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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is so out of hand.

There's this. There's that video from Los Alamos discussed yesterday on HN, the one with a fake shot of some AI generated machinery. The image was purchased from Alamy Stock Photo. I recently saw a fake documentary about the famous GG-1 locomotive; the video had AI-generated images that looked wrong, despite GG-1 pictures being widely available. YouTube is creating fake images as thumbnails for videos now, and for industrial subjects they're not even close to the right thing. There's a glut of how-to videos with AI-generated voice giving totally wrong advice.

Then newer LLM training sets will pick up this stuff.

"The memes will continue" - White House press secretary after posting an altered shot of someone crying.

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The war on facts continues. Facts are hard, they require a careful chain of provenance. It's much cheaper to just make up whatever people want to hear, safe in the knowledge that there will never be any negative consequences for you. Only other people, who aren't real anyway.

Youtube has recently recommended me a video of Feynman allegedly explaining why we couldn't go to Mars and back. I am normally on Youtube for something specific and don't follow recommendations, but hey, it's Feynman and I haven't seen it before, so I had to watch. After a few seconds it has become very clear that the video is totally fake. Then I started digging, and it turned out that both voice and the text it says are fake too. According to the "authors" it was "based on Feynman's work", which is his whole physics course.

YouTube must be absolutely flooded with this stuff.

I clicked on one about Henry the 8th, which is a story Ive heard heard 100 times but whatever. It started out normal enough, then claimed he started carrying around a staff with a human skull on the top near the end. Made up artifacts and paintings.

The most egregious has to be the "World War II mechanic fixes entire allied plane arsenal with piece of wire" category. I've come across a couple dozen of these. Completely fabricated events and people that never seem to have existed.

> YouTube must be absolutely flooded with this stuff.

I don't know what the current upload rate to YT is, but this seems unlikely. Despite the reckless and insane energy consumption associated with generative visual and audio art forms, there's no way there's enough power available for generative stuff to overwhelm the "actually recorded digital video" uploads.

Are there some niches on YT where this is true? Seems possible. YT overall? Nah.

If my toilet overflows and starts leaking raw sewage into my bathroom, I don't tend to then go "well, at least the rest of my house is fine proportionally".

Most of these kind of videos aren't fully SORA level AI anyway, they just use ChatGPT to make up a fake story and script they would otherwise have to make up themselves, which is much faster, and increases the chances one of them gets picked up by the algorithm and generates a few bucks in ad revenue.

> If my toilet overflows and starts leaking raw sewage into my bathroom, I don't tend to then go "well, at least the rest of my house is fine proportionally".

Sure. But if you live in a multi-apartment complex and someone's toilet on the far side of the complex is overflowing, you don't say "my apartment is flowing with raw sewage".

Maybe your part of the complex (YT) is drowning in raw sewage, mine is not, and I'm vaguely confident that the complex (YT) is large enough that at this point in time, most parts of it are still functioning "as intended".

I think YT Shorts IS overwhelmed with complete garbage. There are lots of great channels I watch that don’t have issue.

But YT shorts is the one place on YT that tries to frequently show you new uploads and stuff outside of your normal algorithm, and there is so much AI on there.

One of these videos was referencing a problem with one of the Mars landers. Feynman died in 1988, long before the landers were even on the drawing board.

Yep. I had the same experience. Except for me, it was someone I've never heard of read before, so I was none the wiser and assumed it was real. 30 minutes in I go "man this guy is really shit there's no way he should have this much credit" and I check the description and it says the same "based on X".

Same thing happened to me, a fake Feynman video that seemed really off after only a few seconds.

The more AI shit I see, the more I find myself agreeing with the Luddites and the Amish.

> recently saw a fake documentary about the famous GG-1 locomotive

It wouldn’t happen to be a certain podcast about engineering disasters, now, would it?

Not a patron, so I haven't seen the whole video, but I don't think Rocz would use AI for a video about his beloved Pennsylvania Railroad.

Well there's your problem? That one always seemed very well researched to me.

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