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AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos

159 points by aquir 10mo ago

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403805
999900000999 10mo ago
What's the end game? AI sloop ads for dating apps full of ai chat bots , YouTube watched by AI bots. I was a bit surprised Spain has the most subscribers to ai sloop. Kinda weird considering the population size compared to the US
- whatshisface 10mo ago
  The end game is that computer generation beats human content for a subset of the population who becomes accessible to advertisers and propagandists through model alignment, and unresponsive to word-of-mouth.
- ralegh 10mo ago
  Its channels from Spain, so presumably appeals to Spanish speaking countries.
- lanthissa 10mo ago
  the 'slop' is generally at either end of the extremes of video length, either shorts or multiple hour videos. shorts get paid by the view, ppl put on long videos to fall a sleep to and youtube premium does a rev share based on watchtime of the premium user. this is why you have like 10 hour playlists and white noise videos.
- ninth_ant 10mo ago
  There is no “end game” it’s just hustlers out for a buck for themselves — YouTube, the slop makers, the ad companies, the bots scraping videos, all of em. Same as it ever was. When this cash cow proves worthless or runs out it’ll be another thing.
- bakugo 10mo ago
  The end game is eliminating the last remaining human element in the engagement optimization pipeline, so that the corporations can control 100% of it. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok already have almost full control of how the majority of users spend their time on their platforms. They open the app, they immediately get a feed of content algorithmically selected to keep them on the app for as long as possible. They don't need to search, they don't need to think about what they want to watch, they just consume. Fully automated consumption with 0 human effort involved. Well, almost. There's one last thing remaining: you still need humans to produce the content that you then put on people's feeds. Or rather, needed. Now that the actual production can also be automated, those platforms no longer need to put effort into finding existing human-created content that will keep people watching - they can just generate new, algorithmically perfect content. This is their endgame.
  - stcg 10mo ago
    Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass. Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".
    - ffuxlpff 10mo ago
      Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.
    - anovikov 10mo ago
      Why can't it be the actual tiktok? By simply winning competition with humans i.e. whereas vast majority of humans see their pay go too low to bother to continue?
- csomar 10mo ago
  I have noticed people on the subway watching them. I sneaked a peak on a few of their phones and it was legit AI slop with clear signs (for me at least) that it was AI generated. The end user (viewer?) seemed hooked but they are mostly shorts (10-20sec videos) and you can see their fingers swiping to the next one. The other day my mother told me if I watched some random AI slop (Putin getting in a physical fight with Trump) and I asked her why she watches this stuff and her answer is that it comes up in her feed. She said it was funny. I don't know what to make of any of this.
  - rationalist 10mo ago
    People do not want reality; they want to comfort.
  - rationalist 10mo ago
    People do not want reality; they want comfort.
  - Anamon 10mo ago
    I'm observing this with my dad. He watched some genuine history documentaries on YouTube, and now the feed keeps showing him AI slop history videos. You know the type: an hour long, overdramatic AI voice with pronunciation issues, barely relevant stock footage, loads of factual mistakes and nonsensical sentences, epic Hollywood music on a loop... He knows it's crap, keeps making fun of the horrible AI voice, shaking his head about all the vapid bullshit it's saying, and yet, he keeps watching them. I'm also at a loss.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- muldvarp 10mo ago
  > What's the end game? What makes you think that there is an "end game"? Someone figured out how to make computers be able to create content that is costly to distinguish from human-made content. Someone else is using it to pump out AI slop in the hopes that it will make them a quick buck. The platform becomes unusable for anyone that values their own sanity. No "end game" to be found. AI will be the worst thing that happened to society in a very long time.
  - 999900000999 10mo ago
    IDK about the worst thing. To flip it around AI can help a doctor find a cure, the other day I used AI to help translate and assist a non English speaker find the right bus. AI is just a tool. It's up to us to determine how it's used. I know I'm not using any service or product that's so lazy as to use AI sloop to advertise. Especially if it's clearly AI with jumbled text.
- thisisit 10mo ago
  YouTube always had a slop problem. Previously it took time, people, money and effort to create a slop channel. That’s why it was mostly run by content farms based out of Eastern Europe. For example 5 minute craft based out of Cyprus. With AI creating slop and content farming is easier than ever. Now it can be run at scale by anyone. As such the only purpose is to make money. YouTube has started banning some AI channels and maybe with time put serious restrictions. Or maybe not, at least not for big channels because 5 min crafts continues to exist despite producing most bizarre, outrageous and down right dangerous content. YouTube needs that sweet advertisement money.
noncoml 10mo ago
Matches my experience
jmward01 10mo ago
What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?
- behindsight 10mo ago
  Out of curiosity, do you have watch history enabled/disabled? I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about. I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly. It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)
  - wrxd 10mo ago
    It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before
    - Ekaros 10mo ago
      Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well. Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.
