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Children and seniors are victimized by AI content on a huge scale. Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds. I saw kids sp

• diegolas 5mo ago
  tbh those brain rot videos pre-date AI generation, i know because my little BIL used to watch those kind of random non-stop action and movement vids in like 2020
• jccc 5mo ago
  And unfortunately the other way around could be about as bad: “Don’t believe what you just saw — That’s just AI propaganda!”
• emursebrian 5mo ago
  I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.
  • rkozik1989 5mo ago
    There's a bar by me where the owners made all of the decor with ChatGPT. It feels surreal in there.
    • dmos62 5mo ago
      What do you mean they made it with ChatGPT?
      • pc86 5mo ago
        My guess is, at best, uploaded photos of the space and said "give me things to decorate this."
  • scotty79 5mo ago
    it became for me a quick signal for me that I'm watching an ad, because it doesn't normally pop up in my feeds
• mythrwy 5mo ago
  My girlfriend mindlessly watches those sometimes. I think they are from China maybe. I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this: "A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!" Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.
  • solumunus 5mo ago
    Is she otherwise intelligent reasonably? I just can’t wrap my head around anyone consuming content like this.
    • mythrwy 5mo ago
      She is reasonably intelligent. Not necessarily intellectually inclined but not stupid by any means. And I'm with you, I can't wrap my head around it either. To be fair I didn't really get her choice of movies before AI (superhero flicks, hallmark type movies, 200 watches of "Twilight" etc). I think to her it's just sort of "turn off your brain comfortable background noise" from inquiries. I'm different and when I watch things I pay attention and think about it and notice plot holes etc etc. I watch to be entertained or informed and if it doesn't do either of those I tune out. So I can't sit through most movies even before AI. But some people I think just "vibe watch" for lack of a better term. I also have never understood people who come home and watch "whatever is on TV" or watch news all day or that kind of thing either so I'm not sure the problem is AI in this case. It just produces more volume of junk than the junky junk that existed previously. Some of the AI stuff is egregiously horrible though.
      • delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
        I believe some people have Fox News on constantly? In Russia it is the state TV’s 24/7 propaganda that some people have on the background, or so I heard. That is how propaganda works, it becomes the background of information colouring everything even if you don’t believe it. I don’t mean that what she and many others watch is propaganda, but I do think it affects one over the time same as hearing every day that Ukrainians are all Nazi’s etc. That might be why young people are smashing their faces with hammers and using shitload of steroids etc. Perhaps we shpuld be as careful of what media we consume as we are of what we eat and drink.
• Lambdanaut 5mo ago
  The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives. The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
  • TremendousJudge 5mo ago
    this stuff always reminds me of There is no antimemetis division [0] From Case Hate Red: > With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around. [0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
    • isoprophlex 5mo ago
      That indeed, and The Entertainment or the samizdat from Infinite Jest. A film so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than endless viewings of the film.
      • crdrost 5mo ago
        Back when people would read blog posts about the erosion of ownership in the face of intellectual property law, I used to blog about something similar... Of course the MPAA is against copying, I would say -- the ideal situation for the MPAA would be if when you left the theater, they could just wipe your brain of the memory of the film you just watched. You just remember that you had a fun time with your friends and it was a good movie, but you don't remember any of what happened there. "but those are MY memories" -- no no no we didn't touch YOUR memories, we left your memories just fine -- we only removed a copy of OUR copyrighted content from the world, consistent with our terms of service for the theater. But if you want to experience it again, by all means, come back to watch it again. "That sounds like it would stifle all cinematic innovation" -- no you don't understand! Our artists are suffering because they don't get the full amount of money they are due because of all of these unlicensed copies moving about the world in peoples' heads. When people are discussing how amazing that movie was, our artists deserve to have them in a controlled cafe attached to the theater where they can control that experience and fully profit off of it. Don't you get it? Bigger financial incentives, bigger payoffs for successful artists -- therefore more artists, and more cinematic innovation! When you play back these unlicensed copies in your "memory" and pirate our works, you're really just contributing to monoculture by not rewarding the people who made your favorite things.
• narag 5mo ago
  I've found a curious variety of AI videos: releases of motorbikes that don't exist, brought by Youtube algorithm. I guess the point is just clicks or ads money. Some comments, by bots or gullible users. No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)
  • munk-a 5mo ago
    From what I've seen YT takes "Don't show me this channel again" very seriously but the effect appears to be limited just to you. It would be very silly for YT to fail to enforce that preference as a user who is willing to go through an annoyingly multi-step flow to express their displeasure is on who would never monetarily engage in the content anyways - but neither it (nor the reporting system) seem to have a significant impact on the visibility of that content to others since both are often used for brigading or personal preference.
• cynicalpeace 5mo ago
  kids simply shouldn't be looking at a screen, AI-generated or not. Screen time for kids (and adults for that matter!) should be way way scaled back. That falls on the parents. Bad parents give their kids phones and tablets and that's a hill I will die on.
  • untitled-now 5mo ago
    I guess it depends on the age of the kid , if a kid is 11-12-13 yo , you can hardly do anything about it. I remember of how I was at that age , now I am 38.
    • cynicalpeace 4mo ago
      Actually, you can. If parents are somehow powerless by the time their kids achieve some independence, again, that's bad parenting.
  • bad_haircut72 5mo ago
    do you have kids?
