Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

It is becoming unbearable. YouTube now has "AI" slop ads for Freenow (Lyft brand in the EU) with fake cars that move without the wheels turning and "AI" "actors" that look like plastic.

This of course means that Freenow is now on the personal blacklist. People should not engage with companies who advertise with "AI" slop.

View on HN

Not just ads - there is TONS of AI-generated YouTube shorts now, and the quality is so good that it's tough to always tell whether it's real as long as it's plausible (which not all of it is).

It's annoying because the whole point of a lot of this stuff is that it's real, and one can be informed, entertained or have an emotional response to it. When you distrust everything because it's maybe fake, then the fun of the internet as a window into human nature and the rest of the world just disappears.

When it comes to ads on Youtube, Freenow is at the classy end of them. i.e. it's not that they're good, but that many others are much worse.

I was just looking at Instagram's promoted shopping ads, and 9 out of 10 are AI slop, pretending to be actual physical products. It is quite shocking.

Agreed. I’m increasingly using the presence of AI slop as a primary signal about whether to avoid a company and its products.

Youtube is intentionally blunting this signal by making many videos look slightly slop-y, I mean "enhancing low-res content with AI upscaling"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtu...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-dismisses-cre...

Which suggests the next human dirty trick will be to put out AI slop 'supporting' a company and its products just to make 'em deny it was them making it :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com