koakuma-chan 10mo ago
Works as intended. My YouTube feed is 0% AI slop.
- EbNar 10mo ago
  Same as mine. I just don't use YouTube at all and search for information on alternative sources, preferably in text form.
- metricflux 10mo ago
  Could you elaborate? What have you done to achieve a 0% slop ratio?
  - oefrha 10mo ago
    Turn off watch history and there’s no feed whatsoever, they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago. Yes that includes even Shorts, you’re not allowed to doomscroll without watch history. > Recommendations are off > Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for videos instead. Learn more.
    - xorvoid 10mo ago
      Same. This is the way. If you use Firefox, install the "unhook" extension to remove all the junk (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...)
      - nicbou 10mo ago
        UnTrap for iOS works practically the same.
    - latexr 10mo ago
      > they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago. I remember when that happened. It was hilarious to me because the way they phrased it felt like they think of it as a punishment or incentive, but not having anything on the homepage is incredibly refreshing, exactly what I wanted. YouTube’s homepage (at least in my country) is just garbage videos no one should be watching.
tedk-42 10mo ago
There are a lot of AI generated shorts around animals. A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable. I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI
- rapnie 10mo ago
  Cats getting totally excited to see their owner, because they dearly missed them. Cats filmed in night cam dropping weird animals from the forest on sleeping boss. Olympic athletes, gorgeous, but not real. Countless disasters where people die, generated. Youtube shorts is a pile of steaming garbage. As long as it sells, your brain may rot. Worst are imho on the regular long vids side, the geopolitical advisor deep fakes, giving background to the news. Some with well over a million followers. Many of those have the same "we are a fan of the real person" disclaimer, many have no disclaimer. And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part.
  - dspillett 10mo ago
    > And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part. Many who notice won't bother commenting, because most who notice know how pointless that is (counterproductive in fact: a comment is an interaction, any interaction is a positive for the "content"). Those that do notice and comment are either drowned out by • those too numbed on the brain to care, let alone notice, who lap it up, and praise it • bots (either those being used to interact with the clip to drive it's interactions counters, or more general spam bots) or if there is anyone/anybot monitoring the negative comments are removed.
- bulbar 10mo ago
  That's an improvement as before people would abuse real animals to fake seemingly wholesome "before-after" videos by showing snippets in the wrong order.
  - deleted 10mo ago
mojuba 10mo ago
Skimmed through the article, some interesting numbers but not a single statistic is per capita (or per million, whatever). How do I understand the scale of the phenomenon without the per capita figures? Sorry but seems a bit useless.
throw_m239339 10mo ago
How can I block AI generated videos (especially AI generated scripts) in my browser? Youtube has to give the viewer an option or the website is going suffer greatly from AI slop... Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...
- EbNar 10mo ago
  Because quantity > quality, as long as Google keeps making money from your time, engagement and attention. Easy.
- phito 10mo ago
  Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos, without having too many false positives and without spending huge amounts of resources playing the cat and mouse game? It's not possible and it's not economically viable. Best we could do is some sort of signature to prove that the source of a video is trusted by the proof issuer.
  - throw_m239339 10mo ago
    > Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos Of course they can detect enough of these, Google literally has a AI video generator in Gemini. It's not a matter of detecting every single ones, but enough to weed out the most egregious use of AI. > It's not possible and it's not economically viable. It's absolutely possible and it's about the very future of Youtube as a platform, what isn't economically viable is letting people upload tons of AI generated garbage on their platforms.
guidedlight 10mo ago
How is YouTube going to deal with all the storage of these videos?
- ohmahjong 10mo ago
  Maybe they will avoid the storage cost by generating this slop on the fly; who would notice?
  - bot403 10mo ago
    AI compute costs far outweigh storage costs.
- Anamon 10mo ago
  Look forward to further increases in pricing, whether through subscription rates or ad frequency or anti-ad-blocker measures, I guess. I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.
pogue 10mo ago
This site appears to be an AI slop generator though?
- AlexAplin 10mo ago
  The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.
xeonmc 10mo ago
Google’s two moats, YouTube and Search, both succumbing to the same infestation to destroy its market grip I see.
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  Ah, that's what the TPUs are for.
UberFly 10mo ago
My own "research" has me in complete agreement. Venues like Etsy are now 33% Ai slop now so why should Youtube be any different?
phplovesong 10mo ago
Youtube is horrible, specially the force-fed "shorts". Its 95% AI slop with the same generic graphics and voice-over. From the actual videos most are also AI generated, making me quit the video as soon as i see it. YT has hit rock bottom. Just sad.
- wodenokoto 10mo ago
  My shorts are mostly of the creators I follow or adjecent creators. I do get the occasional AI slop, but it looks more like the algorithm is testing someone new, to learn what they are, than the algorithm feeding me slop. Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.
jacquesm 10mo ago
And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
- Kiro 10mo ago
  Example?
