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Was watching a history YouTube video when I realized they are all AI
Ink Explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_Ph2q6uIM
Genius History: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHCamT4zfH4
It is the exact same AI voice. How sad.
At this point just assume any video that’s purely voiceover on top of rolling b-roll or stock-footage to be AI.
I even see a lot of videos with actual people talking at the camera where the script they’re reading is clearly AI. They all do that thing where they sort of talk around the point and use weird metaphors.
In their defense, I've been using weird metaphors my entire life. Pretty sure that's just the way my brain is wired.
It's not weird—it's a unique and powerful way to see the world.
Weird ceased to be an insult since I discovered Monty Python in 1992 and Weird Al in 1994.
Nice try, but the LLMs put spaces around their em dashes
So do I! 😩
Sometimes they do — but sometimes they don't. It's not consistent within the same model; it varies significantly.
I think the last channel I watch that is in that format is Wendover/Half as Interesting, but I've seen the actual host and writing team in Jet Lag. Of course, their corpus is large and distinctive enough it might be hard to tell if they started running an LLM on their own output, but it seems unlikely.
It’s honestly getting to the point where it’s not worth watching YouTube anymore unless you can verify the creator. Google is all in on AI and they have no qualms on pushing AI content regardless of the hallucinations and inaccuracies they contain. My husband often watches things from the recommendations feed and I often have to stop him and say “you know this is AI, right?” Sometimes he cares, sometimes he doesn’t.
Similarly it’s at a point where I ask my wife “did you hear that news from a real source or was it a Reel on Instagram?”
Don't forget having to ask if she heard about that great, new restaurant from an influencer...
Hallucinations and inaccuracies are for the videos where they are actually trying, the worst of them are just flat out made up.
Watch the time Jimi Hendrix dropped into a suburban guitar shop, where for some reason there was a pre-assembled crowd that didn't recognise him despite being pictured at the height of his fame, get disrespected and blow them all away on one of the many left handed guitars present
It's drivel and easier to make than something that even has a vague finger on reality. It's got me on YouTube less, which I suppose is an achievement.
To be fair, I have been getting a lot of really shit recommendations from Youtube which has been leading to really low quality video essays in which the person reading the script clearly didn't do much research and is giving some wildly untrue claims. But I'd still rather see human slop than machine slop, because at least there's a baseline of effort being made.
As a history lover I avoid youtube and podcasts as much as possible. This will sound snobby buy I don't care: If the person presenting does not have a Ph.D or at least a Masters Degree in the topic they are speaking on turn it off, they have no business speaking on the topic. Secondly, if whatever you are watching feels 'entertaining' it is probably crap, history is boring and that is OK.
The best source for good material to consume is either actual university lectures, which you can find but can take some work, the other resource that I really love and have consumed huge amounts of are The Great Courses. These are college level courses on all kinds of subject matters including a ton of stuff on history. Usually 12-24 hours worth of lectures on a topic split into 30 minutes. They are taught by actual university and college professors, usually those known for their teaching ability. They are not crazy advanced, usually start really basic but by the end get advanced enough for a lay-person just interested in the topic.
What a waste. I've found that it's only the topics I'm familiar with where presenters are uninformed, so most of the videos and podcasts are great.
haha, strangely the same (at least used to) applied to AI too. Also that same strange experience where whenever you are involved in an incident that has made the news media all the details are wrong and at least half the story appears to just be made up, yet I trust the news media right? (This has only happened to me twice, but that's 100% of my experiences with that situation)
Omg same with the media and crimes!! Literally also had that happen twice, and one of them was a national news story here. I read several news articles and in every one they got at least one or two details completely wrong. It was so jarring, made me a skeptic of the media from that moment on.
My wife and I were just interviewed for the news last week. We spoke and spelled our names into the microphone pre-interview and they still misspelled by wife's last name when it got time for them to transcribe them.
Dan Carlin would like a word
Actually I think Dan Carlin is a perfect example :) You will find real historians are not fans of his. /r/AskHistorians/ is probably one of best subreddit's going and there has been lots of debate about him over the years. It's not as simple as Dan Carlin bad, he does some good work, but he doesn't have the background to know what sources are respected and which aren't, he tends to focus on 'cool' history while not painting the proper entire picture.
Academics literally make these complaints about anyone who popularizes scholarship for a mass audience, particularly the ones active on Reddit. Oh no! he focuses on the stuff that’s interesting instead of poring over tax records what an asshole!”
I don’t view this genre of criticism as meaningfully different from comic book nerds losing their minds over adaptations not being “canon.”
Personally I think those academics are right, they are the ones who hold the Ph.D's and went to school for 8+ years learning their usually very niche subject. That process is all about learning how to do serious publishable research. I have a lot of respect for that.
“Publishable research” and “things worth caring about outside the ivory tower bubble” are different things. I don’t know why 8+ years of pursuing a PhD in a niche topic is inherently more worthwhile than, say, 8+ years of working in the corporate world figuring out how to do businessy things. It’s not like we grant this deference to people operating in the tech and VC world who got really good at their specific thing and openly disdain people in every other field. We recognize that being narrowly specced gives you major blind spots and biases, that it makes your thinking insular and weird and, frankly, kind of dickish. Even if it makes you good at your particular job, it doesn’t mean you have any special insight into how to contextualize the output of your work to the rest of the wide world because you don’t actually know enough about the rest of the world.
