I just went down an interesting rabbit hole. I’m a huge car guy. Started off by some news videos about Koenigsegg that turned out to be long AI narrated videos of generic footage with very short interview clips with Christian von Koenigsegg himself interspersed in between. Tbh I only watched one, the rest I clicked on just to confirm my suspicion that they’re all bs. Discovered the following YouTube disclaimer on some of the videos:

How this content was made Altered or synthetic content Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.

Now those videos were clickbait and misleading, but they’re far from the worst. They get some hundreds of thousands of views each, and get shat out by these channels at a rapid pace.

Things get more interesting with fake car reviews and such. Years ago you’d see videos that were looking at photos of concept cars and narrating them with a bunch of bullshit.

Now they have AI generate the concept car imagery. The supposed new car looks different in every “photo”. Like completely different designs, down to the entire body shape. AI narrator talking about conservative styling on the Mercedes S-Class saying “around the back you see slimmer taillights” while the image being shown is the front quarter of an extremely low grand tourer type car that couldn’t clear a speed bump, has tire only on the bottom of the wheel (it just disappears as you go higher up the wheel), has no possibility of suspension travel as there’s no distance between the wheel and the top of the wheel well, the wheel itself isn’t entirely round, the brakes look like a cartoon, and while there’s a visible separation between the front bumper and the front quarter panel… There isn’t one between the quarter panel and the hood, or the hood and the front bumper. So really it’s all one piece that can never be removed. I’m surprised the door is separate from the front quarter panel at this point. This video is here. The S-Class is a luxury sedan, available also as a coupe or convertible, but never has it been whatever… this is.

Buick is also bringing back the Series 40 after a century. Looks almost the same too!. Featuring a rear license plate saying “Series 80” in the lovely font called AI slop.

These videos get shat out at an even more rapid pace. Most have relatively few views, some have quite a lot, and there are people asking if they can buy these cars for real. They come up on google when doing highly specific searches to see if some manufacturer has a car in some category, etc.

So it’s similar to the fake movie trailers that have already been talked about, but this is distracting people looking for actual products. It might just be cars in my examples, but I’m sure the same is happening in all kinds of video genres and different product types. I know a lot of you already know about it too, but I was shocked to find out how prevalent it really is.

Also YouTube has the disclaimer that video uploaders can use, and that their own AI tools automatically add, so there’s already a database field they could check. But thay have added no AI content filtering.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
    3·
    3 days ago

    Thing is, there is a lot of extraordinary educational content on YouTube, made by people who have a knack for it and do it as a labor or love.

    Thanks to some YouTube channels like 3Blue1Brown, WelchLabs and Numberphile, I’m getting the hang of Riemann Surfaces, vector spaces and higher dimensions, the importance of prime numbers and Fourier Transforms… there is an embarrassment of riches bubbling behind so much bad faith A.I.-fabricated clickbait garbage that the algorithm pushes.

    There are university professors uploading semester-long courses on cosmology or particle physics. Science channels like ParallaxNick, PBS Spacetime, The History Of The Universe, Terra Physics, The Science Asylum and Ask A Spaceman… many, many others.

    But this YouTube treasure may not appear at first glance, and once you select a good path to follow, you have to cultivate that unavoidable algorithm: subscribing to the proper channels, blocking a seemingly endless barrage pseudo-science and conspiracy bullshit and blocking entire topics and keywords (like Roswell, Niburu, etc).

    Sometimes the algorithm will suggest new things and it will deliver gold, you can feel the power of the tool and it is awesome, but unfortunately it will also often be clickbait crap, and now more and more often it’s with these god-awful A.I. images and pseudo-friendly emotionless generic narrations. Time to take out the digital machete again and hack away ruthlessly, blocking channels and erasing their videos from one’s watch history.

    In fact, right now if anything has so much as a synthetic scent after a minute of watching, it will be purged and blocked.

    But also often, I come across content creators excitedly and clearly explaining the quantum spin of electrons in a two hour video, and it is a glorious sight to behold. Case in point - look up Highly Entropic Mind and his two videos “Understanding QFT”. QFT being Quantum Field Theory.
    In this case, I also check out the channels that they recommend on their account page. That’s a good way of pulling the thread.

    Many of these well-meaning content creators are being drowned by those gaming the algorithm and flooding feeds with crap. So I created a Patreon account and chip in, trying to be a little bit of wind beneath their wings.