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    Any google search I do. "how to configure arducopter gps" 9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all. To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth. edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.
    - sen 10mo ago
      I searched for that exact phrase out of curiosity because I haven’t used Google in years… and it’s even worse than you say. I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..” Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS. Google has *completely* lost the plot.
      - kubb 10mo ago
        There’s a Web tab which you can click to show only the web results, none of the AI, videos, other people, etc. I presume you want that to be the default, but I’m sure you understand that Google can’t grant your wish, because it’s subject to market forces.
      - 10mo ago
coffinbirth 10mo ago
"Deepfake Yanis Varoufakis Videos Are Flooding YouTube": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1ZewbOd2JQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1ZewbOd2JQ There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now. I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven... Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
- gbrindisi 10mo ago
  I noticed that too and it’s kinda scary. Soon we will have the opposite of canceling, where the target will be deepfaked to say everything and its opposite to nullify their signal to noise ratio.
- mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  Yeah, I hate that also. I just subscribed to Yanis Varoufakis‘s official feed and installed a Safari extension to block everything on YT not in my subscriptions. I think this will work out: use the YouTube app occasionally to discover new material to subscribe to, but usually access YT on Safari using this extensikn.
- throwaway_dang 10mo ago
  The AI slop is real; I don't think Yanis has a YT channel besides [DIEM25](https://www.youtube.com/@DiEM25official https://www.youtube.com/@DiEM25official)
aucisson_masque 10mo ago
That ain't exactly a study as people think of, something scientist do and that get published in a journal, peer reviewed, approved, etc. It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted. Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers. And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.
noduerme 10mo ago
At a societal level [if that's what we should be worried about], it's not what percentage of results are slop. It's what percentage of people believe the slop. Arguably, that seems to be decreasing proportionally. What I mean is: Slop is on a parabolic, hockey stick upward, and trust is on a logarithmic decline. So, good? - let it blow itself out? Bad information is worse than no information, and evolutionary pressures have many ways of proving that.
wenbin 10mo ago
Same for podcasts (and other types of online contents) - Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts" https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
PeterStuer 10mo ago
YouTube promotes slop and "brainrot" irrespective of AI use, this through the client being tuned for clickbait title presentation, forcing back shorts after every relaunch and promoting clickbait select single frame thumbnails.
submeta 10mo ago
Same is true for Pinterest. Try to find human generated interior design images on Pinterest. It’s flooded with AI generated content.
burnt-resistor 10mo ago
This is definitely true for my mom's feed because she watches so many random pet videos. Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too. Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess. Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.
wrxd 10mo ago
Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules. Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine. YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader. You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
- mvdtnz 10mo ago
  > YouTube search still work Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.
shevy-java 10mo ago
It has really become horrible in the last some days, probably weeks now. It is not just fake-videos AI generated, without Google having any decency to mark it, as it wastes my time and the time of others - but there are now also videos where some videos are real (I know because some of these videos came from years ago), mixed in with AI fake crap. Now, I am able to spot many AI videos, but I bet many other people simply don't have the knowledge. That is also a generational problem, where people have a harder and harder time to separate real from fiction. But I have no desire to waste my time with fake, so Google now has started to kill youtube. I still have use cases of youtube without this problem, e. g. good music (here, whether it is AI generated or not, makes no real difference IF the music is good; but most AI music is crap anyway but I can not listen to it and only focus on good music), but this is getting more and more of a dead end here. Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine. Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here. Google, you are the guilty party.
Havoc 10mo ago
Yeah don’t use the feed. Use subscriptions- old school chronological list of things the creators you follow published. I do worry that yt will intentionally break that functionality in their quest for maximum enshitification though
markus_zhang 10mo ago
AI is OK. I used to ignore AI stuffs on YouTube but in recent months the channel “Napoleons Hill Notes” helped me tremendously. It is an AI voice reading channel.
- nervysnail 10mo ago
  Napoleon Hill, the well-known crook? https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645 https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-gr... Not to say that some of his work is not useful though.
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    That's fair. I don't even know whether they are authentic NP notes (never read his books), but the channel is the only thing that helped me to be very close (a few days/a couple of weeks away) to complete a non-trivial learning project out of school -- first time ever in my life, how weird that sounds. I guess as long as it works it's fine.
zeristor 10mo ago
Every time I watch a video it’s like I’m running a Turing test. Mispronunciations could be a giveaway, but then some people may have naïve pronounciations. So many videos about nerd-sniping niche subjects. As though we need to have a new regimen of thought discipline since so much could so easily be list.
