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Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.
I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.
What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.
In the old days e.g. concerts were for enjoying the music together with people you did and didn't know. The best concerts were those where you were left sweaty from (slam)dancing with everyone in the pit on music that was even better-performed than on CD. Showing the experience afterwards was not really a thing that existed.
In other words, you need to be in control of your own narrative, or someone else will do it for you to fill the void. For example, someone can use cold reading to deduce what others suspect and fear and then paint you in that specific light, essentially planting individually targeted nasty rumours about you while increasing their rapport with others. That kind of rumours tend to spread.
Eventually you become the outcast in your social circles and you will be hard pressed to regain control of ”you” in the eyes of others.
If I see a performance from Lang Lang, I don't just perceive the sound, it is the expression of memory, discipline and attention. Learning an instrument is more than attaining the skill of producing the correct notes in the correct order. It shapes attention, perspective, patience, discipline, sensitivity and so much more. You can't replace that with effortless simulation. I mean you could, but it's practically meaningless.
As live music enjoyer and person that was commonly around safe spaces in the techno scene I cant agree more. Fuck filming people.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
A sincere thank you for this metaphor.
Agreed. Filming strangers in public is making everyone scared to have fun trying anything new, as they’re afraid of online mockery…
In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.
You just described me 40 odd years ago :))
I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.
Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.
But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.
So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.
Your argument is like "people have been killing each other for centuries so when you think about it hydrogen bombs are not the problem"
I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.
More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.
This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.
When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.
A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.
Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?
A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?
Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves
A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?
I would NEVER EVER consider using AI in something I actually release to listeners
I don't care if its good or bad. If I'm making someone listen something, it should've been touched by my hand - even if that means turning a knob in a DAW
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
It occurred to me that we appreciate this kind of public performance, but we get annoyed if someone plays their boombox too loud in public.
I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.
I think we value _effort_.
Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.
And when you look at broader culture, people dancing seem to welcome only small or bigger mockery, unless they dance really well.
You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.
I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
There are several channels with pure ai Wh40k music. Some Star Wars creators are doing similar stuff.
I’m actively resisting desire to dump bunch of YouTube links, but if you want to hear what many people already vetted great, I’m happy to share.
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
It's normal to hate AI being pushed down our throats, but it's a completely different thing when we call people names, who enjoy it on their own.
Like this, made by a guy who clearly understands who to use ai?
https://youtu.be/6YTjH_7QUT0?t=42
Ai is a great enabler for people who have ideas but don’t have chops.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
What a perfect illustration that while you typed on a keyboard you're so far away from making art.
PS: how many pieces of art that moved you were made by artists you knew or met?
How much music do you even need? Is she listening 24/7?
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
This is the distilled essence of a “first world problem.”
It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you
https://youtu.be/6JCLY0Rlx6Q?si=xZvid6TWR66LTqhE
The way I use Suno is sometimes I play Ukulele and discover a tune I like; I record it and generate a song from it.
I didn't take any music lessons. I'm 100% self-taught so my recordings are a little rough but the melody comes through and Suno polishes it up nicely and adds lyrics based on a topic I've been thinking about.
I find both the creation and listening aspects relaxing and therapeutic. I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song. It's very clearly my melodies, my songs but it's enjoyable to hear them as a finished product. There is definitely an element of surprise, the lyrics are sometimes quite insightful and clever too and I can actually start appreciating the poetic aspect of music in a way which eluded me before.
I suspect that by the time most musicians finish refining and producing their own songs, without AI, they're probably tired of hearing it. Suno avoids that. It's a truly novel thing to be both a producer and consumer of your own music. Perfect for an introvert like me who can't relate to anyone except himself.
It's nice to see that some other people also like my pieces though I'm not trying to make a career out of it.
Edit: slop not slob
Have the ick for AI-gen, fine. But dismissing the things it solves puts you in a position where you'll never understand other people.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
Previously web search, YouTube, and Reddit would have been my go to but they have all been enshittified.
The idea that only humans can make music is absurd.
> I guess she can listen to slob but maybe just look around a little instead?
The idea that AI generated = slop is absurd.
Humans create just as much, if not more slop. Look at 99% of "professional" output in creative fields. It's awful.
A human with taste steering AI tools can be better than a "classical" human with hard skills but no taste.
The old world is going to be run over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4
Completely. Run. Over.
Hard disagree, there is just music people make because it's what they want to make, if all you're looking at is the top 10/pop radio music, yes it will be tailored for the largest market but by no means is there a conspiracy to only accomodate the 'young people'.
It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.
