AI YouTube infestation.
"It is not simply low effort slop — it is a way to ruin perfectly good videos, too."
Dead Internet Theory, I've already talked about it in my post Winter Ruminations: Dead Internet and the Dead World, but today I want to talk about the less obvious side of YouTube AI. Yeah, everybody knows when someone is using AI for a voice-over video that looks like shit. But recently, I've found many videos that were good-looking videos, well edited too, with one small problem... the script was run through ChatGPT.
The first video that I've watched like this was a Serial Experiments Lain video, one of those video-essays, usually I don't watch those type of videos, let alone one about one of the most analyzed pieces of media in all of content creation. If there is an anime a pretentious video-essayist would be compelled to analyze, it's probably SEL, and I think I've already heard everything a big YouTuber could say about SEL.
That's the thing... this video was not by a big YouTuber, it had less than a thousand views and the editing was pretty good. The problem was the script, it wasn't just slightly altered by AI — It was completely generated by it! Do you catch what I am saying? This construction: "It isn't X, it's Y" is very common with Artificial Intelligence — And this video was riddled with it at every couple of sentences, there wasn't even an attempt at hiding the em-dashes through the script. I use em-dashes, I don't want to be discredited just because AI uses them too, but having that repeating structure, sequences of three, and em-dashes, that's too obvious...
Do you think your video will be better if you use AI, or do you want to save time? Because if you want to save time, that makes sense, but then, what is the point of having such a good-looking video? If the idea is to spit as much shit from the asshole as possible, why even try to perfume it? Surprisingly enough, not many realized it was AI, and this was an obvious example.
The other example had me guessing all the time, but I must admit, it has all the markings of AI generated script, and again, the production of the video is very good quality. The voice of the narrator is also good, and it would be even better if he wasn't repeating the same "it isn't X, it's Y" sentences each paragraph, sequences of three again... either this guy has the most AI sounding scriptwriting, or he's using AI, and at that point, if your writing is so similar to AI, then you may as well call it AI — You don't want to be caught writing in such a boring way.
AI doesn't make your script better! It makes it sound repetitive and boring! Stop ruining your own video-essays by having AI "fix your script" or "improve it". Ultimately, I am surprised — "AI slop" looks less slop-like each passing day thanks to the effort of people capable of producing good things deciding that either:
- It's faster to use AI.
- It's better to use AI.
Only (1) is true, but the product is slop, look at it however you want to, try to "fix AI" and you'll find yourself unable to know what to change. Ask AI to change it, and soon you'll find why it is so prevalent. I tried using AI to write, the only method that "works" is simply to ask it to fix your grammar (I still wouldn't recommend it over any grammar checker), anything else will shit up your writing. There's always a guy who believes he, with his great intelligence, found the solution to make AI better, and always, every time, it is the result of being too oblivious to realize that the thing is still ass.
Stop chasing the YouTuber dream, and start using your own words; use your own words to speak of the things that matter to you! It doesn't matter if it has mistakes, it is those mistakes that make you unique, it makes up your style. I wrote about that in my post Occult In-search on Subterfuge Art as Marketable Fluid for Connective Systems:
What I’d like to postulate is that the attention is now the result of badness — when something conflicts with the established good it captures attention. That which is able to stand-out is the result of a unique set of bad traits that make it garner attention, rather than a subset of good characteristics. This is not to say that, in the case of being able to choose, a person would choose the bad output rather than the good one, but that the bad output would interest the person more even if they don’t want to engage with it as an element in the algorithm. This is the way in which AI art can look “good” but it’s not appealing — it doesn’t garner attention as uniqueness, yet AI content is prevalent, because it is engaged with in the algorithm.