reidrac 10mo ago
It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me. The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically. Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding. Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
- nicbou 10mo ago
  I did the same. Unhooked for desktop and UnTrap for iOS. No suggestions, no shorts, and no comments. Just the videos from creators I subscribed to.
  - mark_l_watson 10mo ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. I just bought the UnTrap creator’s bundle social media product and tested with YouTube, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is a safari extension. My biggest surprise was how pleasant it was to spend t minutes in Facebook.
wg0 10mo ago
Fake Brian Cox and Richard Fynemen are in abundance. Imagine 50 years down the road impossible to tell which things Richard Feynman really said in his lectures and which are all made up.
- tim333 10mo ago
  I just blocked a fake Brian Cox one a couple of hours ago. There can be a certain time waste looking at the things before figuring they are rubbish. Youtube should give you more options than just block or don't show me this. You should be able to click 'AI fake of real person' so they don't get inflicted on others unless they like that stuff.
  - mvdtnz 10mo ago
    Unfortunately it's not possible to block a channel on YouTube, or I'd have blocked thousands. All you can do is tell it not to recommend a channel.
- jfil 10mo ago
  I'm working on a short story that explores this! Different organizations producing fake videos about a real person/event, to nudge you in their desired direction.
renegat0x0 10mo ago
Don't care. I use my own domain index, which also contains youtube channels, which I use through RSS. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database Most important links are available through a simple search https://rumca-js.github.io/search https://rumca-js.github.io/search I have also RSS search https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
Pooge 10mo ago
I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm. Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question. My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage. Surely I'm not alone but it surely feels like it.
- user_7832 10mo ago
  I agree that the algorithm isn't always the best. Interestingly however I occasionally get "legendary pulls" (I think that's a gatcha term?) on youtube - a 1990s stop motion video of some legendary niche Japanese animator, or some other 8+ years old video in 240p that's absolutely amazing. But "fortunately" for me, on my main account, my feed is 80%+ decent stuff - science channels, AOPA safety videos - stuff like that. But my other account has absolutely terrible suggestions on the algorithm, so it probably varies a ton on how much and what you watch.
- optimalsolver 10mo ago
  Most of the great music I've discovered is thanks to Spotify's "Play song radio" feature.
  - Pooge 10mo ago
    Granted I have very specific tastes in music and 98% of the time I listen to things I've already listened to hundreds of times... I sometimes try the song radio but it's not to discover a "banger".
- tzs 10mo ago
  I’ve had some great recommendations from YouTube. For example the video below, called “The Squirrel and the Peanut”, which by just adding some well chosen classical music to some found footage of a squirrel getting a peanut turns it into a moving story of overcoming your fears told in a mere 1:32. Watch with the sound turned up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1ZYGHmtN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1ZYGHmtN8
mark_l_watson 10mo ago
My wife and I pay for YouTube and the prevalence of AI Slop definitely reduces the value we get for our money. YouTube has done a fairly good job over the years of providing useful recommendations but lately I always immediately ‘back out’ of any AI generated videos or materials with robot-voiced narrations. I keep hoping that the algorithms quickly learn to not show me this stuff, but in the meantime I have had to change my viewing habits to following specific channels - and this reduces ‘discoverability.’
alangibson 10mo ago
I hate to say it, but Zuckerberg is right about where online content is going. The future is just an endless feed of personalized short form AI brain candy.
anovikov 10mo ago
I thought it was simply the way all youtube videos are now made :) my feed has little but those, i need to search for something specific to see anything else.
JoeDaDude 10mo ago
I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.
- tim333 10mo ago
  There's good stuff too if you are a bit selective.
twoodfin 10mo ago
HN’s front page isn’t 20% AI-generated—sorry, “cleaned up from my notes”—but it’s a lot closer than it was a few weeks ago. The problem is that it’s working; HN voters seem to love the stuff.
ineedasername 10mo ago
AI slop is a significant improvement over countless videos in the past few years that were little more than slide decks with bad TTS. The current equivalents are better written, better spoken, better visuals, etc.
xnx 10mo ago
If YouTube slop is in that range, Instagram must be 50-60% and Facebook 70-80%.
aorth 10mo ago
I saw one Warren Buffett video where the voice was Buffet's and he said "in this video I will show you...". Most videos featuring Buffet's voice are snippets from actual interviews etc, but this one threw me off. I stopped it immediately. Sigh.
mvdtnz 10mo ago
Breaking this down by country must be the least interesting analysis possible. I'm much more interested in a breakdown by video genre and the type of person watching.
johanyc 10mo ago
> AI Slop: Careless, low-quality content generated using automatic computer applications and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinion. They consider low quality video produced by automatic programs "AI slop" even when it's not AI. That's not a very accurate title.
joshcsimmons 10mo ago
The fact that platforms such as YouTube have incentivized "quantity over quality" for so long means that they deserve the influx of "filler" material. As a society it probably says something dark about us that a significant number of users watch these videos.

