YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
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I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated.
It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content.
I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence (animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points), a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content.
Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person.
Currently, AI videos are a gold mine for black hats.
“Don’t believe what you just saw — That’s just AI propaganda!”
I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this:
"A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!"
Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.
And I'm with you, I can't wrap my head around it either.
To be fair I didn't really get her choice of movies before AI (superhero flicks, hallmark type movies, 200 watches of "Twilight" etc). I think to her it's just sort of "turn off your brain comfortable background noise" from inquiries.
I'm different and when I watch things I pay attention and think about it and notice plot holes etc etc. I watch to be entertained or informed and if it doesn't do either of those I tune out. So I can't sit through most movies even before AI. But some people I think just "vibe watch" for lack of a better term.
I also have never understood people who come home and watch "whatever is on TV" or watch news all day or that kind of thing either so I'm not sure the problem is AI in this case. It just produces more volume of junk than the junky junk that existed previously. Some of the AI stuff is egregiously horrible though.
I don’t mean that what she and many others watch is propaganda, but I do think it affects one over the time same as hearing every day that Ukrainians are all Nazi’s etc. That might be why young people are smashing their faces with hammers and using shitload of steroids etc. Perhaps we shpuld be as careful of what media we consume as we are of what we eat and drink.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
From Case Hate Red:
> With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around.
Of course the MPAA is against copying, I would say -- the ideal situation for the MPAA would be if when you left the theater, they could just wipe your brain of the memory of the film you just watched. You just remember that you had a fun time with your friends and it was a good movie, but you don't remember any of what happened there. "but those are MY memories" -- no no no we didn't touch YOUR memories, we left your memories just fine -- we only removed a copy of OUR copyrighted content from the world, consistent with our terms of service for the theater. But if you want to experience it again, by all means, come back to watch it again.
"That sounds like it would stifle all cinematic innovation" -- no you don't understand! Our artists are suffering because they don't get the full amount of money they are due because of all of these unlicensed copies moving about the world in peoples' heads. When people are discussing how amazing that movie was, our artists deserve to have them in a controlled cafe attached to the theater where they can control that experience and fully profit off of it. Don't you get it? Bigger financial incentives, bigger payoffs for successful artists -- therefore more artists, and more cinematic innovation! When you play back these unlicensed copies in your "memory" and pirate our works, you're really just contributing to monoculture by not rewarding the people who made your favorite things.
namely: "social" media
Like in the same way that windows has "won" in that it has 99% of desktop market share yet I can still use Linux happily.
I don't want government regulation here for the same reason I don't want the gov to step in and tell Linux what regulations it has to follow
More seriously, the more I think about this issue, the less I believe it can be fixed by technical solutions.
No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)
Screen time for kids (and adults for that matter!) should be way way scaled back. That falls on the parents.
Bad parents give their kids phones and tablets and that's a hill I will die on.
It's easy to say be a better parent, or produce a better environment for your kid, but it's not as easy to help people with that. If we can make social media healthier for everyone, that's a big deal.
Now, all the video services have feedback loops where they can determine what keeps people glued and provide more of that. Some "programs" like cocomelon have dialled that up to 11.
The only defence is the terrible parental controls and/or taking devices away. That almost always results in "fights".
not a perfect defense, but a very good one.
I get parents use it to babysit their kids. That's bad parenting. I'm a parent. I know it's not easy, and tempting to use it.
But you're not supposed to yield to those temptations. Part of being a leader, which is what being a parent is, is sucking it up.
And, yes, you can regulate cocaine too. There's nothing stopping us from taking the business away from drug-dealers and having actual health professionals distribute it in sensible ways.
idc how potentially beneficial screens may be, in the future (now?) we will start treating screens like smoking
Some of us are still in the "smoking can be good for you stage"
My message is basically, make it non-taboo, educate, give people tools to manage their behavior, prosecute predatory behaviors. To regulate social media, we can heavily regulate ads in social media; make ad algos, feed algos, recommendation engines transparent by law, in a way inspectable by individuals as well as journalists; put legal constraints on what these algos can do; use cryptography to get rid of fake accs and bots, without compromising anyone's privacy.
the best thing that can be done right now, rather than waiting for a broken government to fix our problems, is to admit to ourselves and parents that kids should not receive phones or iPads
it's not a good thing! taboos serve a purpose and it absolutely should be a cultural taboo.
I think absolute 0 is best for as long as possible. If you never introduce them to the drug, they'll never have the craving for it.
That's obviously difficult, practically, and we like movies, so we'll watch about a movie a week... but even I feel that is too much.
If you’re including regular TV, sounds like you are, they watch significantly more of that. At least some daily. I don’t think it’s nearly as damaging or addictive compared to phone/pad. It barely holds their attention a lot of the time and they would rather play.
just imo, I can't control you. God bless your family :)
Hey i like that!
Wealthier and more educated parents have more time and money to devoute to their kids education, hobbies, vacations etc. If you are single care mom working 10-12h shifts each day like mine (like mine), how the hell is it even possible to watch constantly what your kids do alone sfter school, or find the energy to do so when you are home? Does being poor and divorced make you a bad parent? Also you have no idea what content kids are being offered unless you are there next to them - I’m almost forty (no kids) and I have no idea what apps kids use or what is “cool” to them. No wonder boomers let their kids hang around in Habbo Hotel unsupervised. It’s just some kids video game right?
So as much I would just like to blame bad parenting I think we need laws and regulations on this stuff. We completely dropped the ball as a society on social media, we can’t let the same happen with AI.
This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos.
And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war.
Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.
Or whether it’s only a small subset who do.
If you disagree, I would strongly suggest you review where else you might be making this incorrect assumption.
From my experience actions are easily worth thousands of times more than any other criteria.
But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions.
How is it relevant to my question, whether you think someone else agrees with you… or not?
I just don’t see a reason for anyone to give you higher credibility than other HN users.
This is obviously false. Every developer has had hour-long debugging sessions to track down a mysterious behavior. Sometimes entire teams are stumped by a technical glitch. Until the bug is found, nobody knows everything about the machine.
As a first approximation, why not? Behavior is generally all we have in front of us, plus any other assorted social signals. Internal mental states are invisible, as is the personal history of the individual. We might note a man beating a kitten on the sidewalk, and believe this behavior sufficient grounds to reduce this person to the category "dick", even if we remained unaware of his high intelligence, his doctoral paper on gender-inequality, and the fact his mother hates him.
Maybe I should be generating generic AI made videos. LOL.
