Automate the creation of YouTube Shorts by providing a topic | Hacker News Reader

Automate the creation of YouTube Shorts by providing a topic

github.com

117 pointsrcarmo59 comments

Now we just need some software to automate the watching of youtube shorts and we'll be sorted

Or we'll be shorted.

Why would one want to create more of those abominations?

One reason I deleted all my yt videos was because YT converted half of them to "shorts" without asking and with no way back, breaking all navigation and losing the readily available comment section and description.

Just not the way I wanted my work presented.

You used to be able to access shorts as normal videos even after they rolled out normal videos by using the original video link. Did they remove this?

No, in fact I keep a very handy redirect in Redirector for this specific usecase:

         {
            "description": "Youtube shorts to something useful",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iB9KMNzNIZI",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB9KMNzNIZI",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*",
            "excludePattern": "",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        },

Nice! I had not thought of creating a redirect, but I have now added this. I currently filter out all short content but on the rare occasion that I get linked a short this will come in handy. Thanks!

Is Redirector an extension?

Yep, available for multiple browsers and quite powerful in my opinion: https://www.einaregilsson.com/redirector/

If you open the comments section you can click on the date of a comment and it will open it in the regular video UI.

It doesn't matter what I could. I did not make videos so that I can look at them myself. :) But nice trick for viewing other's videos.

“Your work”, is their “content”.

> Why would one want to create more of those abominations?

Because we're regressing as a civilization and soon, content like what's being generated here will be the only thing consumed by the majority (read: the only form of profitable/growth-producing content).

I'm a major proponent of Joseph Juran style "quality thinking," but sadly, that world is dead and gone on a mass consumption scale (what platforms like YouTube are geared towards these days).

De-Evolution has been proven correct.

Fun fact: The popularizers (Devo) were at Kent State when US troops killed US citizens on US soil and knew the deceased…recently revealed after decades…

De-Evolving to remove humans from the equation is the logical conclusion.

Resistance is futile. We •will• adapt.

The only reason is to collect advertiser dollars.

It's one way to kill them.

> because YT converted half of them to "shorts" without asking and with no way back

Wait, what? What the hell! That’s terrible. I am out of touch with all of these new “features”. Looks like content creators can’t use YouTube any more.

I make DVDs (ConvertXtoDVD) and give them to donors I meet in person, meaning I keep everything, nobody can take down or edit my content…etc…

Sneakernet has advantages.

Has anyone else noticed the increase of entirely AI generated videos in YouTube suggestions and search results? They tend to be about completely made historical or scientific facts

I’m much more interested in projects to detect junk like this than see more of it in the world

It's all just "10 hours of jingling keys": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jingling-keys

Doesn't need to mean anything or feel anything, it's just a pleasant form of white noise for the eyeballs and brain behind.

I recently saw an interview with one of the people doing those videos. He makes over $15k per month, so I doubt it will go away without Google interference, but they obviously take a sizable cut of the total earnings from the same videos as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qg36r8KH8U

Of course. Not just in videos, but in pre-roll ads as well. This is why some of us feel enormously pessimistic about generative AI and AI-based automation. The ideal customers for this are marketing companies that need to churn out even more grist for the social media content mill.

How much ink has been spilled on HN lamenting the SEO-ification of the web and impossible volumes of blogspam on search results? Yet if you posit that AI will make it worse, the villagers come out with their pitchforks.

Here hear!

Money printers are forever remembered in Garrys Mod: You hide them from other players.

Dear lord I haven't seen a DarkRP reference for 12-15 years. You just triggered a wave of memories evading the police, blowing up people's bases, and raiding the Mayor's office to jailbreak people.

This reminds me of one of the examples of what you can do with Huginn:

"Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the "HumanTaskAgent"). For example: "Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog."

Except it's old enough to use humans instead of AI, and blogs instead of short vertical videos.

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

TODO

* Ask ChatGPT for a random topic [1]

* Automate upload

[1] And this is what it said: A potential topic for a YouTube short could be "Quick Tips for Productivity." This topic is relevant and valuable to many viewers who are interested in maximizing their efficiency and getting more done in less time. You could share bite-sized productivity hacks, time management techniques, or organization tips that viewers can easily implement in their daily lives. Short, actionable content tends to perform well on YouTube shorts, making this topic a promising choice for engaging your audience in a concise format.

Yeah, as you read about this and watch the associated video it slowly dawns on you..

Someone needs to turn this into an xscreensaver hack that (optionally?) round-trips the mp4 through YouTube.

Does stack overflow support RSS (to feed it requests for youtube videos)?

