I've probably been underestimating how much AI slop is inundating YouTube.

[highplainsdem]

I was searching YouTube for the song title "Saint Rita" - a new song I haven't yet heard by a British band I like, a song they debuted at a recent festival - and I'd had no luck finding it with the band name, so I decided just to search for that title, in videos uploaded in the last month. I figured there couldn't be too many videos to scroll through with that limited a search.

Wrong. I got quite a few videos because the past month included her saints day - those were videos from various churches around the world.

But I got much more AI slop uploaded to YouTube in the last month. At least dozens of AI slop videos, and possibly hundreds, about that saint, all created and uploaded in just a few weeks. After all, using AI tools requires very little work, or even any real interest in a subject.

It's becoming more and more obvious that we could soon have more AI slop on YouTube than anything else. More AI slop about ANY subject, including an Italian nun who lived six centuries ago. Videos done by people (or content farms) with no expertise on that subject. Just more AI garbage, patched together with mindless AI tools in the hope it might make the AI user a bit of money. A tsunami of slop that could bury everything else - every video done with real care by people who knew what they were doing.

A nightmare that couldn't happen without this harmful tech.

Sometimes I wish the AI bros could be sentenced to watch nothing but AI slop for the rest of their lives.

[cachukis]

1. Worried that AI slop will destroy reality in research.

[highplainsdem]

3. GenAI is destroying almost everything it touches (it's the Trump of technologies).

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220879208

[CurtEastPoint]

2. yes... make AI bros watch it like this.....

[highplainsdem]

4. They would deserve it.

[Maninacan]

5. Pathe films

Have seen AI copies similar to Pathe films while looking for historical events. Why?

[highplainsdem]

7. GenAI tools are plagiarism machines.

[Sympthsical]

6. As a history documentary enjoyer, it is truly irritating

I like to type in things and add videos to a watch later list I often put on at bedtime to fall asleep to.

There are so many with AI voice overs now. Even though many of those voices are quite good, they all start to sound exactly the same in modulation, cadence, etc. They narrate as images, paintings, and bits of nonsensical art float across the screen.

It looks like a documentary an actual YouTuber would produce, but it's not.

And there's no editing. It's crazy. The people posting don't seem to notice when the documentary repeats the topic almost word for word. I was listening to one the other day, and it was like, "This is the third time I've heard this exact same three paragraph spiel." You can tell the scripts have been run through ChatGPT or similar.

We shall not get into the errors. I have run across some big ones. Just try being knowledgeable about, say, the Wars of the Roses, and then make it through one of these AI documentaries. They get entire names and sequences of events wrong.

Astronomy videos are getting bad about this as well. They just repeat nonsense over and over and over until it becomes a kind of unintelligible background noise while constantly flashing windows wallpapers across the screen. I was listening to one about black hole formation where I wasn't sure if I was having a stroke, because I couldn't follow the nonsensical word spew.

More and more, I'm scaling down to only going with channels run by humans I'm familiar with. People like ASMR Historian or podcasts by actual credentialed historians.

It's kind of a shame, because I really enjoyed smaller channels who were putting that kind of content out there for the love of the game, but now they're getting crowded out by the sheer volume of empty content that gets pumped out in increasingly vast quantities.

[highplainsdem]

11. Don't be surprised if there are soon AI copies of those channels by real people you trust. Much as I hate

to think of it.

I was just on YouTube looking at a reggae song that had been posted in Music Appreciation. One of the YouTube recommendations only a couple of videos below was a channel for AI slop videos of Gregorian chant, over a hundred AI videos posted since November, roughly one every two days. AI-generated fake Gregorian chant, AI video of monks singing in preposterous AI cathedrals, video lengths from half an hour to 2-1/2 hours. Latin lyrics. No idea how accurate the Latin is, or what it's saying.

Some - not all - of the video descriptions admit they're AI, but a lot of people never read the video descriptions. These should all have banners across the thumbnail saying they're AI.

Some nitwit thought the world needed AI Gregorian chants.

[msongs]

8. tons of history videos, nothing but Ai slide shows. new channels posting dozens a week. if it's less than

A year old it's highly likely ai

[highplainsdem]

12. Yes. Good chance it's AI if it's 1-2 years old, too. A script written by AI and AI images could show up in

videos a few years old.

A professor at Wharton who's a huge fan of AI has admitted anything more recent than 2022 might have been created at least in part with AI. My March 2024 post about that:

An academic fan of AI, who found an AI fake bio of himself, just compared AI to the meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218765223

ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, making text generators easy and free to use. Image generators were still pretty crude in 2022 but got much better in 2023. So did AI voice generators. AI video and music generators were becoming fairly good in 2024.

[canetoad]

9. I agree with

Everything you said and have very similar tastes to yourself. I hate the 'rebranders' those who take reputable docos rename them and put them on YouTube with a garish AI thumbnail.

The voices - there's always something wrong with pronunciation or cadence. It's a plague on society.

[highplainsdem]

14. It's destroying YouTube, and hurting the creatives who put the most work into their videos.

And doing incalculable harm with AI misinformation. Some of which is aimed at children.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221114561

[Ursus Rex]

10. It's a LOT

I’m a fan of outdoor and camping videos and the slop I see advertised after like 2 videos is insane: monotone inflection narration, imagery that has only the vaguest connection, etc. It’s making the whole platform very off-putting.

[highplainsdem]

15. True. I miss the YouTube that existed before AI slop.

[Straw Man]

13. As if there weren't enough human-generated slop inundating the cyberverse, ...

... now we have to deal with machine-generated slop.

[highplainsdem]

17. AI slop is a much worse problem because it's so easy to generate.

[dalton99a]

16. Kick