159 points by aquir 10mo ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403805

What's the end game? AI sloop ads for dating apps full of ai chat bots , YouTube watched by AI bots. I was a bit surprised Spain has the most subscribers to ai sloop. Kinda weird considering the population size compared to the US

whatshisface 10mo ago
The end game is that computer generation beats human content for a subset of the population who becomes accessible to advertisers and propagandists through model alignment, and unresponsive to word-of-mouth.
ralegh 10mo ago
Its channels from Spain, so presumably appeals to Spanish speaking countries.
lanthissa 10mo ago
the 'slop' is generally at either end of the extremes of video length, either shorts or multiple hour videos. shorts get paid by the view, ppl put on long videos to fall a sleep to and youtube premium does a rev share based on watchtime of the premium user. this is why you have like 10 hour playlists and white noise videos.
ninth_ant 10mo ago
There is no “end game” it’s just hustlers out for a buck for themselves — YouTube, the slop makers, the ad companies, the bots scraping videos, all of em. Same as it ever was. When this cash cow proves worthless or runs out it’ll be another thing.
bakugo 10mo ago
The end game is eliminating the last remaining human element in the engagement optimization pipeline, so that the corporations can control 100% of it. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok already have almost full control of how the majority of users spend their time on their platforms. They open the app, they immediately get a feed of content algorithmically selected to keep them on the app for as long as possible. They don't need to search, they don't need to think about what they want to watch, they just consume. Fully automated consumption with 0 human effort involved. Well, almost. There's one last thing remaining: you still need humans to produce the content that you then put on people's feeds. Or rather, needed. Now that the actual production can also be automated, those platforms no longer need to put effort into finding existing human-created content that will keep people watching - they can just generate new, algorithmically perfect content. This is their endgame.
- stcg 10mo ago
  Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass. Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".
  - ffuxlpff 10mo ago
    Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.
  - anovikov 10mo ago
    Why can't it be the actual tiktok? By simply winning competition with humans i.e. whereas vast majority of humans see their pay go too low to bother to continue?
csomar 10mo ago
I have noticed people on the subway watching them. I sneaked a peak on a few of their phones and it was legit AI slop with clear signs (for me at least) that it was AI generated. The end user (viewer?) seemed hooked but they are mostly shorts (10-20sec videos) and you can see their fingers swiping to the next one. The other day my mother told me if I watched some random AI slop (Putin getting in a physical fight with Trump) and I asked her why she watches this stuff and her answer is that it comes up in her feed. She said it was funny. I don't know what to make of any of this.
- rationalist 10mo ago
  People do not want reality; they want to comfort.
- rationalist 10mo ago
  People do not want reality; they want comfort.
- Anamon 10mo ago
  I'm observing this with my dad. He watched some genuine history documentaries on YouTube, and now the feed keeps showing him AI slop history videos. You know the type: an hour long, overdramatic AI voice with pronunciation issues, barely relevant stock footage, loads of factual mistakes and nonsensical sentences, epic Hollywood music on a loop... He knows it's crap, keeps making fun of the horrible AI voice, shaking his head about all the vapid bullshit it's saying, and yet, he keeps watching them. I'm also at a loss.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
muldvarp 10mo ago
> What's the end game? What makes you think that there is an "end game"? Someone figured out how to make computers be able to create content that is costly to distinguish from human-made content. Someone else is using it to pump out AI slop in the hopes that it will make them a quick buck. The platform becomes unusable for anyone that values their own sanity. No "end game" to be found. AI will be the worst thing that happened to society in a very long time.
- 999900000999 10mo ago
  IDK about the worst thing. To flip it around AI can help a doctor find a cure, the other day I used AI to help translate and assist a non English speaker find the right bus. AI is just a tool. It's up to us to determine how it's used. I know I'm not using any service or product that's so lazy as to use AI sloop to advertise. Especially if it's clearly AI with jumbled text.
thisisit 10mo ago
YouTube always had a slop problem. Previously it took time, people, money and effort to create a slop channel. That’s why it was mostly run by content farms based out of Eastern Europe. For example 5 minute craft based out of Cyprus. With AI creating slop and content farming is easier than ever. Now it can be run at scale by anyone. As such the only purpose is to make money. YouTube has started banning some AI channels and maybe with time put serious restrictions. Or maybe not, at least not for big channels because 5 min crafts continues to exist despite producing most bizarre, outrageous and down right dangerous content. YouTube needs that sweet advertisement money.

noncoml 10mo ago

Matches my experience

jmward01 10mo ago

What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?

behindsight 10mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you have watch history enabled/disabled? I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about. I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly. It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)
- wrxd 10mo ago
  It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before
  - Ekaros 10mo ago
    Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well. Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.

koakuma-chan 10mo ago

Works as intended. My YouTube feed is 0% AI slop.