OP I have this up and running but it seems like most of the video samples it fetches in response to my prompt have nothing to do with the prompt I've typed. Maybe 1 out of 5 videos is actually relative to my prompt. Any Ideas?

I've also noticed that any generated Subtitle language will fail if the AI responds with a semi-colon anywhere in it's response.

"Sure, here's the thing you asked for: A long text description about <subject>"

Actually short subs "Sure, here's the thing you asked for - end video.

pretty neat though

YouTube shorts is such a time sink. I blocked the whole section on desktop with uBlock origin and never looked back.

The only way I stream videos from YouTube is in mpv on my desktop (usually using pipe-viewer) and in NewPipe on Android, configured to hide all recommendations and comments. The only way I see a video on YouTube is by searching for it.

We do not need automated content creation.

We need AI to detect incoherent garbage without censoring things people disagree with.

The issue with moviepy is that it's looking for maintainers, the original author doesn't have the time to reason about some PRs, and they're undergoing a "v2" rewrite in the process.

https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/issues/1874

The cropped stock videos where quite bad in his example video. Blurry closeup plants and half a parrot :S

Otherwise great execution.

It doesn't matter. People will eat it up.

Yeah the only problems I've had so far are the stock videos not having much if anything at all to do with my script.

Also had to edit gpt.py to sanitize the ":" if the AI script response contained a colon

Can someone explain to the uninitiated what a YouTube short is and why you might want to automate creation of them?

Somewhat equivalent to TikTok videos. On YT they are frequently clips from longer videos. I assume they offer some form of monetization, so automated low-effort videos could potentially bring in revenue.

A lot of content creators put a lot of time and effort into making high-quality long-form videos. It's pretty reasonable that they might also want a way to quickly create a YT Short without spending even more time editing their original video down. I'd rather them spend more time doing whatever I subscribed to see them do or talk about.

As for why anyone would even watch Shorts, not everyone has time to watch long-form videos. Or not everyone wants to commit that time, even if they have it.

It's telling the name of this repository is "MoneyPrinter"—says a lot about the monetization of videos today. I wonder if the creator has made money on YouTube from this repository. I didn't see any stats in the README.

In the video, they show that some videos got more than 1k views, but most around a couple hundred. YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. So definitely no money earned yet on the channel they created.

Unless they have some secret other channel with a bunch of manufactured videos. ;)

I sincerely hope they never earn a dime.

There are already thousands and thousands of channels doing something similar to this, it's very profitable en mass. It wont stop until it's made expensive to do.

And then you can double dip with a little drop shipping on the side.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

The players enable the game

I can hate both.

I doubt the creator intends to make a dime. They seem to hate the current state of things as well, and made this to prove how useless channels like this are.

For shorts you need 10 million views in a 90 day period to be eligible for monetization.

With a minimum length of 15 seconds, you'd have to algorithmically waste close to 5 years[1] of cumulative watch time to earn anything from this.

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=150000000+seconds+to+years

Yeah, I'm not aware of anyone offhand who's making big money off shorts. A couple creators I follow have discussed attempting to use them to bring new viewers into their channels, but apparently the conversion rate from shorts viewers to subscribers-who-watch-full-length-videos is bad.

It's still better than $0, but then it costs money/time to make and upload good quality shorts that you could spend on full length videos instead.

Because shorts are well, short, they can't run ads on them the same way they do for full length videos, which apparently hurts the revenue potential.

That's kind of insane. The top few hundred most viral shorts get something, everyone else gets nothing. I heard a Hololive creator the other day talking about how pleased they were to get 1M views on something - but that was also in the context of hoping to drive traffic to their main channel, subscriptions etc.

On the other hand, what's the revenue of a short? They've got to be pretty worthless views. And of course AI just makes them more worthless.

This sucks a lot.

Ruth approves.

Nice... All it needs now is automated talking heads. I guess the AI for that will be available in the not-too-distant future. (/s)

We are there already - we have synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable and that go perfectly with a smiling animated cartoon talking head to present a self-study webinar. We advise our readers to eschew violence against their corporate laptop monitor.

> synthetic voice narration, whose bland perfection I find insufferable

Yeah, AI got better than humans at this too. You need to inject randomness, force the tool to "make mistakes", so it feels more authentic.

Or goofy jokes, which I haven't seen LLM do well yet.

You can already get things like newsreader video footage where an actor has had their voice sampled and their likeness animated, such that they appear to read out whatever text you feed in. For a small fee.

I attended a talk a while back by a guy who had automated summarising some daily stock news, feeding it through this service and published to YouTube. He was making a modest amount of money out of it.

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