Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.
I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…
I’ve recently been using the home page on YT (in addition to my bookmark, which takes me straight to /feed/subscriptions) and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It seems like the algorithm is generally pretty good at finding similar videos to the ones I enjoy. That is unless I scroll waaaaay down, where it just runs out of ideas. I would recommend trying out your home page, with some light pruning as needed (“Not interested”, “Don’t recommend channel”).
Same here, generally, but I think there are a tiny few people who have a legitimate reason for using TTS. For instance, those whose English skills are lacking, or who have an accent which some might find distracting. Or a person who is self-conscious about their voice but still has something to offer, or maybe those who legitimately can’t speak at all. Hell, I support anyone who could narrate but doesn’t want to put their voice out there for privacy reasons, or to keep it out of the public space where it will inevitably be used as training data.
I’d still rather listen to the human, because I can’t stand any of the “AI” voices, especially those that are used on every fucking tiktok (I stay away from TT, but unfortunately the voices are pretty ubiquitous). It might sound silly but I’d prefer good old Microsoft Sam to the any of these new voices.
One channel I found recently for coding-related topics uses TTS but before I got annoyed enough to close it, I realized that the script was probably hand-written, just narrated by a machine. The video was highly informative, and I walked away having learned some new information. For the curious
Something that sucks about this new wave of TTS is that we get some odd errors in pronunciation that probably wouldn’t be there if it was spoken by a human. A missing comma or other punctuation errors will pass a spell check but end up sounding really strange due to the broken inflection. Uncanny Valley stuff I suppose.
AI thumbnails are utter garbage though. All polish, no substance, no love for the craft.
Yup. I think the worst offenders are the videos that are just Wikipedia pages with still images and an AI text-to-speech robot voice. It’s the world’s laziest form of “content creation” and I always downvote them.
Same with comments. For their purposes, a comment that says “i want my 10 minutes back, I hope you die.” is basicallly the same as “best 20 minutes ever! (I watched it twice)”
I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…
I almost never click a video by someone I don’t know these days. It’s almost always a waste of time.
I’ve recently been using the home page on YT (in addition to my bookmark, which takes me straight to /feed/subscriptions) and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It seems like the algorithm is generally pretty good at finding similar videos to the ones I enjoy. That is unless I scroll waaaaay down, where it just runs out of ideas. I would recommend trying out your home page, with some light pruning as needed (“Not interested”, “Don’t recommend channel”).
Same here, generally, but I think there are a tiny few people who have a legitimate reason for using TTS. For instance, those whose English skills are lacking, or who have an accent which some might find distracting. Or a person who is self-conscious about their voice but still has something to offer, or maybe those who legitimately can’t speak at all. Hell, I support anyone who could narrate but doesn’t want to put their voice out there for privacy reasons, or to keep it out of the public space where it will inevitably be used as training data.
I’d still rather listen to the human, because I can’t stand any of the “AI” voices, especially those that are used on every fucking tiktok (I stay away from TT, but unfortunately the voices are pretty ubiquitous). It might sound silly but I’d prefer good old Microsoft Sam to the any of these new voices.
One channel I found recently for coding-related topics uses TTS but before I got annoyed enough to close it, I realized that the script was probably hand-written, just narrated by a machine. The video was highly informative, and I walked away having learned some new information. For the curious
Something that sucks about this new wave of TTS is that we get some odd errors in pronunciation that probably wouldn’t be there if it was spoken by a human. A missing comma or other punctuation errors will pass a spell check but end up sounding really strange due to the broken inflection. Uncanny Valley stuff I suppose.
AI thumbnails are utter garbage though. All polish, no substance, no love for the craft.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
For the curious
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
These don’t work
I’ve never been able to get these piped links to work. Do they only work on desktop or something?
As far as I can tell they stopped working a couple weeks ago, but I’m not sure.
Worked for me on mobile for a while.
Yup. I think the worst offenders are the videos that are just Wikipedia pages with still images and an AI text-to-speech robot voice. It’s the world’s laziest form of “content creation” and I always downvote them.
Down voting is engagement. They don’t care if you hate it as long as you watch it. Block the channel.
Same with comments. For their purposes, a comment that says “i want my 10 minutes back, I hope you die.” is basicallly the same as “best 20 minutes ever! (I watched it twice)”