YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
Using AI to detect AI has, time and time again, proven to be a broken idea. Here is Google with a genius idea: use AI to detect AI, to prevent AI videos.
Keep in mind folks, this is a global top-three company in terms of revenue.
Yeah, it’s bad.
Non-watermarked slop is going to be impossible to detect going forward, and the false detections are going to get worse.
The fundamental issue is the monetization scheme. It’s just too lucrative for spammers. YouTube’s economics are broken, and getting worse.
…Hence, no matter what YouTube says, YouTube is going to double down on “detectors,” because Alphabet leadership couldn’t care less about destroying longstanding creators. Their only objective is to suppress just enough spam to keep ad buyers unconcerned next quarter, no matter the long term damage; that’s someone else’s problem.
The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.
But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.
For every ten users who decry AI voices and animation, a thousand more will blindly click “Like” and “Subscribe”. The people have spoken, and they want to eat straight from the fertilizer pile.
People only click like and subscribe because their other options were taken from them. They got tired of the people speaking up so removed the options to do so.
I’ve run my own anecdotal and admittedly small blind trials on friends and family. Most people unfortunately preferred the A.I. slop to real human content. My theory is because it tends to be bright and shiny. The only actual study I could find online, told participants which is which, kind of defeating the purpose in my opinion.
It’s engagement optimized, that’s why.
That’s the whole point of the spam; being engagement bait.
Same thing applies to any human made clickbait, and people have demonstrated they simply cannot help themselves, and click it.
is Youtube/Google speed running their death?
Nah thats correct kurzgesagt is slop
They were probably right.
Reminder that Kurzgesagt is German government sponsored slop originally created by Bill Gates to spread capitalist propaganda (yes, unironically) https://youtu.be/ZRPcyWNfgxo
Ah yes capitalist propoganda like …scrolls most popular… Countering coronavirus disinformation, explaining vaccines and the dangers of the antivax movement, the physical limits disproving the infinite growth lie of capitalism… Yeah, there’s a lot of science fiction/fantasy topics but those are generally what gets views.
If they are pushing propoganda, they’re pretty shit at it and should probably be spending their money on manosphere podcasts instead. Honestly you should be encouraging such inefficient efforts.
This is such a stellar example of the cold war tankie mindset. Anything a capitalist funds must be evil; anything from the west is a lie; it’s my duty to counter everything coming out of their mouths; blah blah blah.
Don’t forget pretending climate change will magically go away. And my favorite: German genocide denial.
Ah yes, the evil liberal-capitalist climate solutions: shilling solar panels, agriculture tech, electrification, more efficient production of cement and steel
Nothing like the glorious socialist solutions of the proletariat: Chinese solar panels, Chinese agriculture tech, Chinese electrification, more efficient production of Chinese cement and steel
Turns out that every productivist ideology imagines their band-aid efficiency gains will hand wave what is essentially a growth and finite resource problem. So yeah I agree with you on some level, the free market won’t magically save us any more than an AES state market. You’re just mad because you’re hearing it from a video sponsored by the bad team
You mean Liberal self replicating space robots vs Chinese solar panels.
Addressing the argument is a horror.
“Everything I don’t agree with is slop”
Pseudoscience about capitalism going to magically fix climate change by doing nothing is slop.
I prefer slop to live in its own technical box of generative AI crap instead of broadening the word to the point it’s just another meaningless pejorative like sus.
I know damned well that the term slop has been used since the 90s for food and at least the late 00s for other things. The term shovelware slop comes to mind. Note I don’t remember the 90s I was a month old when it ended but I did watch a lot of 90s media so yeah.
Knowing how extremely unscientific Kurzgesagt is the accusation of them using AI to create slop scripts is most likely true.
Seriously can anyone watch the Dyson Sphere video and not come away thinking this is written by morons who have no idea what they’re talking about?
But you say the word “science” a bunch of times with a nice looking, animation as if we have self-replicating robots already, and every Liberal will buy it.
