generative AI? Or are they plebs by your definition?
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    I expect the large social media platforms to emphasize verification that accounts are controlled by real humans even if they are pseudonymous. X (formerly Twitter) is already heading in this direction. AI social media accounts and even accounts where they're unsure if the account is a genuine human or AI are likely to end up shadowbanned. I suspect newer platforms and small enclaves that want to be larger will be tempted to use AI. Reddit's founders infamously created fake accounts and put fake posts on their platform when it started to make it look active.[0] That was actually a pretty common technique to address the "chicken and egg" dilemma that every new forum has: Nobody wants to join a forum that has no posts and no active users but the forum won't get posts or active users unless somebody joins. AI can solve this problem much more efficiently than if the founders are writing the fake posts. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
gumballindie 3y ago
A sensitive choice - procedurally generated content should be disclosed, not only by youtube but also twitter, reddit, and most important news websites.
chartpath 3y ago
There is a lot of synthetic content about academic subjects on YT now, and it's very low quality. I used to search for lectures to listen to while walking or driving but now need to wade through tons of enshittified spam. Even if it's reading wikipedia or other long form articles, the voices and graphics are bad. Actually I paid for Blinkist recently and really enjoyed it at first. They have a lot of "blinks" that state at the end that the voice was synthetic and I was legitimately surprised at the quality, having not even noticed until they told me. This seems like a good move for YT to maintain a basic level of quality (which I'm amazed can actually get worse), but I suspect it's a pretext to avoid paying out to "illegitimate creators" for commercial reasons in a way that makes them look like they care about people.
beej71 3y ago
Are we going to see this on every Hollywood blockbuster trailer?
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Lots of discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269656
michaelcampbell 3y ago
Well, that will sure work. About as well as the Craiglist ad poster who says, "No scammers."
JudithDeren 3y ago
[dead]

53 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

Hopefully there's a search filter that comes with this disclosure requirement. I'm all for people expressing creativity however they go about it, but I still have a preference for actual human content.

ingen0s 3y ago
With you on this one!

ape4 3y ago

I've noticed a lot of AI narrated videos lately

542458 3y ago
Honestly that doesn’t bother me very much, so long as the script is human-written. YouTube has always had videos with TTS narration, and I’d rather be listening to that than an incomprehensible accent or $0.50 microphone. There’s one clever channel that makes content about the Deus Ex games that uses voice synths trained on the games’s characters - which, in addition to making the narration a bit more interesting is very on-brand for a cyberpunk game. Here’s a video. You can see that the translation from “real” JC Denton dialogue in the first few seconds to fake AI voice is surprisingly smooth (helped by the admittedly weird voice acting in the game), although there are always a few spots in the video where it breaks down (which the author usually leaves in for laughs): https://youtu.be/jDYVx3nqgxw https://youtu.be/jDYVx3nqgxw
- jwestbury 3y ago
  I was prepared to criticise this video - but upon inspection, it really captures the low quality[0] of the voice acting in an authentic manner! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGE2ZB_3ZO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGE2ZB_3ZO0
- taneq 3y ago
  Do you actually want a human-written script, or do you just want a good script, and use 'human-written' as a proxy for 'good'? In a hypothetical future where most AI generated content was qualitatively better than most human content, would you feel the same?
  - 542458 3y ago
    Oh for sure, my problem is primarily one of misinformation. If we managed to solve the hallucination problem such that AI content was more reliable than a reasonably smart human I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But for now AI has a bad habit of telling me that “mayonnaise” has four letter Ns or that you can melt eggs.
wincy 3y ago
I really hate when the top result for something on YouTube is an obviously AI narrated video. Even weirder when I realize it halfway through because it makes a mistake no human narrator would. I feel like someone cheated me out of my time. If you can’t spare the time to actually narrate something, why should I listen to it?
- cthor 3y ago
  Maybe the author is a good writer with interesting things to say, but has a bad speaking voice?
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    Write a book then? Blog? If I can't throw a baseball, then a career in baseball isn't for me. Trying to be a baseball player with a pitching machine to do the work for me isn't the way.
  - gs17 3y ago
    Or someone like Stephen Hawking who has great ideas but no other option for speaking.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Maybe the author is a good writer with interesting things to say, but has a bad speaking voice? Possibly, but it's more likely the author was trying to make a quick buck by spamming low-quality content. Especially since the GP left the experience feeling cheated. AI narration also could probably be used to launder stolen content to make a buck off it. Did you find a good writer with interesting things to say? Steal his work and run it through AI narration and collect the clicks.
techterrier 3y ago
The David Attenboro 40k lore channels were hillarious
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
A bunch of "review" videos are just a referral link to aliexpress, a slideshow of aliexpress photos, some AI thing that takes the item description and condenses the data to a few sentences and text to speech that reads the text... Although, even with actual humans reviewing stuff, there is a very very high chance that the review is "influenced" (=paid by) the seller/manufacturer of the item.... there are only a few youtubers left, whose reviws I'd actually trust...