EbNar 10mo ago
Same as mine. I just don't use YouTube at all and search for information on alternative sources, preferably in text form.
metricflux 10mo ago
Could you elaborate? What have you done to achieve a 0% slop ratio?
- oefrha 10mo ago
  Turn off watch history and there’s no feed whatsoever, they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago. Yes that includes even Shorts, you’re not allowed to doomscroll without watch history. > Recommendations are off > Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for videos instead. Learn more.
  - xorvoid 10mo ago
    Same. This is the way. If you use Firefox, install the "unhook" extension to remove all the junk (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...)
    - nicbou 10mo ago
      UnTrap for iOS works practically the same.
  - latexr 10mo ago
    > they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago. I remember when that happened. It was hilarious to me because the way they phrased it felt like they think of it as a punishment or incentive, but not having anything on the homepage is incredibly refreshing, exactly what I wanted. YouTube’s homepage (at least in my country) is just garbage videos no one should be watching.

tedk-42 10mo ago

There are a lot of AI generated shorts around animals. A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable. I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI

rapnie 10mo ago
Cats getting totally excited to see their owner, because they dearly missed them. Cats filmed in night cam dropping weird animals from the forest on sleeping boss. Olympic athletes, gorgeous, but not real. Countless disasters where people die, generated. Youtube shorts is a pile of steaming garbage. As long as it sells, your brain may rot. Worst are imho on the regular long vids side, the geopolitical advisor deep fakes, giving background to the news. Some with well over a million followers. Many of those have the same "we are a fan of the real person" disclaimer, many have no disclaimer. And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part.
- dspillett 10mo ago
  > And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part. Many who notice won't bother commenting, because most who notice know how pointless that is (counterproductive in fact: a comment is an interaction, any interaction is a positive for the "content"). Those that do notice and comment are either drowned out by • those too numbed on the brain to care, let alone notice, who lap it up, and praise it • bots (either those being used to interact with the clip to drive it's interactions counters, or more general spam bots) or if there is anyone/anybot monitoring the negative comments are removed.
bulbar 10mo ago
That's an improvement as before people would abuse real animals to fake seemingly wholesome "before-after" videos by showing snippets in the wrong order.
- deleted 10mo ago

mojuba 10mo ago

Skimmed through the article, some interesting numbers but not a single statistic is per capita (or per million, whatever). How do I understand the scale of the phenomenon without the per capita figures? Sorry but seems a bit useless.

throw_m239339 10mo ago

How can I block AI generated videos (especially AI generated scripts) in my browser? Youtube has to give the viewer an option or the website is going suffer greatly from AI slop... Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...

EbNar 10mo ago
Because quantity > quality, as long as Google keeps making money from your time, engagement and attention. Easy.
phito 10mo ago
Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos, without having too many false positives and without spending huge amounts of resources playing the cat and mouse game? It's not possible and it's not economically viable. Best we could do is some sort of signature to prove that the source of a video is trusted by the proof issuer.
- throw_m239339 10mo ago
  > Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos Of course they can detect enough of these, Google literally has a AI video generator in Gemini. It's not a matter of detecting every single ones, but enough to weed out the most egregious use of AI. > It's not possible and it's not economically viable. It's absolutely possible and it's about the very future of Youtube as a platform, what isn't economically viable is letting people upload tons of AI generated garbage on their platforms.

guidedlight 10mo ago

How is YouTube going to deal with all the storage of these videos?

ohmahjong 10mo ago
Maybe they will avoid the storage cost by generating this slop on the fly; who would notice?
- bot403 10mo ago
  AI compute costs far outweigh storage costs.
Anamon 10mo ago
Look forward to further increases in pricing, whether through subscription rates or ad frequency or anti-ad-blocker measures, I guess. I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.

pogue 10mo ago

This site appears to be an AI slop generator though?

AlexAplin 10mo ago
The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.

xeonmc 10mo ago

Google’s two moats, YouTube and Search, both succumbing to the same infestation to destroy its market grip I see.

bigyabai 10mo ago
Ah, that's what the TPUs are for.

UberFly 10mo ago

My own "research" has me in complete agreement. Venues like Etsy are now 33% Ai slop now so why should Youtube be any different?

phplovesong 10mo ago

Youtube is horrible, specially the force-fed "shorts". Its 95% AI slop with the same generic graphics and voice-over. From the actual videos most are also AI generated, making me quit the video as soon as i see it. YT has hit rock bottom. Just sad.

wodenokoto 10mo ago
My shorts are mostly of the creators I follow or adjecent creators. I do get the occasional AI slop, but it looks more like the algorithm is testing someone new, to learn what they are, than the algorithm feeding me slop. Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.

jacquesm 10mo ago

And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.

