When I search YouTube for videos related to my topic of research that I would consider pretty obscure, 95% of the videos are completely AI-generated, with ChatGPT scripts, AI-generated thumbnails, etc. It makes it really difficult to find video sources, so I have mostly given up on finding good information of YouTube nowadays.
For more general topics (smartphone reviews, food, fashion, and other topics that have a wider audience) the abundance of AI-generated videos makes sense. Pumping out thousands of videos that thousands of people will watch and earn a lot of money. But the videos on more obscure topics rarely get many views and there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for them to exist except to piss on people trying to find non-AI-generated sources.
For reference, I am looking for sources for a Physics research project on observed baryon asymmetry in the universe and the different proposed mechanisms to explain it, such as leptogenesis and ew baryogenesis. I am very surprised that topics like baryon asymmetry, CP violation, neutrinos, etc. are filled with AI slop to such an extent. It’s kind of insane. Who’s doing this, how are they doing this, and why???
I guess that’s sort of the whole money making appeal of new AI tools, previously it didn’t make much sense to spend your time and often/usually money to make something if very few would see it, so you focussed on things that get a lot of eyeballs. Now you could more feasibly make something on kind of any topic and not even have to try very hard to do it since it’s pretty well automated. With such low costs, even a tiny return is a positive return and you can just make a lot of stuff.
That said, I would think it still at the moment required someone directing the tools to generate something on a given topic and it does seem pretty unlikely someone trying to pump out videos with ads on any and every topic for a few cents of revenue hoping it all adds up would be able to have conceived of the topics you’re seeing so I guess my theory falls apart there.
What you are seeing is NotebookLM it is by Google it is meant as a study tool. You can go and upload a couple PDFs and generate a podcast to listen to while you work. I would say like many things automated - if you cannot do it yourself than it can benefit you but if you can read the paper and understand it well the AI talking about it is probably going to be the worse than just reading it yourself. Maybe it could be good again if you wanted to grab a bunch of niche topics and see if something with a big perception could offer any unique insights.
https://notebooklm.google/ it can actually be nice if you just want to passively get the gist of something while you are doing something else.
Please think about all the horrid responses in this thread with no fucking clue what they are on about these dickheads just saw an opportunity to express hate these are not moral people.
It doesn’t matter that these niche topics don’t get many views because making
themthese videos requires no effort. They’re throwing everything at the wall and some of it will stick, even if it’s just for a little while.Also, they want to drown out legitimate sources.
Edit: clarity.
they want to drown out legitimate sources.
Who would “they” be, in these cases?
The people making loads of AI slop videos. Or what are you asking? I don’t have any names.
Yeah, I’m just curious who you suppose the people in question might be. Just a random distribution, or could there be some type of pattern there?
Everyone who wants to make money from YouTube ads. I don’t think there is a big conspiracy to discover here.
Let’s rewind a bit, shall we? I wasn’t expecting any conspiracy theories, but when the commenter above stated:
Also, they want to drown out legitimate sources.
That sounded like an interesting assertion, possibly hinting at a group-level effort, which is why I asked them. Thanks for adding in your opinion, I guess.
Wait. Did you interpret “they” as “((((they))))” or something? ಠ_ಠ
Haha, it felt a bit shades of ((((they)))), yes. Anyway, I was just curious if you had any particular group in mind.
It’s not a significant question, so no worries!
Good lord, I was wrecking my brain about what you were even saying, hah. I know nothing about the makers of AI slop videos other than that they fucking annoy me but anyone suggesting that they’re somehow all members of any one specific group of people can fuck right off.
Easy, now. I do think that chatter in this thread has produced some good candidate groups, however.
Sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking.
It’s basic SEO slop logic applied to video.
All the popular topics are already crowded, so you shotgun very specific search terms in the hope of capturing the majority of people searching for that term because nobody else has anything on it.
For instance, if you have a web shop selling fish equipment, “how to keep fish” is probably extremely crowded, so you would target a bunch of specific search terms like “how to teach crabs to read classical Latin”
Now I wanna learn how to teach crabs to read classical Latin.
My bet- it’s the conspiracy nuts.
When AI videos started to flood YouTube, science was one of the biggest areas. It’s stuff like “scientists discover potential signs of vacuum collapse”, then have 4 minutes of clips before going full AI and rambling about quantum physics for an hour
I think they just take a grab bag of technical terms and theories, have AI spit out a title, and feed it into a video pipeline.
Then they bait and switch you
Now throw in a title about Elon musk discovering aliens, and anyone who clicks on it is probably low functioning enough not to realize
My guess(!): Big topics are already crowded by big channels which get an algorithmic boost because of their past success. Its harder to get your slop prominently shown and establish your content slop farm with these topics. While with niche topics its easier to get your video to the top of the search results.
There are opensource tools like https://n8n.io/ to automate the creation of slop content. From what i heard its piss easy to setup. Like here is a half an hour tutorial to set you up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u54cy2nQigThen you shit out the slop content and hope your channel picks up. If it fails to drive numbers you abandon it and start with the next channel with the next topic variation. If you get lucky and the algorithm blesses you, you continue to shit out hundreds of videos.
As seen eg in the video of redlyne about the dead internet theory. Where he looks a bit into the slop channels on youtube and other stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJKOYOkRMkFirst line of the pitch for n8n lol:
Build with the precision of code or the speed of drag-n-drop.
At least they’re upfront about the tradeoffs
Then you shit out the slop content and hope your channel picks up. If it fails to drive numbers you abandon it and start with the next channel with the next topic variation. If you get lucky and the algorithm blesses you, you continue to shit out hundreds of videos.
I’m not even sure that you would have to do the abandoning part. There’s likely toolkits that let you upload to multiple channels at once. You can just start them up and spread them out as you wish.
Why abandon a channel when it costs nothing to upload to it, and it might go viral one day?
A lot of older videos can be randomly promoted by the algorithm.
Dead internet.
Even the replies to this post are AI.
Even you?
Everyone on
RedditLemmy is a bot, except you.
This is blatant bigotry against artificial lifeforms.
I’m being oppressed — mods pls ban this human scum
/j
Got me.
Just tells you how popular physics is among kids.
Can you link some videos? I would assume that the videos come from some reckless punks who are pushing for the idea that leptogenesis has also occurred prior to baryogenesis. They flood the zone to get new kids early onto their side.
Interetingly, most of the AI-generated videos I see are from “Physics Frontier” and “Profiles in Politics”(which isn’t about politics at all, weird).
The AI-generated videos helpfully have a big red border (or rather, unhelpfully, as it draws more attention to them)
Thanks. That border is unhelpful indeed.
You baryodorks just can’t take the L can you.
This is exactly the same thing that happened when search engine started to get shitty a few years ago. It’s just another step into enshitification :(
Just guessing, but maybe content creators that focus on those niche topics are generating those for their videos? Like a youtuber who makes videos about blackholes uses AI-generated animations to depict stuff, for example.
That doesn’t explain the AI-generated models on the thumbnails holding up a small hand-sized globe (which is a geography thing, mind you!)
Software that’s easy to use will enable people to crank out content. Most of that content will be bad. But there could be a few gems hidden in the “ocean of gray goo” of cheap content. This has been going on for a long time. People were talking about this happening with music tools decades ago.
Bad content with new tools isn’t a new issue for sure… but it seems pretty dominant in places
Another example is/was every time a space X launch happening (particularly starship) if you search space x or elon musk on youtube. That used to be pretty crypto currency targeted slop though
