Comment by StableAlkyne
21 hours ago
People feel strongly about AI generated content; this is a case where false positives can destroy credibility and disrupt careers.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
21 hours ago
People feel strongly about AI generated content; this is a case where false positives can destroy credibility and disrupt careers.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
This isn't even at the level of the spam filter on your email account. Are there some false positives and negatives? Yes. Are there some people sending emails who are negatively affected by falsely ending up in the junk mail folder? Yes. Are we going to turn off spam filtering because of this? No. Why should we accept video spam any more than text spam?
The problem is that it's not SOME false positives, AI detectors so far have been all so comically bad that they might be classified as pseudoscience. Or an artificial false positive generators even.
We'll I'd think that YouTube would have incentive to get it right. Either there are too many false positives and the content creators go away and YouTube collapses. Or there are too many false negatives and the viewers go away, and YouTube collapses. I mean there is a chance that garbage people will ruin video sharing platforms for everyone.
5 replies →
Excellent analogy. I'm going to use that sometime.
Email spam filtering can clearly cause reputational harm too.
They don’t seem to care about false positives anywhere else on the platform. Being at the mercy of automated Google systems comes with the territory.
There will also be tiktok challenges to do a video that YouTube flags as AI without actually using AI.
Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"
This isn't a choice between "perfectly fine how things are now" and "destroying credibility". If it were, you're right - "good enough to be useful" wouldn't be a high enough bar.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.