5 ms·

Automate the creation of YouTube Shorts by providing a topic

117 points by rcarmo 3y ago

drekipus 3y ago
The issue with moviepy is that it's looking for maintainers, the original author doesn't have the time to reason about some PRs, and they're undergoing a "v2" rewrite in the process. https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/issues/1874 https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/issues/1874
kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
It's telling the name of this repository is "MoneyPrinter"—says a lot about the monetization of videos today. I wonder if the creator has made money on YouTube from this repository. I didn't see any stats in the README.
- plasticbugs 3y ago
  In the video, they show that some videos got more than 1k views, but most around a couple hundred. YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. So definitely no money earned yet on the channel they created. Unless they have some secret other channel with a bunch of manufactured videos. ;)
  - jprete 3y ago
    I sincerely hope they never earn a dime.
    - devmor 3y ago
      There are already thousands and thousands of channels doing something similar to this, it's very profitable en mass. It wont stop until it's made expensive to do.
      - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
        And then you can double dip with a little drop shipping on the side.
    - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
      Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        The players enable the game
      - thrance 3y ago
        I can hate both.
    - buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
      I doubt the creator intends to make a dime. They seem to hate the current state of things as well, and made this to prove how useless channels like this are.
  - atrus 3y ago
    For shorts you need 10 million views in a 90 day period to be eligible for monetization.
    - RulerOf 3y ago
      With a minimum length of 15 seconds, you'd have to algorithmically waste close to 5 years[1] of cumulative watch time to earn anything from this. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years
      - kevingadd 3y ago
        Yeah, I'm not aware of anyone offhand who's making big money off shorts. A couple creators I follow have discussed attempting to use them to bring new viewers into their channels, but apparently the conversion rate from shorts viewers to subscribers-who-watch-full-length-videos is bad. It's still better than $0, but then it costs money/time to make and upload good quality shorts that you could spend on full length videos instead. Because shorts are well, short, they can't run ads on them the same way they do for full length videos, which apparently hurts the revenue potential.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      That's kind of insane. The top few hundred most viral shorts get something, everyone else gets nothing. I heard a Hololive creator the other day talking about how pleased they were to get 1M views on something - but that was also in the context of hoping to drive traffic to their main channel, subscriptions etc. On the other hand, what's the revenue of a short? They've got to be pretty worthless views. And of course AI just makes them more worthless.
nosmokewhereiam 3y ago
Money printers are forever remembered in Garrys Mod: You hide them from other players.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bottom999mottob 3y ago
  Dear lord I haven't seen a DarkRP reference for 12-15 years. You just triggered a wave of memories evading the police, blowing up people's bases, and raiding the Mayor's office to jailbreak people.
sn41 3y ago
Nice... All it needs now is automated talking heads. I guess the AI for that will be available in the not-too-distant future. (/s)
- liotier 3y ago
  We are there already - we have synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable and that go perfectly with a smiling animated cartoon talking head to present a self-study webinar. We advise our readers to eschew violence against their corporate laptop monitor.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable Yeah, AI got better than humans at this too. You need to inject randomness, force the tool to "make mistakes", so it feels more authentic.
    - liotier 3y ago
      Or goofy jokes, which I haven't seen LLM do well yet.
- Nursie 3y ago
  You can already get things like newsreader video footage where an actor has had their voice sampled and their likeness animated, such that they appear to read out whatever text you feed in. For a small fee. I attended a talk a while back by a guy who had automated summarising some daily stock news, feeding it through this service and published to YouTube. He was making a modest amount of money out of it.
megous 3y ago
Why would one want to create more of those abominations? One reason I deleted all my yt videos was because YT converted half of them to "shorts" without asking and with no way back, breaking all navigation and losing the readily available comment section and description. Just not the way I wanted my work presented.
- TheFreim 3y ago
  You used to be able to access shorts as normal videos even after they rolled out normal videos by using the original video link. Did they remove this?
  - ajot 3y ago
    No, in fact I keep a very handy redirect in Redirector for this specific usecase: { "description": "Youtube shorts to something useful", "exampleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iB9KMNzNIZI", "exampleResult": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB9KMNzNIZI", "error": null, "includePattern": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "", "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1", "patternType": "W", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] },
    - TheFreim 3y ago
