Now I find myself wishing for a global date filter (”only show videos posted before a year ago”).
I get the feeling that this issue has exploded during the past few months.
But really, I’ve see this across so many genres lately.
I don’t know if Alphabet wants to solve this, though.
Fake, and dishonest, Christian Country Music.
I learned of this through Fil Henley, who just pointed out Ella Scott (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0wtyIljNns) which is an AI account with AI-generated songs and thumbnails being produced at an unfeasibly high rate for an actual human. There are astroturfing channels under other names that purport, with more AI fakery, to show themselves alongside Ella Scott. There's an Ella Scott psychology channel tapping into the self-help market. There's an Ella Scott Soulnotes channel. There are not-declared-AI linked accounts on other platforms. Until this all got high exposure, there was an active PayPal donation setup for a non-existent Ella Scott charity.
This isn't even the first firehose account of AI-generated CCM that M. Henley has covered. There has been the improbably double-barrelled James Hilton-Cowboy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HORuCSsDLI) for example.
And there is an audience of Christians being taken in by these thinking that they are real performers.
And besides, if they like the music, what’s the harm?
Ironically, the religious have rules about doing unto others: be sympathetic to the people conned into giving their money away, in the hopes that they'll be sympathetic to you when you're conned in your turn.
Makes me wish they'd start showing thumbs-down counts on videos again, maybe that would have some impact on the problem.
Take image generation trained on a bunch of copyrighted photographs and artwork. What is the intent behind creating such a tool?
Yes, there is a stage where the software developer is building the software to do this purely operating on a "this is a cool hack" kind of mentality, but the point at which you make it available to other people, especially for payment, is when the liability becomes real.
Having worked on open source software for most of my life, I have always had to be aware of the issues surrounding copyright. That other software developers will write software and use copyright to proect it while ignoring the copyrights of others is deeply concerning. Copyright of software is no more or less important than copyrights applied to images and artwork.
Engineers are liable for their mistakes. At some point the same mechanisms may well need to be applied to software.
Building FTTP networks is not expensive. It's the bullshit surrounding obtaining permission to install the fibre that is expensive.
That said, all software developers have a choice as to what they work on by the employer and teams that they sign up with. Just because you're employed to do something does not mean that you're obligated to go ahead with breaking the law.
Real engineers are required to take ethics courses in university, and they cannot willfully ignore actions that are unethical without risking the loss of their license. I think that software developers need ethical training more than ever given the direction of the industry.
That being said, some of the random still frames that make up these videos are pretty stupid and valueless.
Typically, all these videos have under 1000 views. I am at a point where I might even write a user script to hide every video under 1000 views.
There appears to be an enormous algorithmic weight to those. Just a few such videos completely swamped my recommendations with Japanese marching bands a couple of years ago. Simply finding those two to copy their URLs into this post has immediately put two further band videos into my recommendations.
Looking for advice? One approach that might be interesting to try is to subscribe to channels and restrict yourself to your subscriptions. You could even bookmark the subscriptions tab in Youtube so that you don't land on the main page with recommendations.
It's funny how invariably the algorithmic feed ends up being overused and pushes people to self filtered content. Facebook is the earliest example I remember of this.
https://www.electrify.video/post/electrify-completes-majorit...
But I agree there has been a drop in quality with the growth of his team.
Up until recently the YT recommender algorithms did a quite good job at that for me. Now they serve up crap.
The good news is that Big Clive, 3Blue1Brown, and even Jago Hazzard have all appeared on camera, albeit not always on their own channels. (-:
Sometimes those creators will mention other channels or I will hear about a channel from someone else and I’ll check them out.
And also the AI slop video featured both himself and his daughter-in-law, so you'd think he would have a pretty good idea the video was AI slop.
And the subject of the AI slop video was announcing magical beds that heal every problem you might have.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2025/09/29/what-are-medb...
The United States is so very fucked.
As a point of reference: I usually watch high quality content, avoid shorts and other brain rot.
I stopped going to festivals for that reason.
The worst was near a lake: during the time we needed to setup our small tent, enough RVs had arrive with though dumping their full toilets into the lake wouldn't matter... yeah, bathing never happened, because a lot of brown sausages were swimming around, plus random trash. But it didn't stop there: before the first night, the way between camping grounds and the different stages was clearly visible even without a lot of artificial light,bdue to the white plastic in the trash, lining both sides. Disgusting.
A lot of festival goers are basically ignorant shit-holes on legs. Even if there are only 2-3%, that often spoils it for the rest.
/rant over
Its a bit drastic but its completely cleared my timeline from slop (by completely clearing my timeline)
He said it settled his brain better than human generated content. It was soothing, consistent and just one or two notches above bland.
I left with the impression that his brain and the AI content had a great impedance match.
The segment of the population that is suffering from brain rot is gigantic. This is the segment Mark Zuckerberg loves.
In his own words: "dumb fucks".
Junk food has a similar effect on the brain - without exercising proper discipline it has a catastrophic effect on productivity.
With YT Premium, it's boring as the algorithm keeps bringing you back to your bubble.