Can you specifically point to some problematic content, because so far you’ve just complained
Literally read the comment. Dyson Sphere. Climate change.
Not really sure what that supposed to mean, as I am sure you are aware since dysons spheres do not exist I’m not quite sure how you’ve come to the conclusion they were wrong about them. You haven’t actually pointed to anything specific you’ve just mentioned two general topics. I want links thank you very much you’re the one that’s making stupid accusations.
You are aware of course that slop existed before generative AI and there are other things that are slop.
Reminds me of that comic the other day
Kurzgesagt: Let’s keep our art human made.
Google: Kurzgesagt, your content looks like this low quality AI slop!
🤖: I’D LIKE TO THANK KURZGESAGT FOR BEING A BIG INSPIRATION TO ME.
We need decentralized video platforms that have revenue sharing.
Yet YouTube Music is absolutely rife with AI bullshit. So much fake-ass viking, cowboy, or other ‘badass’ AI generated slop.
thats why im always hitting the report button. be part of the solution. not passively part of the problem.
I would say that being part of the solution is not using their service at all.
I was recently accused on Lemmy of using AI to write up a post (laced with links to appropriate Wikipedia articles).
I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
Did you use an emdash
I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
That’s because machines don’t have feelings. /s
Oh you used a big word, AI phony!
Nah dude, I just . . . know how to write?
real human intelligence seems utterly alien in this world
At the same time YouTube offers a prompt to generate more AI content.
No, this is just a stunt to claim that it is difficult to detect AI slop, when in reality they want that content as it is more addictive, especially to kids.
Kurzgesagt is slop,
But not AI slop
What? I mean, I don’t vibe with all the stuff they do, but they absolutely put a ton of effort into what they put out. They have multiple teams and everything, it’s not just one guy in his basement.
one guy in his basement
You leave Technology Connections alone! Alec is a national treasure!
“Effort” is not an antonym of slop.
-
Anything new you try takes a ton of effort and the results will generally be pretty sloppy. It takes time and practice to make not-slop.
-
Rushing something to completion results in slop. It’s hard to move fast! That doesn’t make the final quality any better.
-
Using garbage tools and/or materials results in a garbage/slop output.
-
Doing something exclusively for the sake of profit leaves the result soulless. This one is a bit more controversial, but I 100% classify this as slop.
AI generated stuff is usually slop, and the sloppiest of slop, because it’s often an amateur using garbage tools to rush something to completion for a quick buck.
Kurkesagt is, arguably, slop because they have slowly transitioned into trying to put out content as quickly as possible so that everyone working on it gets paid. Their whole thing is covering topics they themselves have not dedicate the time and effort to fully understand and master.
Also, slop is not a synonym for “unrecyclable trash”. In my opinion, Kurkesagt is sloppy as hell! But the animations are fun, the voiceover is pleasant and the pop-sci is generally accurate enough to provide an interesting glimpse into whatever topic they’re covering. They’re still shoveling slop for profit though, sold out years ago and have a heavy bias towards explaining how capitalism, and their participation within it, is the most moral of choices one could make.
I think you’re running with a very nonstandard definition of “slop” here.
Possibly. Probably just an old definition though, hence why I tried to explain it.
Re-reading though I feel like I should clarify that the “nonstandard definition” is definitely a negative adjective, just not ‘damning’ in the same way it seems to be being interpreted here.
While I can’t speak for @itsjustachairmary it seems there’s at least 2 of us with that, or a similar, definition!
How would you explain the “standard” definition?
The definition I think most of the internet has settled on is “no-effort, no-value content, about which neither creator nor viewer cares that it exists.”
It has to satisfy all four criteria to be slop (no effort, no value, creator doesn’t care, viewer doesn’t care), but it doesn’t necessarily have to be AI; still, generally speaking, non-AI content is so much more expensive and time consuming that people are unlikely to put in the work (and companies are unlikely to put in the money) to have it made.
