Comment by jeffbee
12 hours ago
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.
This is basically my only use for YouTube. “How do I frame my carport” and such where visuals are crucial to understanding. But commentary or plain narrative? It’s painful.
It's difficult for an AI to tell what information from YouTube is correct and reliable and which is pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies.
In that context, I think excluding YouTube as a source makes sense; not because YT has no useful content, but because it has no way of determining useful content.
2 replies →
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'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.
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.
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.
> If the videos are the best presentation of the information, best suited to convey the topic to the audience, then that is valuable
Still doesn’t make them a primary source. A good research agent should be able to jump off the video to a good source.
I think you've never read real investigative journalism before
5 replies →
How does the AI tell the difference between trustworthy YouTube postings, accidental misinformation, deliberate misinformation, plausible-sounding pseudoscience, satire, out-of-date information, and so on?
Some videos are a great source of information; many are the opposite. If AI can't tell the difference (and it can't) then it shouldn't be using them as sources or suggesting them for further study.
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...