I’m still coming up to speed on the full scope of what your product does, but I’m curious what you’d say to someone like pal2tec, who has some fairly strong and what I feel to be reasonable views about the impact of content summarization [0].
Getting direct buy-in and sharing revenue is great. But it’s not clear to me that this is the only thing that creators care about, i.e. are you still summarizing content you’re not monetizing without creator buy-in?
Just watched the video, I don't initially agree with his take completely but do totally respect the viewpoint and think a payment split to the creator whenever someone summarizes the video makes sense.
Yes we do offer the option to summarize content without creator buy-in, although it seems a bit different since we're also augmenting the content with questions etc. which should drive users to watch the video even more as opposed to skip it and just read the summary.
But you're right it's not perfect. If we ever have creators who don't want their stuff on our site we'd totally respect their wishes, but that hasn't been the case right now so this seems like the best thing to do.
From a creator’s point of view, I think the concern would be about how true this remains as the product grows/evolves.
But as long as there’s an opt-out, that seems like a reasonable approach.
Also to be clear we have partnerships for all the featured courses. This refers to if a user creates a course based on some videos.
Are you not still making derivative content of the work without the copyright holder's permission? A judge might not care that much whether the video is embedded or not.
Do note that this behavior of "opting creators into a program without their consent, justifying it via revenue share, and CYA with a 'they can opt out if they want to!' shield" is still... awful optics.
The whole Brave scandal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888) is a good case study on how laypeople will perceive this. It's not popular at all.
But in summary, YouTube is rolling out AI summarization features on some content without giving creators any say in the matter.
Concerns include:
- Low quality summarization of high quality content will devalue the content, and in many cases is just a worse version of the content
- Impact to watch time on the channel can impact channel success over time
- YouTube is not doing anything to compensate creators for reducing watch time such as sharing revenue from viewers who primarily interact with the AI summary
But I think he articulates this much better than I did. Much better to watch the video.
FWIW, unfortunately, I think the problem is a two-headed one, and maybe reversed for viewers vs creators. Creators want as many people to see their work as possible. But viewers have to sift through a graveyard of 95%+ junk videos to find the 5% worth watching. AI (or Google/TikTok/etc. in general) acting as gatekeeper in between isn't great, but not having any metrics/summaries/descriptions for videos would be even worse.
In this particular case, I get that this particular creator might've had a point to make, but the description and summary were so cheekily written (to make a point, I guess) that I had no idea what it was about.
The creators who I do follow typically make long-form educational videos with a lot of nuance; I wouldn't want to rely on even the best-written human summary for those. But there are many, many videos for which I'd prefer a 1-sentence summary over 3 minutes of intros and jokes, a 45-second sponsorship, and a gradual dramatic buildup before getting to the point.
Not sure what the long-term solution is.
This is totally fair. I watch quite a bit of his educational content on cameras so I already trusted him enough to watch past the preamble. When this thread came up it was the first video that came to mind since I’d recently watched it. I can totally see how it’d be a bit less effective for someone not already familiar with his stuff.
I also agree with the general theme of your last paragraph. For the most part, I’ll avoid channels that are primarily fluff, or skip through the preamble if it’s a creator that I begrudgingly follow because they make good - if unnecessarily fluffy at times - content.
Also not sure what the long term solution is. I do tend to believe Google’s approach with this YouTube feature isn’t it.
For sake of argument, let's say that this feature causes a 20% reduction in video views.
This feature is part of YouTube Premium, meaning that YouTube is making money on it, but in its current form the creator is not. So in essence, YouTube has chosen to take the creator's content, create derivative content based on it, and make money off of that derivative content while removing some portion of the creator's revenue. In most contexts, this would be described as theft, and I think that's a fair word to use here even if I'm sure the T&C covers it somewhere.
> What's the problem? The creator can take their content somewhere else or host it themselves on their website
You don't see a problem with a move like this? Obviously creators can move elsewhere, but it's a hostile move on YouTube's part nonetheless.