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

this is the kind of thing that algorithms are really good at (determining provenance/AI traces, at scale). search has been trying to fingerprint users forever, its time to point their agorithmic guns at something far more useful for the actual end user. it makes sense for search algorithms to spot these and then flag them accordingly if they have not been disclosed.

criley2 3y ago
Algorithms are NOT good at detecting AI, and every attempt so far has been laughably terrible. For example the internet is already filling up with students complaining about teachers failing their school work for false positives on AI text generation. And there's the reality of the Survivorship Bias when it comes to examples: the only times you see AI art are the times it didn't fool you, not the full set of all AI images you saw. Similarly, if the algorithm can find the easy ones but miss the same better ones, is it really that useful? Or is it just training more realistic AI to evade both you and the algorithms detection? The idea that people will fundamentally be able to differentiate AI and human works is nonsensical from a future perspective and is an aberration of AI quality for the next few years at most. If you're not preparing for fully indistinguishable AI text/image/video/audio, then you're not preparing for the future.
- macNchz 3y ago
  Realistically I think the only way to create verifiably-human-made digital content is basically a end to end chain of trusted computing DRM from keyboard or camera lens to final product, which seems dystopian in its own way, impractical, and a high value target for people to try to bypass.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Authoritarians: "Go on, I would like to know more"
orbital-decay 3y ago
With an automatic system, what will actually happen is even more algorithmic bureaucracy, and real people being banned for false positives or for using any ML-assisted techniques at all. These algorithms are snake oil, there's simply no real way to detect it reliably. Youtube is enough of a dumpster fire already and its automated systems are being exploited left and right. Don't make any mistakes, this requirement is meant to cover Youtube's ass, not to do anything useful to you. How it will be enforced is entirely up to them. I suspect it will be much closer to "occasionally banning someone to appease the outraged crowd" rather than to "algorithmic banhammer".

seydor 3y ago

They should label misleading or fake content, not all "Synthetic content", or else that's discriminatory. There are lots of videos narrated by synthetic AI voices. Lots of users don't speak english well or don't have a good accent, nothing wrong with that.

taneq 3y ago
Some people just want their Warhammer 40k lore deep-dives narrated by David Attenborough, and I don't see why that's bad.
ajross 3y ago
Why would it be bad to have videos narrated by synthetic AI voices carry a label declaring that the voice is synthetic? This isn't a censorship proposal.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  I'm wondering if it'd be specific like that or if it'd just say "This video has been labeled to contain synthetically generated content" and not specify. Meaning the spectrum from "Tr|_|mp sticks a turkey where the sun don't shine" and "Non-english speaker uses AI voice to narrate" would be labeled the same. I hope it's what you're talking about but I've seen enough actions by YouTube to feel like it's probably the latter.
  - ajross 3y ago
    FWIW, both of those examples are the kind of thing I think we'd all agree don't need to be labeled. No one is going to be fooled by those two videos. The worry is about misleading videos, and having a mechanism to tag them as such that doesn't require content providers to get into the business of deciding on what is true. Basically: "This video is synthetic and does not depict real babies being tortured in Gaza" is the use case in question.
    - chankstein38 3y ago

cabirum 3y ago

Why would "AI" be treated in a special way among other tools in a CG artists toolbox? Should I label a video where "AI" applied denoising or color grading? I could hire an actor to professionally fake a voice of a celebrity vs I could generate a voice with "AI". What even is a definition of "AI" vs a "simple" ML or genetic model or sufficiently advanced algorithm? Seems like another reason for arbitrary content removal because video is suspected/highly likely to be made with "AI".