This isn't even well done. I also opened it in a private browsing window, and the ad I was served was the most obviously AI-generated slop hawking some kind of health drink...that was clearly just a badly generated bottle of apple cider vinegar (text on the bottle was all mangled but it's exactly the kind my grocery store sells), and the "doctor" speaking barely synced up with his voice. Do people falling for these just have no sense of the uncanny valley?
Skip ahead a minute or two - the narrator is a bit dull
I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.
This particular subset of GenAI is very very bad.
In my opinion, AI video/voice generation is being used to scam and manipulate people en masse, without a compelling, good use case besides generating more (slop) content.
Or you know, preference. Nice steady predictable AI slop delivered at mono qualities can be very comfy. It's like sleep tube, people reading wiki or random articles, comment threads but with varying energy to time pass. It's good enough, better than most human creator content.
Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.
I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.
What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.
As live music enjoyer and person that was commonly around safe spaces in the techno scene I cant agree more. Fuck filming people.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
I guess people are addicted to new notifications. They are lonely and drawn to human interactions and attention through social media because they are incapable of getting it through real life.
So on the one hand making your own photos and movies at events is less authentic than just experiencing it, and yet at the same time more authentic than relying on professionals to film it for you.
I have found when looking a photos from 20 years ago, I skip most of the shots of only landscapes, buildings, etc. The only interesting shots are shots with the people that I travelled with in them. They bring back all the fond memories, the things we did together, etc.
So I now, when making pictures of sceneries try to do it as much with my fellow travelers in them.
As you say, others can make better pictures of the scenery.
I still take pictures of monuments, or the sky, or the landscape nowadays with my phone, at least trying from some unusual or less common perspective, but I do take a lot of pictures of my family as well, especially in day to day moments. And print them, from time to time, in physical albums. It's just so different.
Same, we went to the US a lot when I was a teenager. I have many good/fun memories of all the places we visited together, people we met, etc. A few years ago I went through some of the photos that my parents still have with about the same ratio of pictures with us in it. Random desert shots are even more frequent than people shots :).
Nothing with with a few photos. However make sure you are making memories not just getting photos of someone else.
Hope there will be research.
Glad I left social media (if you don't count HN). It'll be almost a decade soon since I deleted all my accounts.
If I see a performance from Lang Lang, I don't just perceive the sound, it is the expression of memory, discipline and attention. Learning an instrument is more than attaining the skill of producing the correct notes in the correct order. It shapes attention, perspective, patience, discipline, sensitivity and so much more. You can't replace that with effortless simulation. I mean you could, but it's practically meaningless.
Agreed. Filming strangers in public is making everyone scared to have fun trying anything new, as they’re afraid of online mockery…
In the old days e.g. concerts were for enjoying the music together with people you did and didn't know. The best concerts were those where you were left sweaty from (slam)dancing with everyone in the pit on music that was even better-performed than on CD. Showing the experience afterwards was not really a thing that existed.
In other words, you need to be in control of your own narrative, or someone else will do it for you to fill the void. For example, someone can use cold reading to deduce what others suspect and fear and then paint you in that specific light, essentially planting individually targeted nasty rumours about you while increasing their rapport with others. That kind of rumours tend to spread.
Eventually you become the outcast in your social circles and you will be hard pressed to regain control of ”you” in the eyes of others.
But yes, there are very confirmists circles and some will outcast you for not doing what everyone does - your choice for trying to still belong there or find a better group.
But if you really do what you want and you do it with confidence, you might find the conformists are suddenly coming back and think you are cool.
A sincere thank you for this metaphor.
While theoretically access to everyone has been democratized when compared to music labels of the past since everyone can put their music on Spotify and social media, effectively that also means social media is now a required skill besides musicianship.
It's harder than ever to create your own thing and stay on track. I think this is why so many people are going bonkers with angine de poitrine for example.
I feel like one of the less discussed issues of the hyper-connected world is there are no small ponds to be the big fish in anymore. Used to be you could be the best in your school, church, town even city etc - even if you weren't that good. I remember being astounded as a kid by a woman who juggled 5 tennis balls in a local talent show. Now I can hop on youtube and watch people do way more impressive feats it doesn't seem so unique. I suspect that 5 ball routine might still be the greatest juggling I've seen in person, but it still doesn't compare to random acts I've seen online.
But especially with the para-social relationships of social media people feel connected even to big names now. You might not compare the local young singer to Taylor Swift, but people will to the tiktok singer they 'know' who liked their reply once.
It's gratifying and inspiring to be top of your class in something, but in a world where it's always a class of millions, you know you'll never reach the top.
Consuming all that content leaves you feeling small and isolated. The talents you thought you had are nothing in the face of a global pool of YT/TikTok/Insta superstars.
Currently, I share things with people I care about and who care about me. The rest of the world can remain ignorant of me and I of it. It's a good place to be.
In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.
You just described me 40 odd years ago :))
When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.
A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.
It occurred to me that we appreciate this kind of public performance, but we get annoyed if someone plays their boombox too loud in public.
I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.
I think we value _effort_.
Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.
And when you look at broader culture, people dancing seem to welcome only small or bigger mockery, unless they dance really well.
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.
I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.
It's not foo, it's bar. Baz became qux. That's foobar. Baar baaz — quux quuz.
I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.
More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.
This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.
I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.
Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.
But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.
So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.
Your argument is like "people have been killing each other for centuries so when you think about it hydrogen bombs are not the problem"
Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?
A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?
Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves
A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?
I would NEVER EVER consider using AI in something I actually release to listeners
I don't care if its good or bad. If I'm making someone listen something, it should've been touched by my hand - even if that means turning a knob in a DAW
If we viewed art as some sort of competition or race, then someone using neural–network-based generative tools could avoid losing the race; however, everybody would be participating in some sport A and the person using ML participates in a completely different sport B. Everyone is running, but one person is riding a scooter.
However, art is not a finite zero-sum game[0]. Despite what formal music education for kids sometimes tries to make it look like, it’s not a competition, there is no global ranking and scoring system for your skill. Many people have an intuitive understanding of that; try going to a live jam to see people participating regardless of their hypothetical skill level.
[0] As further reading on this topic more generally, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
There's probably more original music being created now than any time in history. Constant promotion of AI music is why you think it's not the case.
> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
If you think being a DJ is more consumption than shouting cover songs near a lake, maybe you should try learn be a good DJ
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
If you are a musician you know there're absolute geniuses who have ZERO formal music skills completely self taught. Some are world famous names we all know. That was never the problem.
> I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
You contradict yourself. If music really doesn't matter then why AI? The crippling fear of supporting a real human musician somewhere?
Irrelevant because if you are NOT filming you don't magically become people participating in art which is what that comment is about. You don't expect people at a show to play.