    • cynicalpeace 4mo ago
      yes, several, lmao
  • dmos62 5mo ago
    Many parents find parenthood difficult and are happy that something distracts their kid. Further, kids that tend to get more addicted to stuff like this tend to live in stressful circumstances. It's easy to say be a better parent, or produce a better environment for your kid, but it's not as easy to help people with that. If we can make social media healthier for everyone, that's a big deal.
    • macintux 5mo ago
      Many parents grew up with TVs as their screens. It's a reasonable extrapolation to think that their kids will be fine with devices as their screens.
• Fogest 5mo ago
  What's even worse is that these videos are being used for shady purposes as well. I start to fear a lot for our future elections. I have heard parents/grand-parents mention videos they have seen from politicians that are simply fake. They totally believed claims they said these politicians made, but when you look it up you discover these things were never said and that they fell for AI deep-fake style videos. So far most of these videos have been made to promote scams. I'm sure many of us have seen these videos. Like the classic Elon Musk promoting some crypto scam videos. This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos. And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war. Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.
• wan23 5mo ago
  My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.
  • MichaelZuo 5mo ago
    There are so many of these stories… it makes me wonder if humans in general have “general intelligence” either. Or whether it’s only a small subset who do.
    • sublinear 5mo ago
      What people do is not well correlated with what they know. You can't reduce people to their behavior. You can reduce machines to their behavior. If you disagree, I would strongly suggest you review where else you might be making this incorrect assumption.
      • MichaelZuo 4mo ago
        If you don’t assess people based on their actions… then how do you assess them? From my experience actions are easily worth thousands of times more than any other criteria.
        • sublinear 4mo ago
          Attaboy you're on the right track! We're almost in agreement. I'm saying that you cannot accurately assess people at all! All you can do is guess. But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions.
          • MichaelZuo 4mo ago
            This comment doesnt make sense. How is it relevant to my question, whether you think someone else agrees with you… or not? I just don’t see a reason for anyone to give you higher credibility than other HN users.
• dopamean 5mo ago
  > Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.
  • jere 5mo ago
    It's pretty common. I would assume any faceless channel is all AI now. Like I saw these fitness videos and I thought the voice was a little too good for AI, especially a year ago. But apparently the TTS models are really good. https://youtube.com/@yellowdude_co https://youtube.com/@yellowdude_co
• saltyoldman 5mo ago
  Gen Beta is soooo cooked.
• wiseowise 5mo ago
  Something, something, people want to see this, therefore GenAI and algorithms are good (no joke, someone actually replied this to me on the forum).
  • meowface 5mo ago
    GenAI is good. (LLMs are GenAI, for example.) This particular subset of GenAI is very very bad.
  • munk-a 5mo ago
    It's a tool. Tools can be used for good or ill. This tool is the hotness right now so it's quite overused in a lot of poorly fitting situations. This particular usage serves no socially beneficial purpose and needs to be regulated into non-existence (we at least shouldn't pay people to do it). The tool is still useful for a bunch of things but some people get irrationally defensive if you critique their favorite tool. It's a good tool and it's a flawed tool - like every other tool.
    • muwtyhg 5mo ago
      In your opinion, what is the positive aspect of this kind of AI video/voice generation tool that these videos are using? In my opinion, AI video/voice generation is being used to scam and manipulate people en masse, without a compelling, good use case besides generating more (slop) content.
      • Timwi 4mo ago
        When someone uses AI to make a video, they either have nefarious purposes (such as scamming) in mind or they don't. That's not a matter of your opinion. It's not hard to picture someone making a video with innocuous intent to inform or entertain and using AI in the process does not suddenly make their intention a malicious one.
  • delis-thumbs-7e 5mo ago
    I’m going to steal this one
• maxglute 5mo ago
  >victimized Or you know, preference. Nice steady predictable AI slop delivered at mono qualities can be very comfy. It's like sleep tube, people reading wiki or random articles, comment threads but with varying energy to time pass. It's good enough, better than most human creator content.
• konschubert 5mo ago
  This isn’t a response to you, but just so it has been said: 3 to 8-year-old kids have no business being on YouTube alone. AI or not.
  • Timwi 4mo ago
    I agree, but only because YouTube is a wild west of trash, not because children somehow don't deserve to be entertained. I think that distinction should be made. Instead of focusing on barring children from the bad stuff, it might be worth trying to attract them to the good stuff. (I hear PBS Kids is a good app to leave your child alone with. No personal experience of my own though.)
• HeartStrings 4mo ago
  Elderly fall for slop due to bad vision and bad hearing.
  • bibimsz 4mo ago
    i think its because their brains are rapidly deteriorating, combined with the fact they grew up in a "high trust" world where most people believed everything they heard.
• bauldursdev 4mo ago
  It's not just mind either. I know at least one person whose around 60, still very smart actually, but has diminished vision and hearing. So less able to pick up the obvious signs.
• eks391 4mo ago
  My dad (senior) was tricked by some GTA footage because the game graphics looked realistic enough. Perhaps it was modded because it looked nicer than I remember it, but nonetheless I'm concerned for the inevitable confusion from AI, in the hopeful assumption that it isn't already affecting his judgement.
  • melon18 4mo ago
    Can't imagine how many people are gonna get fooled once GTA 6 drops. Pair that with AI video this realistic and we'll straight up have fake traffic news hitting the headlines.