zlacker

The AI filter applied server-side to YouTube Shorts (and only shorts, not regular videos) is horrible, and it feels like it must be a case of deliberate boiling the frog. If everyone gets used to overly smooth skin, weirdly pronounced wrinkles, waxy hair, and strange ringing around moving objects, then AI-generated content will stand out less when they start injecting it into the feed. At first I thought this must be some client-side upscaling filter, but tragically it is not. There's no data savings at all, and there's no way for uploaders or viewers to turn it off. I guess I wasn't cynical enough.

>>TazeTS+(OP)
I’ve been saying for a while that the end game for addictive short form chum feeds like TikTok and YouTube Shorts is to drop human creators entirely. They’ll be AI generated slop feeds that people will scroll, and scroll, and scroll. Basically just a never ending feed of brain rot and ads.

>>api+o
Yes, but what happens when the AIs themselves begin to brainrot (as happens when they are not fed their usual sustenance of information from humans and the real world)?

>>bitwiz+k1
Have you seen what people watch on these things? It won’t matter. In fact, the surreal incoherent schizo stuff can work well for engagement.

>>api+o
I buy into this conspiracy theory, it's genius. It's literally a boiling the frog kind of strategy against users. Eventually, everyone will get too lazy to go through the mental reasoning of judging every increasingly piece of content as "is this AI" as you mentally spend energy trying to find clues.

And over time the AI content will improve enough where it becomes impossible and then the Great AI Swappening will occur.

>>api+o
There's already a huge number of AI generated channels in youtube. The only difference is that they're uploaded by channel owners. What's is gonna happen very quickly (if not already) is that Youtube itself will start "testing" AI content that it creates on what will look like new channels. In a matter of a few years they'll promote this "content" to occupy most of the time and views in the platform.

>>api+o
Perhaps the shorter/dumber the medium and format, the less discerning an audience it attracts. We're seeing a split between people who reject the idea of content without the subtext of the human creation behind it, and people who just take content for what it is on the surface without knowing why it should matter how it was created.

>>TazeTS+(OP)
Wow - I had not considered this as the intention.

>>api+J2
> the surreal incoherent schizo stuff can work well for engagement.

There’s already popular subreddits (something blursed ai I think) where people upload this type of content and it’s getting decent engagement it seems

>>api+o
Meta already teased making this ("Vibes") in September. Also OpenAI's homepage for their Sora tool is a bunch of AI video shorts.

>>TazeTS+(OP)
I think they are doing it so they can mask the extreme compression they are doing to YouTube shorts.

>>colive+k5
And then they'll start feeding in data like gaze tracking, and adjust the generated content in real time to personalize it to be maximally addictive for each viewer.

>>api+o
I think this will backfire and kill any service that mass implements it. The human to human nature of video is important to the engagement. Even if it becomes such that you can't tell on individual videos, eventually they'll become known for just being AI slop farms as a whole (something that I'm seeing have a lot of backlash)

And what for? Tiktok creators already generate content for them

>>api+o
Whenever we open YouTube to play a song for our toddler, we see at least 90% slop Shorts. It's disgusting.

>>TazeTS+(OP)
Have you tried viewing the short in the normal YouTube UI? Just copy the short's unique identifier from the URL and replace the unique identifier in any normal UI YouTube video.

>>TazeTS+(OP)
Smoothing skin does give important data savings. Smooth blocks take up much less space than detailed blocks. Which makes me believe these are nothing but compression artefacts.

The conspiracy theory that this is done to make people get used to AI content is the kind of bs that would be derided and flagged otherwise… but since it is anti-tech, it’s fine. Shows how the site is going.

>>dotanc+Es
It’s easier than that. Replace shorts with watch in the URL.

>>absolu+La
That’s a little different. It’s people playing with AI, which is fine.

It seems like a minor difference, but the undifferentiated unlabeled short form addiction feed is much worse.

Reddit has been heading that way though. It hasn’t gone all in yet.

>>AstroB+zh
Like other things the market will bisect. Discerning people who are self aware and resist addiction and are put off by this stuff are already jumping ship from these platforms. They’ll be hypnosis machines for everyone else.

There’s a component of people around here who will shrug or even cheer. That’s because we are losing any belief in compassion or optimism about uplifting humanity. When I really think about it, it’s terrifying.

We are headed for a world where normal people just step over the dying, and where mass exploitation of the “weak” gets a shrug or even approval. Already there in some areas and sectors.

Is this the world you want, folks? Unfortunately I’ve met a disturbing number of people who would say yes.

Now consider that this includes children, whose childhood is being stolen by chum feeds. This includes your own relatives. This includes your friend who maybe has a bit of an addictive personality who gets sucked into gambling apps and has their life ruined. Or it’s you, maybe, though I get the sense there’s a lot of “high IQ” people who think they can’t be conned.