Kiro 10mo ago
Example?
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  Any google search I do. "how to configure arducopter gps" 9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all. To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth. edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.
  - sen 10mo ago
    I searched for that exact phrase out of curiosity because I haven’t used Google in years… and it’s even worse than you say. I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..” Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS. Google has *completely* lost the plot.
    - kubb 10mo ago
      There’s a Web tab which you can click to show only the web results, none of the AI, videos, other people, etc. I presume you want that to be the default, but I’m sure you understand that Google can’t grant your wish, because it’s subject to market forces.
    - 10mo ago

coffinbirth 10mo ago

"Deepfake Yanis Varoufakis Videos Are Flooding YouTube": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1ZewbOd2JQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1ZewbOd2JQ There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now. I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven... Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.

gbrindisi 10mo ago
I noticed that too and it’s kinda scary. Soon we will have the opposite of canceling, where the target will be deepfaked to say everything and its opposite to nullify their signal to noise ratio.
mark_l_watson 10mo ago
Yeah, I hate that also. I just subscribed to Yanis Varoufakis‘s official feed and installed a Safari extension to block everything on YT not in my subscriptions. I think this will work out: use the YouTube app occasionally to discover new material to subscribe to, but usually access YT on Safari using this extensikn.
throwaway_dang 10mo ago
The AI slop is real; I don't think Yanis has a YT channel besides [DIEM25](https://www.youtube.com/@DiEM25official https://www.youtube.com/@DiEM25official)

aucisson_masque 10mo ago

That ain't exactly a study as people think of, something scientist do and that get published in a journal, peer reviewed, approved, etc. It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted. Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers. And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.

noduerme 10mo ago

At a societal level [if that's what we should be worried about], it's not what percentage of results are slop. It's what percentage of people believe the slop. Arguably, that seems to be decreasing proportionally. What I mean is: Slop is on a parabolic, hockey stick upward, and trust is on a logarithmic decline. So, good? - let it blow itself out? Bad information is worse than no information, and evolutionary pressures have many ways of proving that.

wenbin 10mo ago

Same for podcasts (and other types of online contents) - Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts" https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

PeterStuer 10mo ago

YouTube promotes slop and "brainrot" irrespective of AI use, this through the client being tuned for clickbait title presentation, forcing back shorts after every relaunch and promoting clickbait select single frame thumbnails.

submeta 10mo ago

Same is true for Pinterest. Try to find human generated interior design images on Pinterest. It’s flooded with AI generated content.

burnt-resistor 10mo ago

This is definitely true for my mom's feed because she watches so many random pet videos. Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too. Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess. Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.

wrxd 10mo ago

Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules. Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine. YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader. You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.

mvdtnz 10mo ago
> YouTube search still work Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.

shevy-java 10mo ago

It has really become horrible in the last some days, probably weeks now. It is not just fake-videos AI generated, without Google having any decency to mark it, as it wastes my time and the time of others - but there are now also videos where some videos are real (I know because some of these videos came from years ago), mixed in with AI fake crap. Now, I am able to spot many AI videos, but I bet many other people simply don't have the knowledge. That is also a generational problem, where people have a harder and harder time to separate real from fiction. But I have no desire to waste my time with fake, so Google now has started to kill youtube. I still have use cases of youtube without this problem, e. g. good music (here, whether it is AI generated or not, makes no real difference IF the music is good; but most AI music is crap anyway but I can not listen to it and only focus on good music), but this is getting more and more of a dead end here. Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine. Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here. Google, you are the guilty party.

Havoc 10mo ago

Yeah don’t use the feed. Use subscriptions- old school chronological list of things the creators you follow published. I do worry that yt will intentionally break that functionality in their quest for maximum enshitification though

markus_zhang 10mo ago

AI is OK. I used to ignore AI stuffs on YouTube but in recent months the channel “Napoleons Hill Notes” helped me tremendously. It is an AI voice reading channel.

nervysnail 10mo ago
Napoleon Hill, the well-known crook? https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645 https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-gr... Not to say that some of his work is not useful though.
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  That's fair. I don't even know whether they are authentic NP notes (never read his books), but the channel is the only thing that helped me to be very close (a few days/a couple of weeks away) to complete a non-trivial learning project out of school -- first time ever in my life, how weird that sounds. I guess as long as it works it's fine.

zeristor 10mo ago

Every time I watch a video it’s like I’m running a Turing test. Mispronunciations could be a giveaway, but then some people may have naïve pronounciations. So many videos about nerd-sniping niche subjects. As though we need to have a new regimen of thought discipline since so much could so easily be list.

reidrac 10mo ago

It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me. The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically. Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding. Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.