Harmful because if you ask any real musician or event organizer who's not very famous already, filming & posting and tagging is probably the biggest way to support them that you can do as audience. On par with actually coming to the show. For two reasons, it spreads word of mouth to people's followers and it gives musician/venue promo material. I chatted with many performers after events and they are always grateful for this.
And anyway literally no one pays ticket money to spend the entire show fimling. No one wants to be unpaid video guy. People film some bits to post and then hang out with others which is why they're there. Grifters who actually film entire shows hoping to earn more money than they spent on the ticket are annoying but very rare and they only go to already famous performers.
You seem to be dismissing any music that you don't have some pretty close participation in. Did it all start to go downhill with the invention of the gramaphone? Listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Vera Lynn or Elvis or Frank Sinatra was irrelevant for those that weren't actively jamming along with them?
I'm being facetious, I know you don't really mean that. My point is, listening (on your own, with no musical skill) to good quality music made by a real human is a valid activity. That's under threat, and the fact that making your own music with your friends isn't (or at least is less so) shouldn't detract from that.
This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!
All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.
You don't have to say I wont be a rockstar, therefore let me use some AI to make a song, and in doing so give up on the joys of touching and making sounds with an instrument, a very old human thing we've been doing all over the world, having someone show you a song, or look up a youtube video and learning it from some random stranger.
Even better, being in love with a song and finally being able to play it yourself!
Maybe AI could've sufficed for Paul McCartney's interest in music, and provided a creative outlet. But we wouldn't have had something as great and as human as the legacy of the Beatles.
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
There’s an appetite for this.
Reasonable people can believe they have a legitimate ownership right when they petition YouTube for copyright enforcement for AI-generated work. The courts might eventually disagree, but that's a different thing than knowingly making a fraudulent misrepresentations to YouTube for financial benefit. This difference makes the proposed behavior criminal fraud. I highly recommend not risking twenty years of prison time for like maybe a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue.
Besides, nobody's actually checking
Not that it still isn't depressing.
wouldn't be surprised if it's because they don't have to pay out for AI music.
That suggests you've done a good job of directing the AI to generate what people like.
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
I wish I had your Spotify.
Over the last few months they have served me multiple slop tracks in the discover weekly playlist. Probably more I didn't notice when just listening without focus, but several had generic artist name without bio and dozens of nearly identical tracks.
Edit: slop not slob
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
The idea that only humans can make music is absurd.
> I guess she can listen to slob but maybe just look around a little instead?
The idea that AI generated = slop is absurd.
Humans create just as much, if not more slop. Look at 99% of "professional" output in creative fields. It's awful.
A human with taste steering AI tools can be better than a "classical" human with hard skills but no taste.
The old world is going to be run over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4
Completely. Run. Over.
AI is a tool.
Artists and engineers using AI as a tool can get further than people not using it at all.
I don't mind that Opus and Codex were trained on my code.
I don't mind that Seedance and Veo were trained on my YouTube videos.
I benefit from the models.
Purely a economic argument but also the rare good music from AI I am still looking its generally speaking not that cohesive and for unremarkable. A lot of human work is that to but the discovery of good music from people feels much less daunting
That's not to say you can't make effortful novel content using AI, but this is just lazy hollow stimulation. Like all the laziest of AMVs, nothing to say outside of "isn't this cool?".
We want to see the person underneath and what ideas they explore through the medium - AI is just a fancy new tool of the times.
Who cares what brush or canvas Vincent used to make Starry Night? Without his name on it, it's just another oil painting.
Social media already shows people love this stuff. It's only the 1% of terminally online whiners that have to project their take on it.
And I've worked with enough artists that kick ass with these tools to know this is the new normal.
People on social media follow creators who make novel content irrespective of how they made it.
AI generated content will always be lower quality because the entry level is literacy, hence YouTube intervention with their "it's probably not worth your time" label.
Have the ick for AI-gen, fine. But dismissing the things it solves puts you in a position where you'll never understand other people.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I love music and I frequently go to live shows, so the bar for me has kind of become "Can I go see this artist live, OR is it so good that I don't care that I can't?" If it passes that, I'll listen. I've found one AI generated song that has made it onto my top 100 favorite songs I've ever heard.
The thing that really shits me with AI music is when it outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics. There's certain tells and boy do they give me the ick.
I don't necessarily agree. Read the lyrics to the "irony is a dead scene" EP by the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. It's nonsense. Still genuine expression.
Most Carpenter Brut songs don't even have lyrics and there is endless expression there. I know that I consume music in a very different way than most people, and that's probably why I have such a strong opinion here.
Aren’t you curious how a modern solar panel works so well with no moving parts?
The problem isn't about it being "easier", it's about people who want the praise and attention of being a maker but don't want to put any thought or effort into it. They have no thoughts and nothing to say and what they generate reflects that.
I smile when I come across the term 'qualityslop', which is an oxymoronic term to indicate very good human content.
If it didn't take effort to make it, if you can repeat it a hundred times in a week, it's slop. It's a good descriptor, even if to an untrained ear it's convincing.
Previously web search, YouTube, and Reddit would have been my go to but they have all been enshittified.
You can see new releases almost daily on e.g. NewRetroWave[0].
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
If somebody told me "I choose to only read AI-generated books" I would also silently judge them.
With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.
Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.
You are free to judge people for liking AI music, or in fact anything obviously. We all judge, and must live with judgement. But is this judgement supposed to be of any particular importance given it is equally likely someone is passing judgment on you for something they may personally dislike?
It just often feels as if there is an assumption that one's own standards are that which is "normal," while everyone else's are the weird ones. But to plenty of other people, our own interests, values, hobbies, or lifestyle choices would may be considered equally rubbish and worthy of judgement, according to their worldview and experience.
I would say, judge people if you want. As we all largely do, though I try not to do. Provided it comes with the realisation you're not somehow standing outside the exact same process.
Note: I do not willingly consume AI content, nor do I have any particular interest in doing so. But I have had people very openly judge me for things that for many of us here would be considered entirely normal, including my choice to work with computers for a living. So I do not have a tendency to give any particular weight to the "judgement" of others, silent or otherwise, where my choices do not materially impact that individual or society at large.
To lighten the mood a little more, I am quite openly judged (and silently I expect) because I have a particular enjoyment for Russian hardbass :) Which many if exposed to it I would expect consider it to be total garbage. But it does nothing to reduce my enjoyment of it and nor would I allow it too.
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
Like what? People say this kind of stuff all the time and it's either not true or they're generating things with very questionable taste.
But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.
I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.
If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.
You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?
Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.