      Nice! I had not thought of creating a redirect, but I have now added this. I currently filter out all short content but on the rare occasion that I get linked a short this will come in handy. Thanks!
    - RulerOf 3y ago
      Is Redirector an extension?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
petesergeant 3y ago
Can someone explain to the uninitiated what a YouTube short is and why you might want to automate creation of them?
- cthalupa 3y ago
  Somewhat equivalent to TikTok videos. On YT they are frequently clips from longer videos. I assume they offer some form of monetization, so automated low-effort videos could potentially bring in revenue.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    A lot of content creators put a lot of time and effort into making high-quality long-form videos. It's pretty reasonable that they might also want a way to quickly create a YT Short without spending even more time editing their original video down. I'd rather them spend more time doing whatever I subscribed to see them do or talk about. As for why anyone would even watch Shorts, not everyone has time to watch long-form videos. Or not everyone wants to commit that time, even if they have it.
__loam 3y ago
This sucks a lot.
sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
Ruth approves.
hedora 3y ago
Someone needs to turn this into an xscreensaver hack that (optionally?) round-trips the mp4 through YouTube. Does stack overflow support RSS (to feed it requests for youtube videos)?
chinathrow 3y ago
YouTube shorts is such a time sink. I blocked the whole section on desktop with uBlock origin and never looked back.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  The only way I stream videos from YouTube is in mpv on my desktop (usually using pipe-viewer) and in NewPipe on Android, configured to hide all recommendations and comments. The only way I see a video on YouTube is by searching for it.
tomgp 3y ago
Now we just need some software to automate the watching of youtube shorts and we'll be sorted
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Or we'll be shorted.
Mashimo 3y ago
The cropped stock videos where quite bad in his example video. Blurry closeup plants and half a parrot :S Otherwise great execution.
- junon 3y ago
  It doesn't matter. People will eat it up.
- jcpham2 3y ago
  Yeah the only problems I've had so far are the stock videos not having much if anything at all to do with my script. Also had to edit gpt.py to sanitize the ":" if the AI script response contained a colon
tgv 3y ago
TODO * Ask ChatGPT for a random topic [1] * Automate upload [1] And this is what it said: A potential topic for a YouTube short could be "Quick Tips for Productivity." This topic is relevant and valuable to many viewers who are interested in maximizing their efficiency and getting more done in less time. You could share bite-sized productivity hacks, time management techniques, or organization tips that viewers can easily implement in their daily lives. Short, actionable content tends to perform well on YouTube shorts, making this topic a promising choice for engaging your audience in a concise format.
- djmips 3y ago
  Yeah, as you read about this and watch the associated video it slowly dawns on you..
haxiomic 3y ago
Has anyone else noticed the increase of entirely AI generated videos in YouTube suggestions and search results? They tend to be about completely made historical or scientific facts I’m much more interested in projects to detect junk like this than see more of it in the world
- pjc50 3y ago
  It's all just "10 hours of jingling keys": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jingling-keys https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jingling-keys Doesn't need to mean anything or feel anything, it's just a pleasant form of white noise for the eyeballs and brain behind.
- sorenjan 3y ago
  I recently saw an interview with one of the people doing those videos. He makes over $15k per month, so I doubt it will go away without Google interference, but they obviously take a sizable cut of the total earnings from the same videos as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qg36r8KH8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qg36r8KH8U
- rchaud 3y ago
  Of course. Not just in videos, but in pre-roll ads as well. This is why some of us feel enormously pessimistic about generative AI and AI-based automation. The ideal customers for this are marketing companies that need to churn out even more grist for the social media content mill. How much ink has been spilled on HN lamenting the SEO-ification of the web and impossible volumes of blogspam on search results? Yet if you posit that AI will make it worse, the villagers come out with their pitchforks.
  - dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
    Here hear!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
sorenjan 3y ago
This reminds me of one of the examples of what you can do with Huginn: "Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the "HumanTaskAgent"). For example: "Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog." Except it's old enough to use humans instead of AI, and blogs instead of short vertical videos. https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn
RecycledEle 3y ago
We do not need automated content creation. We need AI to detect incoherent garbage without censoring things people disagree with.
jcpham2 3y ago
OP I have this up and running but it seems like most of the video samples it fetches in response to my prompt have nothing to do with the prompt I've typed. Maybe 1 out of 5 videos is actually relative to my prompt. Any Ideas? I've also noticed that any generated Subtitle language will fail if the AI responds with a semi-colon anywhere in it's response. "Sure, here's the thing you asked for: A long text description about <subject>" Actually short subs "Sure, here's the thing you asked for - end video. pretty neat though