Human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop, partially because even when they’re low effort bad photoshops, they make people laugh (or at least think amused thoughts). At the very least, a human can feel gratified to have made a thing they wanted to make. Human-made ads aren’t slop, because the company at least cares that it provides enough of a return to justify paying an employee for its creation.
Honestly it seems like our definitions don’t differ that much. Rephrasing my definition to your format: “little to no-value content, about which the creator cares little about, with the goal for mass appeal”.
I don’t think the amount of effort someone put into something changes it’s value or quality. It feels like some kind of “blood sweat and tears are what’s most important, that’s why blood diamonds are the most valuable” shit y’know?
People can find value in anything, so I’m likely a bit more pervasive on what’s “slop” quality.
I do emotionally agree that most human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop but according to both of our definitions that doesn’t really hold up. If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?
I disagree strongly about ads and see those of all shapes and provenance as the quintessential and original slop. The creators don’t care about the ad, they’re doing it for a paycheck with the benefactor only giving a shit about the “engagement” that comes from force feeding the ad to the masses.
No, I think the effort is key here, because the original pitch for calling AI output “slop” was, “if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”
If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal, then we have to put Sherlock Holmes stories into that camp; certainly from “Hound of the Baskervilles” onward, if not all of it. Doyle cared about the work, and he put in plenty of time and effort to making it, and the readers definitely cared, but at the end of the day he was done with the character and just wanted to give the fans what they wanted so he could make a paycheck. We also have to put basically every movie in that camp, and pretty much every book written before the publishing industry took a nosedive in the late 90s. We have to put a ton of music into that category. Basically, anything other than indie street art.
As for ads never being art: I see what you’re saying, but the “art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s. Similarly and more recently, there’s a seminal and well-beloved Chobani ad from 2021 called “Dear Alice” that has defined and codified a lot of the “solarpunk” aesthetic. Somebody went through and erased all of the brand logos and set it to different music, and it’s legitimately a beautiful little video about a touching parent/child relationship in a solarpunk future, but it was originally made as an ad.
Humans, especially artists, work for ad agencies; and sometimes they make art as a part of their paid work. It’s not common by any means, but the fact that they were paid for it doesn’t make it slop.
If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?
I think we need to partially disentangle “bad art” from “slop.”
Slop is bad, but it doesn’t just mean “bad.” All slop is bad art, but we humans can try really hard and make bad or objectionable art with our own two hands just fine. “Birth of a Nation” is absolutely objectionable and deplorable, but it’s not slop because D. W. Griffith truly believed in what he was making. “The Room” is objectively not a good movie, but Tommy Wiseau really cared about it. That doesn’t mean many people are ever going to want to watch it unironically. “Friday” by Rebecca Black is really bad music, but it’s not slop.
(Incidentally, in the same way, “slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things, but humans can do that on our own, too; even if we try real hard!)
Not all bad art is slop; that doesn’t make it good art, it just makes it bad art by humans who tried hard (or at least tried a little bit) and did a bad job, or humans who were terrible people and that oozed out into their work.
-
One of the largest slop-machines targeting one of the most vocal and popular anti-slop edutainment channels as slop feels like a targeted attack…
edutainment channels
*educationing channels
Educational entertainment, also referred to by the portmanteau edutainment
The word has been around since 1973 and is included in many dictionaries. If you want to correct someone, at least inform yourself beforehand.
I tried to make a joke. Looks like I failed.
I’m not even sure what that joke could’ve been
Thank you, that is reassuring.
KZ feels a little sloppy at times, I stopped following it
They’ve admitted to using “AI” content editing tools. But, I’d bet most of those tools are using “AI” either due to exploiting hype, or due to being based on non-generative, “AI” ML classifiers.
I stopped when I found out that it’s just a propaganda arm of Microsoft lol.
Propaganda arm? All I could find was that they were contracted for a Gates Foundation video in 2015 and got a big grant from the foundation around that time.
