Comment by topspin
20 hours ago
This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Maybe they could hand out lifetime bans to people who upload untagged AI music? Obviously that wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I could see it helping.
I would support a law that requires all AI generated content to be tagged, labeled, or watermarked as AI.
> This isn't possible on Youtube right now.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
There is https://aisloplist.com/ that works pretty much like you have described.
> What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck".
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
It's clear that YouTube doesn't want you to have much influence over your feed. You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you, which would be the simplest thing to implement, and other knobs that previously existed were silently removed.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
> You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, just let me hide all the AI content. Far too often I stumble onto something that looks interesting, and halfway through I realise it's not really saying anything. It's just AI drivel designed to capture my attention and hold it for a while.