I feel It is less that AI content is difficult to detect and more that the AI technology Youtube is using to detect it is complete trash.

I respectfully disagree.

Have you seen what Minimax H3 can output, on a desktop? Even dirt-cheap AI video gen is basically undetectable now. I think all YouTube can filter is the absolute “bottom barrel” spammers still using some old model because they don’t know any better.

And if they train detectors on “stereotypical” AI output like Ghibli style or flat colors or whatever, they’re just going to nuke channels like Kurzgesagt while most AI slop spammers adapt to get through. There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

…But also, YT doesn’t even care.

The filters make next quarter look better because they do catch the bottom barrel, and that’s all that matters.

If the slop videos get through, the average user won’t see the difference either, so why should they care?

I wish more people that oppose ai would actually keep up with it so they don’t regurgitate outdated information, or claims that nobody will use it when it stops being subsidized.

To be fair, people generally won’t keep up with something they aren’t interested in, much less something they are actively disinterested in. That’s reasonable.

I do have an irrational pet peeve of people making claims on something they know little about though, which is why I may have come on as hostile…

that’s extremely rational

Makes me angry my country is now split as far as AI slop awareness is concerned: some are opposed (look up so-called Pax Silica), while others are embracing the garbage full on as if it’s gonna make them more money, and still others unaware it could affect them sooner or later, especially as the government thinks AI is a boon when it’s really not.

There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

It’s harder for users as well. Even youtubers I’ve followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as “WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS” with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They’re all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it’s the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn’t answer it. We’ll end up with a new Betteridge’s Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we’ll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we’re all getting ripped off…

Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top. Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don’t appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators. On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they’re spamming or a bot, when it’s just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It’s like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren’t suitable for doing the same job at X.

There’s no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn’t know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren’t good enough either.

Youtube and X is basically a private monopolies. They only care about the profit margins. Any and all extra expenditure to R&D or consumer satisfaction is just a cut to their profits today and since they don’t have any real competition, so why raise quality of service above the bare minimum? Their only real selling point is that everybody uses them, so everybody will have to keep using them, if they want to be seen or access most things. they don’t care if they serve slop, because you and me and the wider masses are going to eat it up anyway.

X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video. YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.

Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on

What’s mostly keeping those platforms afloat is, unfortunately, people in developing countries where social media usage is very heavy to the point it’s literally its own internet such as Facebook’s walled garden.

The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.

But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.

For every ten users who decry AI voices and animation, a thousand more will blindly click “Like” and “Subscribe”. The people have spoken, and they want to eat straight from the fertilizer pile.

People only click like and subscribe because their other options were taken from them. They got tired of the people speaking up so removed the options to do so.

I’ve run my own anecdotal and admittedly small blind trials on friends and family. Most people unfortunately preferred the A.I. slop to real human content. My theory is because it tends to be brought and shiny. The only actual study I could find online, told participants which is which, kind of defeating the purpose in my opinion.

It’s engagement optimized, that’s why.

That’s the whole point of the spam; being engagement bait.

Same thing applies to any human made clickbait, and people have demonstrated they simply cannot help themselves, and click it.

There was recently a study using human short stories and LLM generated short stories prompted to write a similar story. The participants where told which stories were AI generated, but sometimes they were lied to, and told a human-written story was AI generated.

The study showed that people liked the AI stories more. It also showed that if someone has a negative bias against AI generated content, they’d claim the AI story was worse, even if it were actually the human story and they were just told it was AI.

Also, another test was performed where they provided a story and asked them if it was AI generated or human generated. The participants could only tell the AI written story 45% to 50% of the time. Essentially, they were guessing.

More info: theguardian.com/…/ai-generated-stories-rated-bett…

I think many people have taken a mental snapshot of the quality of AI generated content from a couple years ago and just assumed it hasn’t improved since then.

We need a law that requires AI-generated videos to be watermarked and huge fines for the streaming companies that allow unmarked videos.

That won’t work for long. Generation can be hosted in a country outside the jurisdiction.

Current services do need such a law anyway, and many already are watermarked. But I’m just saying it wouldn’t even slow down spammers once they figure it out.

that’s why the law shouldn’t apply to just generation. as long as something is delivered (even if over the internet) to EU places, then the EU law mandating AI labels applies.

Well that would mean holding social media liable.

That would be fantastic. But it seems unlikely, sadly.

To be clear, it’s the streaming companies should be fined. If YouTube shows an unmarked video in the US then they get fined for doing so.

The content generation is another matter that’s more difficult to enforce.