117 points by rcarmo 3y ago

The issue with moviepy is that it's looking for maintainers, the original author doesn't have the time to reason about some PRs, and they're undergoing a "v2" rewrite in the process. https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/issues/1874 https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/issues/1874

kaladin-jasnah 3y ago

It's telling the name of this repository is "MoneyPrinter"—says a lot about the monetization of videos today. I wonder if the creator has made money on YouTube from this repository. I didn't see any stats in the README.

plasticbugs 3y ago
In the video, they show that some videos got more than 1k views, but most around a couple hundred. YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. So definitely no money earned yet on the channel they created. Unless they have some secret other channel with a bunch of manufactured videos. ;)
- jprete 3y ago
  I sincerely hope they never earn a dime.
  - devmor 3y ago
    There are already thousands and thousands of channels doing something similar to this, it's very profitable en mass. It wont stop until it's made expensive to do.
    - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
      And then you can double dip with a little drop shipping on the side.
  - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
    Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      The players enable the game
    - thrance 3y ago
      I can hate both.
  - buzzerbetrayed 3y ago
    I doubt the creator intends to make a dime. They seem to hate the current state of things as well, and made this to prove how useless channels like this are.
- atrus 3y ago
  For shorts you need 10 million views in a 90 day period to be eligible for monetization.
  - RulerOf 3y ago
    With a minimum length of 15 seconds, you'd have to algorithmically waste close to 5 years[1] of cumulative watch time to earn anything from this. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm not aware of anyone offhand who's making big money off shorts. A couple creators I follow have discussed attempting to use them to bring new viewers into their channels, but apparently the conversion rate from shorts viewers to subscribers-who-watch-full-length-videos is bad. It's still better than $0, but then it costs money/time to make and upload good quality shorts that you could spend on full length videos instead. Because shorts are well, short, they can't run ads on them the same way they do for full length videos, which apparently hurts the revenue potential.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    That's kind of insane. The top few hundred most viral shorts get something, everyone else gets nothing. I heard a Hololive creator the other day talking about how pleased they were to get 1M views on something - but that was also in the context of hoping to drive traffic to their main channel, subscriptions etc. On the other hand, what's the revenue of a short? They've got to be pretty worthless views. And of course AI just makes them more worthless.

nosmokewhereiam 3y ago

Money printers are forever remembered in Garrys Mod: You hide them from other players.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bottom999mottob 3y ago
Dear lord I haven't seen a DarkRP reference for 12-15 years. You just triggered a wave of memories evading the police, blowing up people's bases, and raiding the Mayor's office to jailbreak people.

sn41 3y ago

Nice... All it needs now is automated talking heads. I guess the AI for that will be available in the not-too-distant future. (/s)

liotier 3y ago
We are there already - we have synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable and that go perfectly with a smiling animated cartoon talking head to present a self-study webinar. We advise our readers to eschew violence against their corporate laptop monitor.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable Yeah, AI got better than humans at this too. You need to inject randomness, force the tool to "make mistakes", so it feels more authentic.
  - liotier 3y ago
    Or goofy jokes, which I haven't seen LLM do well yet.
Nursie 3y ago
You can already get things like newsreader video footage where an actor has had their voice sampled and their likeness animated, such that they appear to read out whatever text you feed in. For a small fee. I attended a talk a while back by a guy who had automated summarising some daily stock news, feeding it through this service and published to YouTube. He was making a modest amount of money out of it.

megous 3y ago

Why would one want to create more of those abominations? One reason I deleted all my yt videos was because YT converted half of them to "shorts" without asking and with no way back, breaking all navigation and losing the readily available comment section and description. Just not the way I wanted my work presented.

TheFreim 3y ago
You used to be able to access shorts as normal videos even after they rolled out normal videos by using the original video link. Did they remove this?
- ajot 3y ago
  No, in fact I keep a very handy redirect in Redirector for this specific usecase: { "description": "Youtube shorts to something useful", "exampleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iB9KMNzNIZI", "exampleResult": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB9KMNzNIZI", "error": null, "includePattern": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "", "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1", "patternType": "W", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] },
  - TheFreim 3y ago
    Nice! I had not thought of creating a redirect, but I have now added this. I currently filter out all short content but on the rare occasion that I get linked a short this will come in handy. Thanks!
  - RulerOf 3y ago
    Is Redirector an extension?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

petesergeant 3y ago

Can someone explain to the uninitiated what a YouTube short is and why you might want to automate creation of them?