I manage engineers in enterprise organizations, I see this all the time. They’re very good at their jobs but often very VERY bad at understanding what about it matters outside their specific job description. Academics are the same, if you know any personally (I do), this becomes very obvious very quickly.
That's OK?
Perhaps this is heresy, but I think being directionally correct on the facts with an emphasis on storytelling/entertainment is fine for your average history consumer.
It's fine if the consumer knows it's storytelling/entertainment. If they think it's historically accurate, they are consuming misinformation.
I don’t doubt he’s a controversial figure. But he’s a great history communicator, and does an excellent job (IMHO) of making history not “boring.” I don’t personally see what the problem is with someone taking a topic that a great many people think is dry, stuffy, and uninteresting, and being able to make it compelling, interesting, and exciting?
Perhaps it’s a false equivalence, but to me it’s like saying that I shouldn’t listen to any music unless the artists involved all have degree-level knowledge of music theory. But I want to listen to whatever compels me and sounds good, and makes me feel something!
I have a degree in linguistics, and I still enjoy listening to people knowledgeable of the field—but not necessarily academically educated in it—talk about language. If someone can synthesise together a lot of ideas and communicate them for mass appeal, then I think that should be applauded. We all win when more people are more knowledgeable.
I hold academia in very high regard. But I recognise it’s not for everyone, and we shouldn’t gatekeep knowledge behind the ivory towers of the university system, to be doled out through dry online lectures. Yes, those educators have a deep understanding of a very specific niche in history, and their contributions to the store of human knowledge are invaluable. But Dan Carlin and his ilk have the ability to take a broad look at something, give it some context, and package it in a way that is palatable for huge numbers to experience and take an interest in. To make people feel something.
There is room for both, and I would argue that neither can exist without the other.
I agree with you on this for sure. Dan Carlin does good work and has done a lot for the popularity of history, I'm particularly geeky and really like dry lectures but I understand that isn't for everyone. Dan Carlin is a great resource for your average person interested in history and a lot better then some random youtuber or even worse some terrible youtube AI video.
Its everywhere and I cant always pick it out like I used to be able to.
Low effort youtube is easy to avoid but theres big budget movies out there skipping over effects with AI.
I decided last year theres plenty of books published before 2022 that I can read because theres no way for me to tell for sure that AI wasn’t involved at all other than to just trust the author.
I allow myself blogs and news articles still, fully understanding that this is the worst of AI, its just without that content theres nothing to read on my phone. I imagine in a year or so I’ll get bored of that too and I’ll be one of those hard to get in touch with people who leaves their phone in the other room for days.
I just don’t want to spend my time consuming material created by no one. Theres better things I could be doing.
This video from Christophe (not AI, I'm reasonably sure) talks a bit about how a lot of AI generated videos that pop up now are just altered or recreated beat-for-beat from content posted by real creators. It really does make YouTube even more useless as a content discovery platform these days. Slop is so effortless to pump out, and putting effort into actual human-created content is becoming so unrewarding and demoralizing that I can only imagine this trend is going to continue.
There’s a YouTube plugin “SponsorBlock” which skips ads, including product placement. It works by having the community of SponsorBlock users who mark the ads timestamps.
This plugin should be modified to flag ai videos. Or maybe someone’s already created such a plugin.
AiSList seems to be someone's attempt at that, though the website is slopped and the source code for the extension itself hasn't been uploaded to GitHub. I only found out about it since it's been added to the Morphe patches for YouTube on Android.
I use this, and it's pretty good! Along with uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, DeArrow, and Unhook. It's frankly absurd how many extensions I'm running just to make YouTube about as good as it was in 2010 again.
This will surely get worse. I just recently had a friend try to convince me to make videos like this. He sent me a video of someone on Youtube explaining the 'business model' of making videos like this and also making 'influencers' with AI and just pumping out slop and my friend was telling me I should do this to make money since I'm unemployed. I'm not going to do it because it sounds terrible and not even viable, seems like a few people can automate the vast majority of this and just churn out most of the AI slop.
Since people are abusing this and making propaganda video for all kind of things I was thinking we should do the same (if you leave them the space they gonna use it and "win"), and make it fun at the same time, but when I looked into it it's still a bit costly/time consuming to generate slop videos and also quite soul crushing...
Yeah, don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
Last year I would watch these videos as I was falling asleep. I had noticed that there were multiple channels that used the same stick figure style and same format with boxes being zoomed in on. But, I had assumed it was some sort of network that was built that split into topics. It took me far too long to realize these were all AI. Granted I never paid close attention to them.
Once I figured it out I realized most of the content that gets pushed now is AI so I had to look for more human stuff. Even audiobooks on YouTube are being dominated by AI voiceovers, so then I have to seek out human read ones.
Nebula has a history section. It would be nice if they would add more creators, but still.