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.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
I feel like the search result of YouTube videos on Google search is much worse than the result on YouTube itself. It's strange because Google develop both Google and YouTube search. It's like reverse Reddit, where the website's search is so unusable you have to search on Google like "xxx reddit".
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.
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.
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
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.
Another common theme is to kill rare animals to stage cool photographs.
However, I don't assume AI slop will (fully) replace that cruelty, unfortunately. But maybe using AI slop will be easier than animal abuse/killing so that those business models run dry for the most part.
I see a lot of educational animal videos that copy the content of BBC Earth only to replace David Attenborough voice with AI, and it unreasonably irritates me.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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?
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)
do you have an account about which "you care somehow", like banning/disabling specific channels explicitly?
Ive found out: If I tell youtube what I want by sometimes thumb-up/down and explicitly clicking on "no more vids from this channel", then the results a) much better and most of the trash is removed.
Though, new AI-slop channels popup some days - esp. new/fresh channels, but these you can ban anyway since most new channels are AI slop. or "XY ... official" or "XY .. best of" or "XY .. clips" or "XY... fails"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
E.g.: Just for entertainment I recently searched for information on a new LLM model. The result was filled with AI garbage. I stumbled upon videos with AI generated content, presented by an AI generated voice and an AI generated human. And if it is not something like that, YouTube at least lies to me about the language of the video and tries to make me listen to an AI voice which is equally vile.
There are times where I constantly have to close videos after a couple of seconds. It is unbearable. At least they should mark these videos clearly. At best they should allow me to filter them out but of course they won't do that or else they couldn't make the experience on their platform even worse than it already is, what seems to be their real goal.
That's a skill issue on your part. Do not use YouTube to search for information. If you need to find information on a new LLM model, look for official documentation from the model's maker. This applies to everything.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Kagi search. I've never looked back. It's what Google used to be and should have stayed.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
Happy user of kagi for several years. This is the opposite of my experience. Your comment strikes me as dishonest.
I feel like the search result of YouTube videos on Google search is much worse than the result on YouTube itself. It's strange because Google develop both Google and YouTube search. It's like reverse Reddit, where the website's search is so unusable you have to search on Google like "xxx reddit".
Gemini seems heavily tuned to return YouTube sources too
Example?
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.
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.
Can I ask why you’re still using Google to search at this point?
There are ppl that depend on me for tech support. What search engine should I install on their phones?
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
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.
Source?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-fake-...
Another common theme is to kill rare animals to stage cool photographs. However, I don't assume AI slop will (fully) replace that cruelty, unfortunately. But maybe using AI slop will be easier than animal abuse/killing so that those business models run dry for the most part.
I see a lot of educational animal videos that copy the content of BBC Earth only to replace David Attenborough voice with AI, and it unreasonably irritates me.
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.
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-fak...
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
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
Its channels from Spain, so presumably appeals to Spanish speaking countries.
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.
Google’s two moats, YouTube and Search, both succumbing to the same infestation to destroy its market grip I see.
Ah, that's what the TPUs are for.
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?
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)
do you have an account about which "you care somehow", like banning/disabling specific channels explicitly? Ive found out: If I tell youtube what I want by sometimes thumb-up/down and explicitly clicking on "no more vids from this channel", then the results a) much better and most of the trash is removed.
Though, new AI-slop channels popup some days - esp. new/fresh channels, but these you can ban anyway since most new channels are AI slop. or "XY ... official" or "XY .. best of" or "XY .. clips" or "XY... fails"
"Deepfake Yanis Varoufakis Videos Are Flooding YouTube": 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same is true for Pinterest. Try to find human generated interior design images on Pinterest. It’s flooded with AI generated content.
How is YouTube going to deal with all the storage of these videos?
Maybe they will avoid the storage cost by generating this slop on the fly; who would notice?
Matches my experience
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.
Works as intended. My YouTube feed is 0% AI slop.
Same as mine. I just don't use YouTube at all and search for information on alternative sources, preferably in text form.
Could you elaborate? What have you done to achieve a 0% slop ratio?
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.
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-recom...)
Your recommendations depend on what you watch. If you don't watch AI slop, you will not receive AI slop recommendations. This is what works for me.
> This is what works for me.
Than you are the lucky one.
E.g.: Just for entertainment I recently searched for information on a new LLM model. The result was filled with AI garbage. I stumbled upon videos with AI generated content, presented by an AI generated voice and an AI generated human. And if it is not something like that, YouTube at least lies to me about the language of the video and tries to make me listen to an AI voice which is equally vile.
There are times where I constantly have to close videos after a couple of seconds. It is unbearable. At least they should mark these videos clearly. At best they should allow me to filter them out but of course they won't do that or else they couldn't make the experience on their platform even worse than it already is, what seems to be their real goal.
That's a skill issue on your part. Do not use YouTube to search for information. If you need to find information on a new LLM model, look for official documentation from the model's maker. This applies to everything.
My own "research" has me in complete agreement. Venues like Etsy are now 33% Ai slop now so why should Youtube be any different?
This site appears to be an AI slop generator though?
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.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403805
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...
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.
Because quantity > quality, as long as Google keeps making money from your time, engagement and attention. Easy.