cthalupa 3y ago
Somewhat equivalent to TikTok videos. On YT they are frequently clips from longer videos. I assume they offer some form of monetization, so automated low-effort videos could potentially bring in revenue.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  A lot of content creators put a lot of time and effort into making high-quality long-form videos. It's pretty reasonable that they might also want a way to quickly create a YT Short without spending even more time editing their original video down. I'd rather them spend more time doing whatever I subscribed to see them do or talk about. As for why anyone would even watch Shorts, not everyone has time to watch long-form videos. Or not everyone wants to commit that time, even if they have it.

__loam 3y ago

This sucks a lot.

sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago

Ruth approves.

hedora 3y ago

Someone needs to turn this into an xscreensaver hack that (optionally?) round-trips the mp4 through YouTube. Does stack overflow support RSS (to feed it requests for youtube videos)?

chinathrow 3y ago

YouTube shorts is such a time sink. I blocked the whole section on desktop with uBlock origin and never looked back.

Zambyte 3y ago
The only way I stream videos from YouTube is in mpv on my desktop (usually using pipe-viewer) and in NewPipe on Android, configured to hide all recommendations and comments. The only way I see a video on YouTube is by searching for it.

tomgp 3y ago

Now we just need some software to automate the watching of youtube shorts and we'll be sorted

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Or we'll be shorted.

Mashimo 3y ago

The cropped stock videos where quite bad in his example video. Blurry closeup plants and half a parrot :S Otherwise great execution.

junon 3y ago
It doesn't matter. People will eat it up.
jcpham2 3y ago
Yeah the only problems I've had so far are the stock videos not having much if anything at all to do with my script. Also had to edit gpt.py to sanitize the ":" if the AI script response contained a colon

tgv 3y ago

TODO * Ask ChatGPT for a random topic [1] * Automate upload [1] And this is what it said: A potential topic for a YouTube short could be "Quick Tips for Productivity." This topic is relevant and valuable to many viewers who are interested in maximizing their efficiency and getting more done in less time. You could share bite-sized productivity hacks, time management techniques, or organization tips that viewers can easily implement in their daily lives. Short, actionable content tends to perform well on YouTube shorts, making this topic a promising choice for engaging your audience in a concise format.

djmips 3y ago
Yeah, as you read about this and watch the associated video it slowly dawns on you..

haxiomic 3y ago

Has anyone else noticed the increase of entirely AI generated videos in YouTube suggestions and search results? They tend to be about completely made historical or scientific facts I’m much more interested in projects to detect junk like this than see more of it in the world

pjc50 3y ago
It's all just "10 hours of jingling keys": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jingling-keys https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jingling-keys Doesn't need to mean anything or feel anything, it's just a pleasant form of white noise for the eyeballs and brain behind.
sorenjan 3y ago
I recently saw an interview with one of the people doing those videos. He makes over $15k per month, so I doubt it will go away without Google interference, but they obviously take a sizable cut of the total earnings from the same videos as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qg36r8KH8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qg36r8KH8U
rchaud 3y ago
Of course. Not just in videos, but in pre-roll ads as well. This is why some of us feel enormously pessimistic about generative AI and AI-based automation. The ideal customers for this are marketing companies that need to churn out even more grist for the social media content mill. How much ink has been spilled on HN lamenting the SEO-ification of the web and impossible volumes of blogspam on search results? Yet if you posit that AI will make it worse, the villagers come out with their pitchforks.
- dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
  Here hear!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

sorenjan 3y ago

This reminds me of one of the examples of what you can do with Huginn: "Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the "HumanTaskAgent"). For example: "Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog." Except it's old enough to use humans instead of AI, and blogs instead of short vertical videos. https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn

RecycledEle 3y ago

We do not need automated content creation. We need AI to detect incoherent garbage without censoring things people disagree with.

jcpham2 3y ago

OP I have this up and running but it seems like most of the video samples it fetches in response to my prompt have nothing to do with the prompt I've typed. Maybe 1 out of 5 videos is actually relative to my prompt. Any Ideas? I've also noticed that any generated Subtitle language will fail if the AI responds with a semi-colon anywhere in it's response. "Sure, here's the thing you asked for: A long text description about <subject>" Actually short subs "Sure, here's the thing you asked for - end video. pretty neat though