Nobody generating anything on Suno is showing any kind of creativity. It's somehow worse then regular plagiarism.
It's normal to hate AI being pushed down our throats, but it's a completely different thing when we call people names, who enjoy it on their own.
I'm not sure how using AI to generate songs will save anyone from the burnout of searching for songs, but what I understood from context is "intellectual laziness" and I see that as an insult. I'm not a native speaker though, so thanks for offering another perspective.
The "intellectual laziness" you describe can be seen as a way to not spend attention and effort on things, you don't care for, in other words being rational and mindful.
Not that I agree with this, there is tons of good music from the past centuries, which I already can't all hear in my lifetime, that I don't need to start consuming never ending output from greedy, soulless and evil corporations. I also don't like modern music that much.
> I'm not a native speaker though
Me neither.
Like this, made by a guy who clearly understands who to use ai?
https://youtu.be/6YTjH_7QUT0?t=42
Ai is a great enabler for people who have ideas but don’t have chops.
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
People have made music before, and I hardly believe they only made It for other people, but als themselves.
We are talking about people who rather generate some random Suno songs instead of just searching for some playlists of which there are thousands upon thousands. There is something deeply dystopian about that.
Extrapolate this idea for a second: 10, 20 years from now, people generating their TV shows, their porn (including the illegal kinds), their music of dead musicians. That's individualism at its most extreme. Culture is a shared experience, you can talk to other people about the same music, same fiction, same art, because it's out there and exists in the world. When on the other hand people normalize consuming their own custom AI-generated culture, that shared experience is completely lost. At best you'll get a friend or two to watch your sitcom episode, it's not going to be a water cooler conversation at work.
It's literally dehumanizing.
But without this incentives I could imagine a future where Smartphones where actually good and have a more positive impact.
But back to culture. I don't see the problem of people listening to their own created music. Even now a lot of people make e.g great photos just for them selves. As long as we don't force people to do so that's fine in my books.
Still if the incentives are bad, this can go very go wrong in very distopian ways.
I love me some Deleuze and Hegel, but my life is full of "interesting" bits already. Sometimes you need something simple. Your example is wrong as well: he did not create his own music, he directed it and yes I would definitely love to read a book about some weird sci-fi ideas I have written in some style I love but myself cannot reproduce.
Which in this case, my need is to recall the memories and emotions when I write the song?
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't want to listen to new music by other people, or create more of my own. I'm simply sharing what it is to experience songs written by yourself. I saw Sting the other day talking about the very same thing to Rick Beato regarding songs he wrote 40 years ago, and I remember Brett Anderson of Suede saying that he loved listening to his own music. In fact, wouldn't it be weird if you didn't want to?
The song that I wrote has more values because it carries memories, emotions, and my internal state. I'm not saying other songs doesn't have values. It's just harder to resonate with, unless the melodies or lyrics align with my emotional state.
I listen to my own songs because I am songwriter, and still am even when I stopped doing it professionally. I am not doing it for the sake of "I just want to listen to my own songs and I will never listen to others". I listen just because "This song is meaningful for me"
And the "this song" in that quote above, can be mine, or other's.
It's just I don't go and explore songs actively. If my playlist suddenly randomize itself (which YouTube Music usually do even when I already selected a specific playlist), I usually just keep it randomizing the songs, I either skip the songs based on the intro or just the title.
Sometimes, I only write the lyrics without any melodies, or just give a base chords for the AI to work with without any melodies, and AI might surprise me on how it suddenly chose a certain melodies or chord progression.
So you can say I'm exploring, but only within the boundaries of the lyrics that I wrote. Or when YouTube Music randomly plays a song for me and I immediately resonates with it.
What a perfect illustration that while you typed on a keyboard you're so far away from making art.
PS: how many pieces of art that moved you were made by artists you knew or met?
I was moved by a lot of songs made by artists I never met. But I was moved because of the song, not because of the reason why the artist wrote it. If I can truly understand the emotional state of the artist when they wrote it, I might be able to empathize with them. But that's me empathizing with the person that made the art as a human. Nothing stopping me from doing that as a human, even when their song didn't move me.
I publish my songs under a pseudonyms. They can infer what am I as a person based on the songs that I wrote. They can infer what emotions and feelings that I am experiencing while I write the songs. But it's all inference, unless they know me behind the pseudonyms, they won't be able to relate with me personally, as my real self, not as the songwriter. And I am okay with that.
You can find a ton of this on archive.org [0]. One of my favorites is from K-Mart background vinyl. AI can't quite do this yet.
[0] https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Kmart%22&and%5...
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
“Slop” is specifically about AI content lacking in effort, quality, meaning. You may not like Zimmer, but saying it lacks in those areas seems a tad too much. “Formulaic” isn’t an indicator of slop either, most stories are formulaic following a variation of the hero’s journey. It’s especially not problematic when you’re someone like Zimmer who invents or popularises the formula.
Also formulaic art isn't necessarily bad, because human appreciation does follow some patterns.
There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art (my pet peeve is many “instrumental guitar albums” that are just pentatonic scale and standard licks in all shapes and forms) and ai art can be good.
I will say even more. I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great. Critics will be in ave “triumphant return to old form” and everybody will avoid looking in the eyes and say the truth about how they were able to write new good songs, given that they weren’t able to do it in like decades.
In fairness, you did say “even worse”. That’s not an expression one tends to use unless calling something bad. I can’t imagine someone saying “this is the best album ever, and even worse this is the second best”.
> There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art
There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box. Even the people who used to wax lyrically about “prompt engineering” have mostly subsided. AI pictures (not necessarily “art”, I don’t think that term should apply to any random image, even from humans) created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
> and ai art can be good.
What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
> I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great.
Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it? Then sure, can’t argue there. Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure. I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
For “even worse” - I meant different, and I think your analogy is unfair.
One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
But again, my native language is not English and the way I say things may surely sound unnatural.
——
How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts and give humans mich more benefit of the doubt and leeway than you give to ai.
> There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box.
There sure is. And that’s what separates results. Most of the things that I enjoy are clearly have good deal of thought in inventing lyrics (again, I watch lore channels and the way the lyrics are made is clear that there is a good amount of thought, prompt and maybe even manual tinkering), in doing montage of videos. I’m skeptical about prompt engineering but your criticism here is as same as painters criticizing photographers: “they just press the button”.
> created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
I used to thing along this line too, but later I realized that this is not an argument in any favor. Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors - costumes of wrong epoch, or made wrong way, or worn wrong way. Wrong guns, wrong ammo etc etc etc. I saw some pro criticising ai generated picture of a woman on a horse, and it was about same - the things used to steer the horse are like upside down, some other things don’t make sense. And then it clicked to me - it doesn’t matter. It isn’t unique to ai. Humans did same stuff forever. As long as result is enjoyable, it’s fine.
