[Kuiper]

There is a huge audience for AI-generated content on YouTube, though admittedly many of them are oblivious to the fact that they are watching AI-generated content.

Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxvTjrsNtxA

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDnMpuSYic

These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)

If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.

The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.

[paradox460]

Reddit has been full of bad fake stories for ages. All that AI does is automate it

[Imustaskforhelp]

Karma farming accounts I guess.

I loved it when sometimes on r/Aita or something people would call out the sheer inconsistencies of the karma farming accounts

"So you are telling me that you were 26 year old and now you are suddenly 40??"

Or just sheer inconsistencies which can make one laugh at the whole situation.

[paradox460]

The biggest problem is every story telling sub eventually grows the rule "don't question the story"

I'm not sure why the mods adopt it. Maybe they think having a comment section full of people calling out a lie isn't good or something, but whenever the rule goes into place it's like a switch is thrown, and shortly thereafter all the stores in that sub will rot away into lies

Happened to tales from tech support, I don't work here, several parenting subreddits, aita, and more

[lawlessone]

Their rate of uploads makes it obvious too. 3 hour videos multiple times a week.

Compare that Fall Of Civilizations (a fantastic podcast btw) that often has 7 months between videos.

[ropable]

I really, really wish that Youtube would start tagging this category of video to increase the visibility to end users. My feeling is that the main reason this content might be "winning" in the market is the sheer volume.

[rockskon]

Remains to be seen if that's sustainable or a flash in the pan.

[cruffle_duffle]

Dude I had to stop watching that “sleepy whatever” channel. It was so blatant simply based upon how frequent the “thing” was posting. It’s simply not possible for a human to crank out well researched two hour long videos daily. And even then, the things content is so repetitive in each video (granted that might be the point, it is “sleepless historian” after all).

That sleepless channel is one of an entire series of very similar channels with the same voice and same “style” of content. Some get lots of views, others not so much.

Honestly, eventually people will spot that shit stuff from a mile away. None of it is unique nor does it add any “entropy” as some other commenter here said.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I can attest to this.

I don't remember what channel but recently I have been into dexter and I have been watching a lot of dexter related content on youtube and I once think that I saw either down-right AI generated or very LLM-y style video / channel in general. Like, the way they speak etc. felt very AI generated imo.

Nobody questioned it in the comments.

I genuinely started wondering what is the point of AI generated content when people will find out its AI and then reject it or shame them etc. but I think that either I believed that humans in general would detect it more often or maybe the fact that people would start using AI in very sneaky ways maybe to not be labelled AI slop while still being very AI assisted.

I don't have problem with AI assistance but I just feel this hate when an AI generated voice speaks AI generated text which I recognize due to the patterns like

"It isn't just X, Its y" and the countless others examples.

[anal_reactor]

Hot take but I don't care if the content I consume is AI-generated or not. First of all, while sometimes I need high-effort quality content, sometimes I want my brain to rest and then AI-generated slop is completely okay. He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone. Second, just because something is AI-generated it doesn't automatically mean it's slop, just like human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free. Boring History For Sleep allowed me to see medieval times in a more emotional way, something that history books "this king did this and then won but then in 1274 was poisoned and died" never did.

[blargey]

> He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone

I'm not in a rock-throwing mood, but I qualify for that easily. False consensus effect cuts against AI...mass-production? aficionados just as much as hardline opponents.

[FridgeSeal]

> He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone

Stand by then, because I have rocks and according to you, licence to throw them.

You are free to watch all the slop you want. All I want is for your slop, to not be at the cost of all other media and content. Have a SlopTube, have SlopFlix, go for it! But do it in a way that is _separate_ and doesn’t inflict it on the rest of us, who would _like_ human produced content, even if the AI stuff is “just as good”.

[ehnto]

Your later point is hard to convey to people who don't want to hear it.

I don't want AI content, even if it is as good, or even if it were better. The human element IS the point, not an implementation detail.

An AI song about sailing at sea is meaningless because I know the AI has never sailed at sea. This is a standard we hold humans to, authenticity is important even for human artists, why would we give AI a pass on it?

And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.

[akoboldfrying]

> An AI song about sailing at sea is meaningless because I know the AI has never sailed at sea.

Human singers often sing about topics they have no authentic experience with. Some pop singers exclusively sing songs written by other people.