wepple 3y ago
All of the examples you’ve given prevent you from trivially scaling content creation to flood the world with nonsense I have no idea what the intention behind this is, but I suspect it might be more to do with preventing extremely low quality content that doesn’t have a human in the loop?
- pawelmurias 3y ago
  Meat puppets have been flooding the internet for a long time. The intent is to distinguish fake AI generated videos of things.
- cabirum 3y ago
  Youtube is already full of low quality nonsense made en masse without whatever they call AI. Another point, AI-made content is (or soon will be) indistinguishable from authentic footage, so any effort to label it is quite quixotic and will likely result in many false positives.
  - chankstein38 3y ago
    Not to mention a whole bunch of stuff labeled as AI and then the really bad stuff non-labeled because they've worked hard enough to make it indistinguishable from authentic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

everdrive 3y ago

I think some people on HN are worried about stifling creativity. The vast, VAST majority of the AI-driven content is going to be gamed product reviews / advertisements, as well as some political propaganda. It’s going to be a hellhole for usefulness.

nathanaldensr 3y ago
I think there are more categories than just that--e.g., kids videos.
andybak 3y ago
Yeah but that stuff was mostly pointless garbage before the advent of AI. Content farms, apps for endlessly generating variations of the same content, low wage and Mechanical Turk jobs etc etc. Maybe AI will speed up the process of making this stuff either ignored or unacceptable. Things gotta get worse before they get better...
- constantly 3y ago
  “The Top 10 X You NEED in CURRENT_YEAR” has been a ubiquitous article title when searching for reviews on literally anything for years. It will only get worse for sure.
  - mtmail 3y ago
    I've seen an AI generated "top 10 list Chrome extensions for $X" submitted to HN. Those didn't exist, I searched, those extensions were all made up. (The user is now blocked.)
- everdrive 3y ago
  That’s true, but I think there are few points of concern here. Currently, I can detect content farm garbage. Will I be able to when AI starts churning out videos? Volume is also a concern. If 10x more videos are AI trash, it functionally just becomes harder to find what you want. WRT propaganda, I think the past few years have proven that people are just absolutely terrible at resisting political manipulation. I don’t support censorship as a solution to this issue, but at the same time it seems impossible to imagine AI doing anything other than making this problem significantly worse. I also wonder how much worse AI will make the filter bubble phenomenon. I don’t just mean with regard to political extremism, but also when it comes to basic alienation from your peers. Too much homogenous culture wasn’t a good thing, but infinitely personalized culture is pretty alienating as well.

andy_ppp 3y ago

I predict a return to private communities on the Internet and bulletin boards where verified humans hang out, away from the rest of the garbage the Internet will become filled with.

idiotsecant 3y ago
Unlikely. Most people care about network effect more than they care about authenticity. Small enclaves of hobbyists like HN will always exist but they aren't and won't be the mainstream.
- toldyouso2022 3y ago
  The small enclaves are gonna become a little less small, the plebs are gonna keep plebbing (now with AI) I am an optimist
  - andybak 3y ago
    How about small select enclaves of people using generative AI? Or are they plebs by your definition?
- bdw5204 3y ago
  I expect the large social media platforms to emphasize verification that accounts are controlled by real humans even if they are pseudonymous. X (formerly Twitter) is already heading in this direction. AI social media accounts and even accounts where they're unsure if the account is a genuine human or AI are likely to end up shadowbanned. I suspect newer platforms and small enclaves that want to be larger will be tempted to use AI. Reddit's founders infamously created fake accounts and put fake posts on their platform when it started to make it look active.[0] That was actually a pretty common technique to address the "chicken and egg" dilemma that every new forum has: Nobody wants to join a forum that has no posts and no active users but the forum won't get posts or active users unless somebody joins. AI can solve this problem much more efficiently than if the founders are writing the fake posts. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

gumballindie 3y ago

A sensitive choice - procedurally generated content should be disclosed, not only by youtube but also twitter, reddit, and most important news websites.

chartpath 3y ago

There is a lot of synthetic content about academic subjects on YT now, and it's very low quality. I used to search for lectures to listen to while walking or driving but now need to wade through tons of enshittified spam. Even if it's reading wikipedia or other long form articles, the voices and graphics are bad. Actually I paid for Blinkist recently and really enjoyed it at first. They have a lot of "blinks" that state at the end that the voice was synthetic and I was legitimately surprised at the quality, having not even noticed until they told me. This seems like a good move for YT to maintain a basic level of quality (which I'm amazed can actually get worse), but I suspect it's a pretext to avoid paying out to "illegitimate creators" for commercial reasons in a way that makes them look like they care about people.

beej71 3y ago

Are we going to see this on every Hollywood blockbuster trailer?

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Lots of discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269656

michaelcampbell 3y ago

Well, that will sure work. About as well as the Craiglist ad poster who says, "No scammers."

JudithDeren 3y ago

[dead]