AI Music is changing music habits ...your friend and myself arent the only ones https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n....
Give it ten years or so and i bet the Taylor Swifts type acts and the big music industry machine wont be as celebrated.
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
There’s an appetite for this.
That suggests you've done a good job of directing the AI to generate what people like.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
To be honest, as long as the music is to my liking, I don’t really care all that much.
But to me this seems silly. Yes I want real artists to make music and be able to make a living not some faceless company spitting out endless music until something works. However at the end of the day if something sounds good then one should enjoy it not refuse to accept it simply because it is AI.
Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child? Or what if AI could could sort through a massive backlog of evidence in unsolved murders and other violent crimes giving new leads previously missed? I am just curious if some people will simply be against it no matter what the use is. As for myself I think it has it's uses but also think it comes at a heavy price as in massive power and water consumption and other issues it comes with. Anyways
Also, re: music, if I was fine with listening to AI music, why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
If AI cured cancer then by definition it would no longer be the technology that’s primary use case is churning out various forms of derivative slop. And so the balance between its value vs the economic/social/environmental costs would immediately and fundamentally change.
Losing my job, spending 3x as much to replace my PC while my favorite websites devolve into a cesspool of spam might not feel worth it just because I can now vibe code a todo app in 2 minutes while listening to a 600 hour playlist of personalized elevator music.
But if it cured my dad’s cancer and my mom’s Parkinson’s? Well, that’s a different story…
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
I wish I had your Spotify.
Over the last few months they have served me multiple slop tracks in the discover weekly playlist. Probably more I didn't notice when just listening without focus, but several had generic artist name without bio and dozens of nearly identical tracks.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
What's the difference with AI doing it instead of your script ?
If your answer to any of these questions is "yes", and your answer to "can AI create art" is no, then there is a difference between AI doing it and a script.
That said the discussion around "human" art and "AI" art often lacks nuance, and I believe there's lots of space to explore art that uses AI. Humans produce a lot of crappy art, this crappy art requires humans to invest time and effort. With AI it is possible for humans to produce lots of crappy art without investing time and effort, so an deluge of crappy AI art follows.
If I use AI to strip backgrounds instead of traditional greenscreen methods, is the end result "crappy AI art"? I'd hope no one sets those standards. I'd hope my videos would be judged as "crappy human art" since I still did the camera work the acting and the editing. If I use AI for visual effects in my video because I don't have visual effect training and don't have money to hire someone with experience (I don't make money from my occasional fun video projects), does that make it "crappy AI art"? I don't believe so. But somewhere between there and the content farm AI slop filling the Youtube servers there is a point where it becomes "crappy AI art" and I can't tell you where that point is because I'm still trying to figure it out.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@ShunnedataFuneral
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKOtpdDzwyA
I imagine it'll apply to anything with a SynthID watermark. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.
People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.
enough music was made already, we don’t need more.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
Music for Airports is ok ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports https://youtu.be/vNwYtllyt3Q ... but there are parts in there that I recognize in the loop that bring me out of it being background and into something I'm listening to).
But yea... I want a soundscape and it doesn't bother me if it was something that was generative in 2018, or in 2026... or loops of recorded sound... I want something that isn't silence and that I can not listen to for four to eight hours... bonus if its enough "noise" that it doesn't even get picked up after noise suppression in a Teams call.
Space Banjo is great ( https://spacebanjo.com be it https://youtu.be/CLnHStt4mbs or https://youtu.be/ygYfJSTc_qQ ) ... but I like to listen to that when I can listen to it more.
There's also things like https://youtu.be/_egA9RZrD5k (and in this realm, I get picky https://www.youtube.com/@resomat6474 is pretty good, but some of it hits higher notes ... https://www.youtube.com/@TheJapaneseTown-jt6fy is pretty good too).
Again, this is more about wanting sound rather than music.
I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).
"B-b-b-but what if I create genuine wo—“
You won’t.
NEXT
Genuinely don't care if its good or not. It's not for me
And you know that how?
And, how do you know news itself is not 100% ai? News corps may simply fail to disclose that it was ai, be taken in, remove watermarks, etc.
The fact is no one can say what one sees on a screen is a true representation of reality. People are acting on a consensus feeling.
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
https://channelsurfer.tv
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
- Occasional AI b-roll during explainer videos
- AI generated backing track (music)
- AI generated shots sprinkled in a short film
- Showing examples of AI video as an AI capability update or commentary
Every online video platform should let you label specific segments as AI generated, even better if it is a requirement with validation checks for certain kinds of content.