> and ai art can be good. What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc. On first albums of Metallica you almost can hear how they are learning and getting better (except drummer). Yes, if it’s pleasing enough people and bringing joy to their life then it’s ok. It doesn’t matter is it ai or human. Again, there are many cases in music when apparently the solos weren’t played by artists but by uncredited session musicians. Is it slop? Musician acted as tool here.
> Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it?
Fans like it. Not only me. It brings new fans or even casuals may enjoy it
> Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure.
You do you. It’s fine.
> I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
Why Metallica does new albums? They already have enough super hits, that stood test of time even By your definition (decades) to not care. Why other bands do the same?
—-
In very short. To me it feels that there is an attempt to steer into public conscience that
Ai = slop
Human Slop = Ai slop = slop
Thank you for clarifying.
> One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
Except no, that doesn't make sense. It is not clear at all to say “This is not your best job. It is a solid job. Even worse…”. That is very confusing communication. “Even worse” means “something was bad but then it got even badder”. “Even better” is the opposite: “something was good and became even gooder”. Using “even worse” to mean “this part was good but this other part was bad” is incorrect. The word “worse” already requires things to be bad. It is an adjective adding to the situation, never contradicting it.
See the definition of the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worse
See how all of them are “more <bad>”, “<bad> to a greater degree”? Worse always means something was already bad.
> How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts.
I don’t think I have. But because you only made the accusation without explaining your reasoning, you’re not giving me any fair chance to clarify any position. Considering we’ve already established, by your own admission, that English is not your strong suit (not a criticism), doesn’t it seem more likely to you that you’ve misunderstood my point? Or perhaps that you should consider that a possibility? As per the HN guidelines, assume good faith. I assumed good faith in your argument and responded respectfully and clearly (to the best of my ability) to it. I would appreciate the same courtesy.
I started updating my comment above as soon as I saw that I posted reply (the one that your answer addresses). Hope that clarifies my position and gives you an explanation where I disagree with your comment.
> Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors
Mistakes are not the same thing as slop. It’s not at all related. Here’s the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
> This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc.
I like gore. I find Cronenberg and old Japanese movies and anime aesthetically pleasing. I have done work based on gore. Not only am I not making a straw man or arguing in bad faith, I’m not insulting or discrediting you in the slightest. Please stop making assumptions and responding to those assumptions in your head. I didn’t use gore as an example to discredit you, I used it because it’s an example of a niche art that I understand and respect. It‘s the exact opposite of what you took from it.
> Why Metallica does new albums?
Metallica is not making new albums with AI, are they? That has nothing to do with your original point of an artist coming back to make a new album after decades using AI. How can you, in good faith, accuse someone else of shifting the goalposts while engaging in such a textbook example yourself?
Here is the wording I was reacting to:
>> and ai art can be good.
> What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
To me, it feels like you are having it both ways. First, you treated my wording - “even worse” - as meaningful according to its normal English meaning, and even after I explained what I meant, you still went back to the dictionary definition. But when your own wording was quite loaded: “the yuckiest of gore,” “to the right person,” and “cult following” - and I read it that way, you dismissed my reading as assumptions in my head.
That feels like a double standard. I was expected to accept the normal meaning of my wording, but your wording was supposed to be judged only by your later explanation of intent. I should’ve known, obviously, that you like gore.
I accept your clarification, but I do not accept that my reading was unreasonable. We clearly read tone and meaning differently here.
I clearly see talented author who just didn’t had chops or resources previously to realize his vision, and now he can and I can enjoy it.
At the same time I probably feel and define slop slightly differently, for myself.
In my birth city there was a street that was closed every weekend for art sellings. You walk about 1km (or less), and there are tables with sculpitures, paintings, crafts etc. In the beginning it’s fun, but after some time (and especially after several visits) you see how repetitive and formulaic it is. Somebody chooses kittens and draws 100s of things with them, somebody chooses nature etc etc etc. I didn’t even know the word slop then, but looking back - it was it.
After watching Bob Ross (and I love the guy) it’s clear that many “creators” were producing slop that is technically similar to what Bob Ross was teaching. Did Bob Ross produced slop? No. Do people who just reuse same approach over and over again (here is how we will paint the tree by using this then than brush) produce slop? In my book - yes. And it’s fine, if they or somebody else enjoy it. I don’t judge them and I don’t judge people who use and enjoy ai.
For me art’s purpose is to invoke some emotion in person, experiencing the art. The way how art is produced is secondary.
You can have buckethead who does music, and you can have someone (even highly technical, with great timing, control, mechanical chops) who “produces song” while sitting on a toilet and an “instrumental album” in a day, by running pentatonic scale all over again. And this is the slop for me. And it has nothing to do with ai.
If you need it to be explained to you why it's a tragedy that a person's curiosity can atrophy (or fail to develop) to the extent that she can't seek meaning in what she engages with every day for enjoyment, then you might not have met the minimum requirements for this conversation.
Some people yearn for the slop.
There are several channels with pure ai Wh40k music. Some Star Wars creators are doing similar stuff.
I’m actively resisting desire to dump bunch of YouTube links, but if you want to hear what many people already vetted great, I’m happy to share.
It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.
AI Music is changing music habits ...your friend and myself arent the only ones https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n....
Give it ten years or so and i bet the Taylor Swifts type acts and the big music industry machine wont be as celebrated.
This is the distilled essence of a “first world problem.”
It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you
Massive like Temu/AliExpress products massive.
It “knows” nothing. It has a database of tokens you have given it to generate more tokens, constantly turning toward meaningless averages unless you steer it strong. Technically speaking any Meta or Google algorithm “knows you” better.
I am not religious, but I can connect into some desire for spiritual, salvation and purity in Allegri’s Miserere. I am not Catholic, I oppose many things Catholic church stands for and I certainly was not alive in .italy in 17th century, but still across the time I can share this common experience of humanity that is completely separate of my own. It is something only art can do. Without that art is just another narcissistic social media wank inherently without meaning.
>meaningless
>narcissistic
>wank
Cool insults. But my lying eyes and ears still say that AI knows me pretty well and is bringing plenty of value to my life.
Hard disagree, there is just music people make because it's what they want to make, if all you're looking at is the top 10/pop radio music, yes it will be tailored for the largest market but by no means is there a conspiracy to only accomodate the 'young people'.
The way I use Suno is sometimes I play Ukulele and discover a tune I like; I record it and generate a song from it.
