Comment by gumboshoes
11 hours ago
I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.
> I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time.
I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.
When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple’s AI to do the rewrite), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I figured it would be good to send the person articles generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person listen to in a week?
I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.
Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe websites.
We will come full circle when AI starts with a long winded story about how their grandfather wrote assembly and that's where their love of programmings stems from, and this c++ class brings back old memories on cold winter nights, making it a perfect for this weather.
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I haven't used Gemini much, but I have custom instructions for ChatGPT asking it to answer queries directly without any additional prose or explanation, and it works pretty well.
It works to cut down on verbosity, but verbosity is also how it thinks. You could be lobotomizing your responses
The other week, I was asking Gemini how to take apart my range, and it linked an instructional Youtube video. I clicked on it, only to be instantly rickrolled.
This is the best argument for AI sentience yet.
That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.
YouTube has almost no original knowledge.
Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions.
I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.
YouTube has a lot of junk, but there are also a lot of useful videos that demonstrate various practical skills or the experiences of using certain products, or recordings of certain natural environments, which are original, in the sense that before YouTube you could not find equivalent content anywhere, except by knowing personally people who could show you such things, but there would have been very small chances to find one near you, while through YouTube you can find one who happens to live on the opposite side of the World and who can share with you the experience in which you are interested.
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While there is a lot of low-effort content, there is also some pretty involved stuff.
The investigation into Honey’s shenanigans[0] was investigated and presented first on YouTube (to the best of my knowledge). The fraud in Minnesota was also broken by a YouTuber who just testified to Congress[1]. There are people doing original work on there, you just have to end up in an algorithm that surfaces it… or seek it out.
In other cases people are presenting stuff I wouldn’t otherwise know about, and getting access to see it at levels I wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, like Cleo Abram’s[0] latest video about LIGO[1]. Yes, it’s a mostly entertaining overview of what’s going on, not a white paper on the equipment, but this is probably more in depth than what a science program on TV in the 80s or 90s would have been… at least on par.
There are also full class lectures, which people can access without being enrolled in a school. While YouTube isn’t the original source, it is still shared in full, not summarized or changed for entertainment purposes.
[0] https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk (part 1 of 3)
[1] https://youtu.be/vmOqH9BzKIY
[2] https://youtu.be/kr3iXUcNt2g
[3] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/learn-more
I'm not looking for original knowledge when I go to YouTube to learn something. I just want someone who's good at explaining a math concept or who has managed to get the footage I want to see about how something is done.
I think that's the wrong metric for evaluating videos.
I've noticed that the YouTubers I enjoy the most are the ones that are good presenter's, good editor's, and have a traditional text blog as well.
You are being dismissive, though. There is no "original knowledge" anywhere. If the videos are the best presentation of the information, best suited to convey the topic to the audience, then that is valuable. Humans learn better from visual information conveyed at the same time as spoken language, because that exploits multiple independent brain functions at the same time. Reading does not have this property. Particularly for novices to a topic, videos can more easily convey the mental framework necessary for deeper understanding than text can. Experts will prefer the text, but they are rarer.
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I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.
Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes.
Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for accuracy.
There is too much information that is only available in video form. You can use an LLM with the transcript quite effectively these days. I also run videos at higher speed and find that it doesn't help as much because it's a content density issue. Writers usually put more information into fewer words than speakers. Perhaps audio may not be as high-bandwidth a medium as text inherently. However, with an LLM you can tune up and down the text to your standard. I find it worthwhile to also ask for specific quotes, then find the right section of the video and watch it.
e.g. this was very useful when I recently clogged the hot-end of my 3d printer. Quick scan with LLM, ask quote, Cmd-F in Youtube Transcript, then click on timestamp and watch. `yt-dlp` can download the transcript and you can put prospective videos into this machine to identify ones that matter.
YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious personalities, etc.
By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like & subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a straight to the point article/text.
Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while doing something related to said reference material.
> If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers.
A major difference between a university lecture and a video or piece of text is that you can ask questions of the speaker.
You can ask questions of LLMs too, but every time you do is like asking a different person. Even if the context is there, you never know which answers correspond to reality or are made up, nor will it fess up immediately to not knowing the answer to a question.
There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text.
Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.
As someone who used to do instructional writing, I'm not sure that's true for those specific examples, but I acknowledge that making a video is exponentially cheaper and easier than generating good diagrams, illustrations, or photography with clear steps to follow.
Or to put it another way, if you were building a Lego set, would you rather follow the direction book, or follow along with a video? I fully acknowledge video is better for some things (try explaining weight lifting in text, for example, it's not easy), but a lot of Youtube is covering gaps in documentation we used to have in abundance.
This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...