It's a really valuable feature that I expect will eventually be the gold standard, it was surprising how helpful it was. I think a lot of creators will embrace it, it adds credibility/authenticity. You aren't just labeling the AI content, you are labeling the content that isn't generated by AI, with a validation layer to back it up.
- AI generated VFX on top of non-AI video
- AI upscaling of low res footage
- AI frame interpolation for synthetic slow-mo
- Modified / composited AI video
- Footage created by "Extend Scene" features in Premiere Pro and others
- Word correction from tools like Descript
- AI relighting or colorization
- Reaction video to a video containing AI-generated content
And in general, what amount of combination of any of these applications constitutes as "AI generated"? If I have a 30 minute video with a 3 second AI generated clip, do I get the same label as full-blown AI slop video?
A 30 minute speech by a president where I use AI to change 3 seconds in order to make that person say something they never did should also get the label. The label shouldn't be about how much AI was used, but that it was used at all.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
The parent post's worry is warranted, IMO.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.
It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.
As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.
It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.
This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
Unfortunately that could still be true while labeling all human-crafted content as AI-created.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just needs one simple policy: Post AI and you're banned for life, no appeals.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
If people don’t want to watch AI content, they should be able to avoid it. Just as a vegan should be able to know if a dish is appropriate for them. Besides: if you have to blatantly deceive people into watching your videos when they otherwise would choose not to, what are you even doing? And yes I understand people already do that. But we should not go out of our way to enable that. Plus the moment you are perceived as not disclosing that, you risk getting burned by someone online and facing much harsher, longer term consequences. Reputation still matters to a degree.
Ultimately I’m not sure we should be advocating for opacity in consumer products.
Why? Not trying to argue against AI labeling, but if you are enjoying the music, why does it matter?
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
If nothing else, it feels like a the subscription price should be less for an AI-music service.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
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From: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
At this point, I bet the next human genius is going to be labeled as AI —by an AI.
People are pretty darn good now at spotting ai.
An alternative is just use ai to look at the comments. Almost anything with AI has comments complaining about it.
All of these sites need to deal with it because it does drive away users.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).
The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint#Species_counterpo...
What I absolutely loathe and instantly block is AI narration. That’s an instant deal breaker for me. And it’s gotten to the point that without a shot of the creator or obvious humanisms like microphone sounds, I assume a new creator is AI tts reading an LLM generated script. There are thousands of these channels.
I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.
That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.
It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.
As someone who doesn't use youtube, this seems conceptually wacky.
i.e. Why aren't those video simply RSS podcasts? Yeah, incentives, but if the video doesn't matter, they'd be a better product as a podcast.
1. Allow us to filter any and all content based on category or tag, this would include AI tagged videos 2. Demonetize any and all videos that incentivize antagonizing people (Looking at you prank videos) 3. Allow the reporting of video for "Criminal Activities" 4. Bring back the number of dislikes 5. Put the "not interested" option on video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail) 6. Put the "do no recommend this channel" option on the video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)
/s
I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
Who watches those anyways?
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
they're already locked down as-is.
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.
So the PR risk here is I think reasonably low.
Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
Basically forces me to use image editing software for something that could be greatly streamlined.
if they would offer youtube plus, i would pay: - no ads. none. nothing - videos with sponsored content tagged, and option to auto skip - Option to HIDE ALL AI-videos. ALL. And channels. from search also - Option to HIDE ALL slideshow-videos (generated) all. From search also. - Community driven filter list that would auto-update. To hide all the shit content.
Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz
I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.
There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.
I find this awful, but it's not a remotely new thing.
https://m.youtube.com/VaniaManiaKids
This shit pops up everywhere and is impossible to filter, as it is translated into many languages.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
Welcome to the future and the brave new world I guess.
"detect". God help us all.
Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.
> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,
YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.
The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.
I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!
1. Detection of AI voiceover. The article makes several references to photo realistic AI content but it's the voiceovers that are killing me.
2. Filtering options for viewers. It's not enough to be able to know if a video is generated. I don't want to see them, ever.
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
better next step: allow us to block them
even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.
The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.
But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:
A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.
I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.
Their detection might not look at audio right now though.
As if Google really cares about the opinion of people. They just realised that AI is killing youtube - if you come to that conclusion, then "labeling" the AI slop isn't going to solve the problem really. Personally I already classify ALL AI-videos as slop-spam. I've also noticed the "suggested" videos in the last few weeks, on youtube, to really go down in quality a LOT. Google does not seem to understand how severe this problem is.
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
I’ve also seen the trend of TV clip slop using AI filters to I assume get by automatic copyright flagging/removal/de-monetization.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...