I didn't take any music lessons. I'm 100% self-taught so my recordings are a little rough but the melody comes through and Suno polishes it up nicely and adds lyrics based on a topic I've been thinking about.
I find both the creation and listening aspects relaxing and therapeutic. I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song. It's very clearly my melodies, my songs but it's enjoyable to hear them as a finished product. There is definitely an element of surprise, the lyrics are sometimes quite insightful and clever too and I can actually start appreciating the poetic aspect of music in a way which eluded me before.
I suspect that by the time most musicians finish refining and producing their own songs, without AI, they're probably tired of hearing it. Suno avoids that. It's a truly novel thing to be both a producer and consumer of your own music. Perfect for an introvert like me who can't relate to anyone except himself.
It's nice to see that some other people also like my pieces though I'm not trying to make a career out of it.
How much music do you even need? Is she listening 24/7?
Lots of artists! They are not even remotely hard to find. They are literally a google search away. Typing stuff into Suno because you can't be bothered to search "new artists that sound 90s" is crazy
I'm not affiliated with it, nor am I against AI-generated music. Just a huge fan who admires the hard work people pour into making the scene work.
Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future | Adam Neely
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk
A detailed philosophical discussion of his point=of-view:
AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely | Alex O'Connor
Music for Airports is ok ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports https://youtu.be/vNwYtllyt3Q ... but there are parts in there that I recognize in the loop that bring me out of it being background and into something I'm listening to).
But yea... I want a soundscape and it doesn't bother me if it was something that was generative in 2018, or in 2026... or loops of recorded sound... I want something that isn't silence and that I can not listen to for four to eight hours... bonus if its enough "noise" that it doesn't even get picked up after noise suppression in a Teams call.
Space Banjo is great ( https://spacebanjo.com be it https://youtu.be/CLnHStt4mbs or https://youtu.be/ygYfJSTc_qQ ) ... but I like to listen to that when I can listen to it more.
There's also things like https://youtu.be/_egA9RZrD5k (and in this realm, I get picky https://www.youtube.com/@resomat6474 is pretty good, but some of it hits higher notes ... https://www.youtube.com/@TheJapaneseTown-jt6fy is pretty good too).
Again, this is more about wanting sound rather than music.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
Not unlike Buckethead, they seemed to prefer avoiding the direct spotlight of fame, but they still wanted to create these things and put their thoughts, feeling, and original aesthetic out there in the world.
...all of which is to say "except for the AI part" is a pretty big exception.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
To be honest, as long as the music is to my liking, I don’t really care all that much.
But to me this seems silly. Yes I want real artists to make music and be able to make a living not some faceless company spitting out endless music until something works. However at the end of the day if something sounds good then one should enjoy it not refuse to accept it simply because it is AI.
Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child? Or what if AI could could sort through a massive backlog of evidence in unsolved murders and other violent crimes giving new leads previously missed? I am just curious if some people will simply be against it no matter what the use is. As for myself I think it has it's uses but also think it comes at a heavy price as in massive power and water consumption and other issues it comes with. Anyways
Also, re: music, if I was fine with listening to AI music, why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
Because you might not be as good as someone else in doing it, just like it was before AI. "Why would I listen to the output of someone else's piano instead of playing it on my own?"
> Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child?
If AI cured cancer then by definition it would no longer be the technology that’s primary use case is churning out various forms of derivative slop. And so the balance between its value vs the economic/social/environmental costs would immediately and fundamentally change.
Losing my job, spending 3x as much to replace my PC while my favorite websites devolve into a cesspool of spam might not feel worth it just because I can now vibe code a todo app in 2 minutes while listening to a 600 hour playlist of personalized elevator music.
But if it cured my dad’s cancer and my mom’s Parkinson’s? Well, that’s a different story…
A: sorry i’d love to deeply consider this topic with you but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so i won’t?
Are you real? - If you can't tell, does it matter?
I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).
Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.
People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.
I imagine it'll apply to anything with a SynthID watermark. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
"B-b-b-but what if I create genuine wo—“
You won’t.
NEXT
enough music was made already, we don’t need more.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
What's the difference with AI doing it instead of your script ?
If your answer to any of these questions is "yes", and your answer to "can AI create art" is no, then there is a difference between AI doing it and a script.
That said the discussion around "human" art and "AI" art often lacks nuance, and I believe there's lots of space to explore art that uses AI. Humans produce a lot of crappy art, this crappy art requires humans to invest time and effort. With AI it is possible for humans to produce lots of crappy art without investing time and effort, so an deluge of crappy AI art follows.
If I use AI to strip backgrounds instead of traditional greenscreen methods, is the end result "crappy AI art"? I'd hope no one sets those standards. I'd hope my videos would be judged as "crappy human art" since I still did the camera work the acting and the editing. If I use AI for visual effects in my video because I don't have visual effect training and don't have money to hire someone with experience (I don't make money from my occasional fun video projects), does that make it "crappy AI art"? I don't believe so. But somewhere between there and the content farm AI slop filling the Youtube servers there is a point where it becomes "crappy AI art" and I can't tell you where that point is because I'm still trying to figure it out.
I guess either way we will see. Art is only appreciated by those who appreciate it so who am I to judge.
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
You can click a button that makes a strong "suggestion" to the algorithim, which they will honor for as long as they feel like.
I went through this a few years ago when the channel of a large far right "news" broadcaster kept being jammed on my front page, and the best I could do was keep hitting the button and have it it "temporarily" be removed from my front page before it would inevitably show up again months down the line.
Perhaps it is not deliberate, and merely incompetence. Either way resolved on desktop with an addon because if I wanted to gamble, i'd go to a casino.
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
And you know that how?
And, how do you know news itself is not 100% ai? News corps may simply fail to disclose that it was ai, be taken in, remove watermarks, etc.
The fact is no one can say what one sees on a screen is a true representation of reality. People are acting on a consensus feeling.
Eg, I can say: "ai wrote this comment".
Or I can say: "ai did not write this comment".
Looking at the comments alone does not tell you whether they were or were not written by ai. Same for videos.
What is going on is that you are trusting the disclosure is significant and real. So, when you see the disclosure you are concluding something on the basis of TRUST. Same for the video itself.
Seeing something on a screen does not make it a true representation of reality. You do not know reality; you only know that you saw a video. This applies to disclosure, video, comments - anything on a screen.
- Clearly amateurish production, which should be met with skepticism until proven otherwise
- Clearly professional production, with good reputation (e.g. long-running with few controversies), meaning it’s probably trustworthy
- Clearly professional, with poor reputation (e.g. propaganda funding), meaning one should be skeptical while consuming
It's really not hard to understand what the problem is with AI generated history vids.
