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A new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube's feed may consist of AI slop

A new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube's feed may consist of AI slop

aquir

Comments (133)

  • jacquesm
    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.
  • Pooge
    I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm.Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question.My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage.Surely I'm not alone but it surely feels like it.
  • tedk-42
    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
  • reidrac
    It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me.The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
  • 999900000999
    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
  • wenbin
    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...
  • zeristor
    Every time I watch a video it’s like I’m running a Turing test.Mispronunciations could be a giveaway, but then some people may have naïve pronounciations.So many videos about nerd-sniping niche subjects.As though we need to have a new regimen of thought discipline since so much could so easily be list.
  • twoodfin
    HN’s front page isn’t 20% AI-generated—sorry, “cleaned up from my notes”—but it’s a lot closer than it was a few weeks ago.The problem is that it’s working; HN voters seem to love the stuff.
  • renegat0x0
    Don't care. I use my own domain index, which also contains youtube channels, which I use through RSS.https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-DatabaseMost important links are available through a simple searchhttps://rumca-js.github.io/searchI have also RSS searchhttps://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
  • xeonmc
    Google’s two moats, YouTube and Search, both succumbing to the same infestation to destroy its market grip I see.
  • wg0
    Fake Brian Cox and Richard Fynemen are in abundance.Imagine 50 years down the road impossible to tell which things Richard Feynman really said in his lectures and which are all made up.
  • aucisson_masque
    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.
  • jmward01
    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?
  • phplovesong
    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.
  • noduerme
    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.
  • markus_zhang
    AI is OK. I used to ignore AI stuffs on YouTube but in recent months the channel “Napoleons Hill Notes” helped me tremendously. It is an AI voice reading channel.
  • mojuba
    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.
  • shevy-java
    It has really become horrible in the last some days, probably weeks now. It is not just fake-videos AI generated, without Google having any decency to mark it, as it wastes my time and the time of others - but there are now also videos where some videos are real (I know because some of these videos came from years ago), mixed in with AI fake crap. Now, I am able to spot many AI videos, but I bet many other people simply don't have the knowledge. That is also a generational problem, where people have a harder and harder time to separate real from fiction. But I have no desire to waste my time with fake, so Google now has started to kill youtube. I still have use cases of youtube without this problem, e. g. good music (here, whether it is AI generated or not, makes no real difference IF the music is good; but most AI music is crap anyway but I can not listen to it and only focus on good music), but this is getting more and more of a dead end here.Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine.Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here.Google, you are the guilty party.
  • ineedasername
    AI slop is a significant improvement over countless videos in the past few years that were little more than slide decks with bad TTS. The current equivalents are better written, better spoken, better visuals, etc.
  • coffinbirth
    "Deepfake Yanis Varoufakis Videos Are Flooding YouTube": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1ZewbOd2JQThere 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.
  • JoeDaDude
    I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.
  • anovikov
    I thought it was simply the way all youtube videos are now made :) my feed has little but those, i need to search for something specific to see anything else.
  • wrxd
    Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules. Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine.YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader. You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
  • guidedlight
    How is YouTube going to deal with all the storage of these videos?
  • mark_l_watson
    My wife and I pay for YouTube and the prevalence of AI Slop definitely reduces the value we get for our money.YouTube has done a fairly good job over the years of providing useful recommendations but lately I always immediately ‘back out’ of any AI generated videos or materials with robot-voiced narrations. I keep hoping that the algorithms quickly learn to not show me this stuff, but in the meantime I have had to change my viewing habits to following specific channels - and this reduces ‘discoverability.’
  • koakuma-chan
    Works as intended. My YouTube feed is 0% AI slop.
  • PeterStuer
    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.
  • submeta
    Same is true for Pinterest. Try to find human generated interior design images on Pinterest. It’s flooded with AI generated content.
  • alangibson
    I hate to say it, but Zuckerberg is right about where online content is going. The future is just an endless feed of personalized short form AI brain candy.
  • noncoml
    Matches my experience
  • UberFly
    My own "research" has me in complete agreement. Venues like Etsy are now 33% Ai slop now so why should Youtube be any different?
  • Havoc
    Yeah don’t use the feed. Use subscriptions- old school chronological list of things the creators you follow published.I do worry that yt will intentionally break that functionality in their quest for maximum enshitification though
  • ChrisArchitect
  • burnt-resistor
    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.
  • pogue
    This site appears to be an AI slop generator though?
  • throw_m239339
    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...