nicbou 10mo ago
I did the same. Unhooked for desktop and UnTrap for iOS. No suggestions, no shorts, and no comments. Just the videos from creators I subscribed to.
- mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. I just bought the UnTrap creator’s bundle social media product and tested with YouTube, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is a safari extension. My biggest surprise was how pleasant it was to spend t minutes in Facebook.

wg0 10mo ago

Fake Brian Cox and Richard Fynemen are in abundance. Imagine 50 years down the road impossible to tell which things Richard Feynman really said in his lectures and which are all made up.

tim333 10mo ago
I just blocked a fake Brian Cox one a couple of hours ago. There can be a certain time waste looking at the things before figuring they are rubbish. Youtube should give you more options than just block or don't show me this. You should be able to click 'AI fake of real person' so they don't get inflicted on others unless they like that stuff.
- mvdtnz 10mo ago
  Unfortunately it's not possible to block a channel on YouTube, or I'd have blocked thousands. All you can do is tell it not to recommend a channel.
jfil 10mo ago
I'm working on a short story that explores this! Different organizations producing fake videos about a real person/event, to nudge you in their desired direction.

renegat0x0 10mo ago

Don't care. I use my own domain index, which also contains youtube channels, which I use through RSS. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database Most important links are available through a simple search https://rumca-js.github.io/search https://rumca-js.github.io/search I have also RSS search https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds

Pooge 10mo ago

I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm. Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question. My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage. Surely I'm not alone but it surely feels like it.

user_7832 10mo ago
I agree that the algorithm isn't always the best. Interestingly however I occasionally get "legendary pulls" (I think that's a gatcha term?) on youtube - a 1990s stop motion video of some legendary niche Japanese animator, or some other 8+ years old video in 240p that's absolutely amazing. But "fortunately" for me, on my main account, my feed is 80%+ decent stuff - science channels, AOPA safety videos - stuff like that. But my other account has absolutely terrible suggestions on the algorithm, so it probably varies a ton on how much and what you watch.
optimalsolver 10mo ago
Most of the great music I've discovered is thanks to Spotify's "Play song radio" feature.
- Pooge 10mo ago
  Granted I have very specific tastes in music and 98% of the time I listen to things I've already listened to hundreds of times... I sometimes try the song radio but it's not to discover a "banger".
tzs 10mo ago
I’ve had some great recommendations from YouTube. For example the video below, called “The Squirrel and the Peanut”, which by just adding some well chosen classical music to some found footage of a squirrel getting a peanut turns it into a moving story of overcoming your fears told in a mere 1:32. Watch with the sound turned up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1ZYGHmtN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1ZYGHmtN8

mark_l_watson 10mo ago

My wife and I pay for YouTube and the prevalence of AI Slop definitely reduces the value we get for our money. YouTube has done a fairly good job over the years of providing useful recommendations but lately I always immediately ‘back out’ of any AI generated videos or materials with robot-voiced narrations. I keep hoping that the algorithms quickly learn to not show me this stuff, but in the meantime I have had to change my viewing habits to following specific channels - and this reduces ‘discoverability.’

alangibson 10mo ago

I hate to say it, but Zuckerberg is right about where online content is going. The future is just an endless feed of personalized short form AI brain candy.

anovikov 10mo ago

I thought it was simply the way all youtube videos are now made :) my feed has little but those, i need to search for something specific to see anything else.

JoeDaDude 10mo ago

I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.

tim333 10mo ago
There's good stuff too if you are a bit selective.

twoodfin 10mo ago

HN’s front page isn’t 20% AI-generated—sorry, “cleaned up from my notes”—but it’s a lot closer than it was a few weeks ago. The problem is that it’s working; HN voters seem to love the stuff.

ineedasername 10mo ago

AI slop is a significant improvement over countless videos in the past few years that were little more than slide decks with bad TTS. The current equivalents are better written, better spoken, better visuals, etc.

xnx 10mo ago

If YouTube slop is in that range, Instagram must be 50-60% and Facebook 70-80%.

aorth 10mo ago

I saw one Warren Buffett video where the voice was Buffet's and he said "in this video I will show you...". Most videos featuring Buffet's voice are snippets from actual interviews etc, but this one threw me off. I stopped it immediately. Sigh.

mvdtnz 10mo ago

Breaking this down by country must be the least interesting analysis possible. I'm much more interested in a breakdown by video genre and the type of person watching.

johanyc 10mo ago

> AI Slop: Careless, low-quality content generated using automatic computer applications and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinion. They consider low quality video produced by automatic programs "AI slop" even when it's not AI. That's not a very accurate title.

joshcsimmons 10mo ago

The fact that platforms such as YouTube have incentivized "quantity over quality" for so long means that they deserve the influx of "filler" material. As a society it probably says something dark about us that a significant number of users watch these videos.