I think a correlating answer can be found in visual effects for movies. And the answer "depends". When it's poorly done, the scene feels off or unbelievable somehow. But when done well, people have an enjoyable experience.
This same conversation existed when moving from practical effects to digital. and in the end, audiences only cared about quality.
Things I would do before committing time to a random channel on a topic I’m interested in:
- Search my trusted communities and channels for alternative recommendations on that topic
- Ask (create a post) for recommendations on a topic in my trusted communities
- Request my preferred content creators create content on that topic
- Search for sentiment regarding the new channel (accuracy, trustworthiness)
Why would you assume I'm NOT subscribed to those channels? And why would you assume I am incapable or haven't asked for recommendations.
My friend. You are a grade A jerk. Get freaking bent.
- Occasional AI b-roll during explainer videos
- AI generated backing track (music)
- AI generated shots sprinkled in a short film
- Showing examples of AI video as an AI capability update or commentary
- AI generated VFX on top of non-AI video
- AI upscaling of low res footage
- AI frame interpolation for synthetic slow-mo
- Modified / composited AI video
- Footage created by "Extend Scene" features in Premiere Pro and others
- Word correction from tools like Descript
- AI relighting or colorization
- Reaction video to a video containing AI-generated content
And in general, what amount of combination of any of these applications constitutes as "AI generated"? If I have a 30 minute video with a 3 second AI generated clip, do I get the same label as full-blown AI slop video?
A 30 minute speech by a president where I use AI to change 3 seconds in order to make that person say something they never did should also get the label. The label shouldn't be about how much AI was used, but that it was used at all.
It sounds like your argument is about deceptive editing. Why not just require labelling deceptive editing? That way there can be place for comedy channels to do so for comedic purpose (rather than blanket ban on deceptive edits).
Almost any photograph taken with a mobile phone is AI edited because phones come with AI to enhance photo quality (e.g. Deep Fusion, Smart HDR), should any photo taken with a mobile camera be labelled AI now?
You may not be old enough to remember seeing it, but notices like "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen" were put there for a reason. It was to avoid legislation which would have forced distributors to disclose that the product they were delivering was not the same as what people saw in theaters because it was considered deceptive to hide that fact. Altering of someone else's video should always be disclosed. That includes upscaling and color alterations even when they aren't done using AI and should absolutely be done when AI is inserting a bunch of fake frames.
When using AI to edit your own content deception is much less of a concern, but yes the use of AI should still be disclosed. There are clearly people who want to know when AI is being used to create something. There's no harm in having the label there, it just makes it easier for people to decide if and how to view your work. What value is there in hiding your use of AI from others in cases where you aren't trying to trick them?
Also yes, cell phone cameras should be required to clearly disclose that the photos they take to not reflect reality, and include the fact that they are edited with AI in meta-data. I've had friends complain that the photos their phones were taking were automatically edited and there was no option to disable those edits. They were upset because they intentionally wanted photos that reflected the real world and ultimately were forced to switch to using other cameras to get the accuracy they needed. As far as I'm concerned cell phone cameras doing that are simply defective. People should be aware of that fact before they use cell phone cameras for things like evidence collection, pictures of medial concerns, and for anything where accuracy matters more than what some algorithm thinks you'd rather see than the truth.
I'd say this is far more problematic than plain slop.
Every online video platform should let you label specific segments as AI generated, even better if it is a requirement with validation checks for certain kinds of content.
It's a really valuable feature that I expect will eventually be the gold standard, it was surprising how helpful it was. I think a lot of creators will embrace it, it adds credibility/authenticity. You aren't just labeling the AI content, you are labeling the content that isn't generated by AI, with a validation layer to back it up.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
The parent post's worry is warranted, IMO.
The point is that, on average, individual experiences are improving, decade by decade. Humanity is doing a remarkable job.
Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.
Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house
My daughter's English professor is now requiring people to hand write their essays during class. So at least there is that.
Yet, in the grand scheme of things, the world has gotten better in that time. Which is how you know these people are wrong, at least most of the time.
The challenge with positive news is that you have to go seek it out. It will rarely come to you. And then you have to greet it without cynicism, which many are incapable of.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
It's not like human-generated content is made of carbon and AI-generated content is made of silicon and the science of chemistry can unambiguously tell them apart. If you asked a million humans and a million LLMs to write a sentence on a specific subject, it's not implausible that one of the LLMs and one of the humans would output the exact same sentence. Maybe more than one.
A thing that can take only the output and accurately tell you if it was AI-generated or not is therefore impossible, because if it said no it would be wrong when the LLM generates that sentence, but if it said yes it would be wrong when a human generates the exact same sentence.
All it can do is try to calculate a probability. But then what do you want to do with that? Suppose the probability it estimates for some content is 45%, and that probability estimate is an accurate measure of the true probability, i.e. can't be improved when the only information you have is the content itself. Do you want to ban the 55% of that content which is human-generated, or allow the 45% which is AI-generated?
I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale, ship it as a screening tool.
Is such tool feasible at all with current state of AI technology, or is it just a reasonable take from the past that may not be so reasonable anymore?
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
The issue is, that's not a thing. AI-generated content and human-generated content have significant overlap. No amount of training data can allow you to distinguish them with that level of accuracy because many outputs exist that could have been generated by either one. Additional training data allows you to say that the probability is 55.0374% plus or minus 0.0001, rather than only being able to say that it's 55% plus or minus 5%. It can tell you with greater precision exactly how ambiguous it is. What it can't do is remove the ambiguity.
Email spam filtering can clearly cause reputational harm too.
Only if it actually works
It could work "well enough" for YouTube to consider it a success while still harming a fairly large number of content creators.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
Unfortunately that could still be true while labeling all human-crafted content as AI-created.
As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.
It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.
This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.
It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.
Why? Not trying to argue against AI labeling, but if you are enjoying the music, why does it matter?
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
---
From: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
If nothing else, it feels like a the subscription price should be less for an AI-music service.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just needs one simple policy: Post AI and you're banned for life, no appeals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
My feed is all channels I'm subscribed to or content from other creators that make similar content. I don't get Mr Beast or any other the other crap that people complain about.
Compared with, say, Netflix, where even though I've been rating everything I watch on there for 5+ yrs, the recommendations still barely feel personalized (if anything, it feels like it personalizes which premade "top list" to show me, but not the titles within them...but it does personalize the cover art/thumbnail, lol).
