Comment by rossant

Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling.

Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.

Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.