You're entitled to dislike AI music, but I think your attempt to justify this dislike doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

[ehnto]

I don't really want to get pedantic about this, but I also don't listen to pop and authenticity in lyrics is important to me. But authenticity in creation is just as important, I listen to a lot of music with no lyrics at all and it is important to me that it was borne of someone's creative experience.

Regardless of any of that, I could also say that I don't like AI music because I prefer my artists to have hot showers and it's somewhat none of your business, respectfully.

[anal_reactor]

HackerNews holds AI to much higher standards than humans. In other news, water is wet.

[ehnto]

You both seem to have assumed I don't hold these standards to real artists, which is nuanced but more or less wrong. I don't know why you made that assumption.

[Marsymars]

> And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.

Would you? That seems achievable with current technology, bolt a PC with a camera onto a sailing ship and prompt it to compose text based on some image recognition.

[ehnto]

For sure, I wouldn't read it as if it were a human story though since I can relate and empathise with the human. But it would be interesting to see what kind of experience it had and how it records and explains it.

[GrzegorzWidla]

For it to have meaning it would have to be an AI without prior experience or knowledge of sailing embedded into its systems.

[danudey]

Just let me choose a filter when I'm doing a search on YouTube and that's a good start. Beyond that I can just block or 'don't recommend this channel' for anything that shows up in my feed, but the fact that these platforms don't let people say 'I don't want this garbage' is the biggest issue I have with it.

[anal_reactor]

No, you get your separate HumanTube.

[zrobotics]

I mean, that certainly is a hot take, but you are getting down voted without people responding why.

I can certainly understand just wanting filler content just for background noise, I had the history for sleep channel recommended to me via the algorithm because I do use those types of videos specifically to fall asleep to. However, and I don't know which video it was, but I clicked on a video, and within 5 minutes there were so many historical inaccuracies that I got annoyed enough to get out of bed and add the channel to my block list.

That's my main problem with most AI generated content, it's believable enough to pass a general plausibility filter but upon any level of examination it falls flat with hallucinations and mistruths. That channel should be my jam, I'm always looking for new recorded lectures or long form content specifically to fall asleep to. I'm definitely not a historian and I wouldn't even call myself a dilettante, so the level of inaccuracies was bad enough that even I caught it in a subject I'm not at all an expert in. You may think you are learning something, but the information quality is so bad that you are actively getting more misinformed on the topic from AI slop like that.

[anal_reactor]

I feel like people's pride is getting in the way. On this website people want to present themselves as intelectuals, and anything that breaks this image is a big no-no. Nobody wants to watch slop, everyone wants quality content, yet for some curious, inexplicable reason that scientist all over the world scratch their heads over, most TV channels start as "The Learning Channel" and end up as TLC.

Regarding the second point, that's true, but I feel like we're focusing on worst examples instead of best examples. It's like, when I was a kid my parents would yell at me "you believe everything they say on the internet!" and then they would watch TV programs explaining why it's scientifically certain that the world would end in 2012. There's huge confirmation bias "AI-generated content bad" because you don't notice the good AI-generated content, or good use cases of low-quality content. Circling back to Boring History To Sleep, even if half of it is straight-up lies, that's completely irrelevant, because that's not the point here. The point here is to have the listener use their imagination and feel the general vibe of historical times. I distinctly remember listening to the slop and at some point really, really feeling like I was in some peasant's medieval hut. Even if the image I had was full of inaccuracies, that's completely fine, because AI allowed me to do something I'd never done before. If I ever want to fix my misconceptions I'll just watch more slop because if you listen to 100 different AI-generated podcasts on the same topic, each time it'll hallucinate in a different way, which means that truthful information is the only information that will consistently appear throughout majority of them, and that's what my brain will pick up.

> when life gives you lemons, make lemonade

[watwut]

And people who wanted that quality content alwaya desert the channel you talk about. Your argument really boils down to "if you are not the biggest economic driver, cheap to produce then you have no right for that preference".

And even worst "serious history dont need to exist, because most people just want something relaxing after stresful day".

[anal_reactor]

You're absolutely right!

[Imustaskforhelp]

If you want AI-generated c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ (slop), then you should go ahead and generate it yourself via chatgpt,claude,aistudio gemini and many many others...

> human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free

I can agree but I wouldn't call human generated content slop, more like messy at worst. Human generated content can actually grow and be unique whereas AI generated slop cannot