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
If people don’t want to watch AI content, they should be able to avoid it. Just as a vegan should be able to know if a dish is appropriate for them. Besides: if you have to blatantly deceive people into watching your videos when they otherwise would choose not to, what are you even doing? And yes I understand people already do that. But we should not go out of our way to enable that. Plus the moment you are perceived as not disclosing that, you risk getting burned by someone online and facing much harsher, longer term consequences. Reputation still matters to a degree.
Ultimately I’m not sure we should be advocating for opacity in consumer products.
It seems like the Google method here is identifying their synthid markings on content. Which won't cause false positives but only catches content from tools that actively adds this mark.
This is the same thing you will see HN users saying unironically about ads. Yet the revenue of say Google and Meta would say otherwise.
People are pretty darn good now at spotting ai.
An alternative is just use ai to look at the comments. Almost anything with AI has comments complaining about it.
All of these sites need to deal with it because it does drive away users.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).
The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint#Species_counterpo...
/s
I dumped my subscription because of it. If I have to use an ad-blocker to make the site useable, and the ad-blocker already blocks the ads which was the reason I subscribed in the first place...no point in paying anymore. Fuck 'em.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.
What I absolutely loathe and instantly block is AI narration. That’s an instant deal breaker for me. And it’s gotten to the point that without a shot of the creator or obvious humanisms like microphone sounds, I assume a new creator is AI tts reading an LLM generated script. There are thousands of these channels.
I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.
That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.
It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.
As someone who doesn't use youtube, this seems conceptually wacky.
i.e. Why aren't those video simply RSS podcasts? Yeah, incentives, but if the video doesn't matter, they'd be a better product as a podcast.
It doesn't seem clear if this sweep will pick up AI-generated maths, physics and CS videos on YouTube, which use AI-generated scripts, AI-generated voices and graphical animations which are presumably produced from AI-generated code for input to Manim or the like. Or all the AI-generated documentaries about military vehicles which apparently use a similar mix of AI-generated scripts and voiceovers combined with old video footage and photos pulled from archives at the AI's direction. These have been absolutely flooding their categories on YouTube for a while now.
There's a thoughtful video by maths YouTuber Mathemanic about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRO_QonhC2c . It includes a discussion of YouTube's "Inspirations" tab https://youtu.be/mRO_QonhC2c?t=331 (based on a Tibees video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd5EHfRerGI ) about Google's own efforts to push AI-generated video ideas at channel owners. Videos which result from "Inspirations" concepts presumably won't (in general) be flagged as AI, unlike Veo work-product.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't have that feature, or that they didn't bother to upload the raw footage anywhere.
I'm not aware of any secure digital signature schemes that don't require the thing they signed to be bit-for-bit identical to pass verification. There are perceptual hashing algorithms that could theoretically be used to build such a scheme, but such hashes are not second preimage resistant, so someone could create a modified video that still passes signature verification.
I suppose the validator could do a fuzzy match and just output a similarity score that compares the result to the original image. IE - This image is 75% similar to the original with something like a perceptual hash. Then it's the users problem to decide if 75% is close enough for their trust.
You want it visually identical but not necessarily bit-for-bit identical. Compression and transcoding should not cause validation to fail unless the compression artifacts are particularly severe, but even a tiny, one-pixel change that substantially alters the appearance of the photo should cause validation to fail.
And yes I agree this is hard to quantify and impossible with existing algorithms, that was my point.
they're already locked down as-is.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
[0] https://leica-camera.com/en-int/news/partnership-greater-trust-digital-photography-leica-and-content-authenticity-initiativeI just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
There might be a specialised line of cameras for forensics that signs the output and has lidar to detect when the camera is pointed at a screen, but the average person won’t have a camera with this kind of crypto. It would just be too easy for hackers to extract the keys from.
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,
YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.
1. Allow us to filter any and all content based on category or tag, this would include AI tagged videos 2. Demonetize any and all videos that incentivize antagonizing people (Looking at you prank videos) 3. Allow the reporting of video for "Criminal Activities" 4. Bring back the number of dislikes 5. Put the "not interested" option on video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail) 6. Put the "do no recommend this channel" option on the video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)
> “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
> YouTube creators who believe their content was incorrectly flagged as AI-generated can modify the disclosure status using the YouTube Studio tool.
I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.
It's not clear what these rules are or how they will be applied to videos of this variety.
TBH, I have found a few of them to be quite good, but most of them are junk, and I don't want my kids to become accustomed to that kind of video.
Genuinely don't care if its good or not. It's not for me
The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.
At this point, I bet the next human genius is going to be labeled as AI —by an AI.
better next step: allow us to block them
even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.
1. Detection of AI voiceover. The article makes several references to photo realistic AI content but it's the voiceovers that are killing me.
2. Filtering options for viewers. It's not enough to be able to know if a video is generated. I don't want to see them, ever.
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.
Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.
So the PR risk here is I think reasonably low.
Who watches those anyways?
Basically forces me to use image editing software for something that could be greatly streamlined.
I think this labeling strategy has an immediate issue.
Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz
I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
Their detection might not look at audio right now though.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.
Welcome to the future and the brave new world I guess.
"detect". God help us all.
As if Google really cares about the opinion of people. They just realised that AI is killing youtube - if you come to that conclusion, then "labeling" the AI slop isn't going to solve the problem really. Personally I already classify ALL AI-videos as slop-spam. I've also noticed the "suggested" videos in the last few weeks, on youtube, to really go down in quality a LOT. Google does not seem to understand how severe this problem is.
> As this technology continues to improve, creators remain in control.
Well, some folks disagree that they are in control. See the rise of FairTube - granted, FairTube has infrastructure issues, but the problem is Google controlling videos via youtube. This has to change in the long run.
Also:
> Our commitment to responsibility
^^^ pointless self-promo by an AI slop adCompany. They censor at will. I know that because so many videos I had bookmarked, suddenly were taken down at a later time - and not by the original author. Often you can find the same (!!!) video again on youtube.
There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.
I find this awful, but it's not a remotely new thing.
https://m.youtube.com/VaniaManiaKids
This shit pops up everywhere and is impossible to filter, as it is translated into many languages.
I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
if they would offer youtube plus, i would pay: - no ads. none. nothing - videos with sponsored content tagged, and option to auto skip - Option to HIDE ALL AI-videos. ALL. And channels. from search also - Option to HIDE ALL slideshow-videos (generated) all. From search also. - Community driven filter list that would auto-update. To hide all the shit content.
The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.
But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:
A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.
I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.
this just applies high quality selection pressure to have ai videos be more realistic
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
I’ve also seen the trend of TV clip slop using AI filters to I assume get by automatic copyright flagging/removal/de-monetization.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...