Comment by dvfjsdhgfv

3 months ago

So we have two universes. One is pushing generated content up our throats - from social media to operating systems - and another universe where people actively decide not to have anything to do with it.

I wonder where the obstinacy on the part of certain CEOs come from. It's clear that although such content does have its fans (mostly grouped in communities), people at large just hate arificially-generated content. We had our moment, it was fun, it is no more, but these guys seem obsessed in promoting it.

There is a huge audience for AI-generated content on YouTube, though admittedly many of them are oblivious to the fact that they are watching AI-generated content.

Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxvTjrsNtxA

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDnMpuSYic

These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)

If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.

The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.

  • Reddit has been full of bad fake stories for ages. All that AI does is automate it

    • Karma farming accounts I guess.

      I loved it when sometimes on r/Aita or something people would call out the sheer inconsistencies of the karma farming accounts

      "So you are telling me that you were 26 year old and now you are suddenly 40??"

      Or just sheer inconsistencies which can make one laugh at the whole situation.

      1 reply →

  • Their rate of uploads makes it obvious too. 3 hour videos multiple times a week.

    Compare that Fall Of Civilizations (a fantastic podcast btw) that often has 7 months between videos.

  • I really, really wish that Youtube would start tagging this category of video to increase the visibility to end users. My feeling is that the main reason this content might be "winning" in the market is the sheer volume.

  • Dude I had to stop watching that “sleepy whatever” channel. It was so blatant simply based upon how frequent the “thing” was posting. It’s simply not possible for a human to crank out well researched two hour long videos daily. And even then, the things content is so repetitive in each video (granted that might be the point, it is “sleepless historian” after all).

    That sleepless channel is one of an entire series of very similar channels with the same voice and same “style” of content. Some get lots of views, others not so much.

    Honestly, eventually people will spot that shit stuff from a mile away. None of it is unique nor does it add any “entropy” as some other commenter here said.

  • I can attest to this.

    I don't remember what channel but recently I have been into dexter and I have been watching a lot of dexter related content on youtube and I once think that I saw either down-right AI generated or very LLM-y style video / channel in general. Like, the way they speak etc. felt very AI generated imo.

    Nobody questioned it in the comments.

    I genuinely started wondering what is the point of AI generated content when people will find out its AI and then reject it or shame them etc. but I think that either I believed that humans in general would detect it more often or maybe the fact that people would start using AI in very sneaky ways maybe to not be labelled AI slop while still being very AI assisted.

    I don't have problem with AI assistance but I just feel this hate when an AI generated voice speaks AI generated text which I recognize due to the patterns like

    "It isn't just X, Its y" and the countless others examples.

  • Hot take but I don't care if the content I consume is AI-generated or not. First of all, while sometimes I need high-effort quality content, sometimes I want my brain to rest and then AI-generated slop is completely okay. He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone. Second, just because something is AI-generated it doesn't automatically mean it's slop, just like human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free. Boring History For Sleep allowed me to see medieval times in a more emotional way, something that history books "this king did this and then won but then in 1274 was poisoned and died" never did.

    • > He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone

      I'm not in a rock-throwing mood, but I qualify for that easily. False consensus effect cuts against AI...mass-production? aficionados just as much as hardline opponents.

    • > He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone

      Stand by then, because I have rocks and according to you, licence to throw them.

      You are free to watch all the slop you want. All I want is for your slop, to not be at the cost of all other media and content. Have a SlopTube, have SlopFlix, go for it! But do it in a way that is _separate_ and doesn’t inflict it on the rest of us, who would _like_ human produced content, even if the AI stuff is “just as good”.

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    • I mean, that certainly is a hot take, but you are getting down voted without people responding why.

      I can certainly understand just wanting filler content just for background noise, I had the history for sleep channel recommended to me via the algorithm because I do use those types of videos specifically to fall asleep to. However, and I don't know which video it was, but I clicked on a video, and within 5 minutes there were so many historical inaccuracies that I got annoyed enough to get out of bed and add the channel to my block list.

      That's my main problem with most AI generated content, it's believable enough to pass a general plausibility filter but upon any level of examination it falls flat with hallucinations and mistruths. That channel should be my jam, I'm always looking for new recorded lectures or long form content specifically to fall asleep to. I'm definitely not a historian and I wouldn't even call myself a dilettante, so the level of inaccuracies was bad enough that even I caught it in a subject I'm not at all an expert in. You may think you are learning something, but the information quality is so bad that you are actively getting more misinformed on the topic from AI slop like that.

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    • If you want AI-generated c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ (slop), then you should go ahead and generate it yourself via chatgpt,claude,aistudio gemini and many many others...

      > human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free

      I can agree but I wouldn't call human generated content slop, more like messy at worst. Human generated content can actually grow and be unique whereas AI generated slop cannot

> I wonder where the obstinacy on the part of certain CEOs come from.

I can tell you: their board, mostly. Few of whom ever used LLMs seriousl. But they react to wall street and that signal was clear in the last few years

  • "Completely detached from reality" we used to call it. But where is the money coming from? Is it because we abolished the idea of competition, they never suffer negative impacts of bad decisions any more?

    • We are in a bad situation. Some of our biggest and best companies went from being "capex lite" to "capex light money on fire" and caused a capex light money on fire social contagion. The money is from debt financing. Things are bad and we don't even know who is completely full of shit because we are still at high tide.

Full on sunk cost fallacy and "business" hysteria. There is no logic, only fads and demands for exponential growth now and also forever.

The CEOs obstinacy comes from simple economics: the cost of producing content with AI is trending toward zero, which allows for scaling content farms to unprecedented sizes. It's a constant race for attention, so the goal is no longer quality, but volume

you have a very narrow definition of "people"

on Instagram AI content is highly popular, some videos have 50mil views and half a million likes

  • And if you believe any of those numbers mean anything, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

If creators are required to disclose that they used AI to create, modify, or manipulate content then I should be able to filter out content created with AI. Even if I'm thinking of a specific video it's getting harder to find things because of the ridiculous amount of mass-produced slop out there.

I don't really care if people produce this sort of crap; let the market sort it out, maybe something of value will come of it. It's the fact that, as Kagi points out, it's getting more and more difficult to produce anything of value because content creators operating in good faith with good intentions get drowned out by slop peddlers who have no such limitations or morals.

not exactly nothing to do with it, they still use generative AI to assist search

and saying 'it is no more'... sigh. such a weird take. the world's coming for you