More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.
The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.
The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.
The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.
The dead internet is here.
And the comments are so obviously bots as well, they’re so polite and saying compliments, and the same comment over and over by different accounts, just bots watching bot videos.
What a great use of energy and infrastructure! Good thing those are free in our post scarcity society.
If I was into this kind of stuff, there are so many get rich quick schemes like - I could be creating ai slop and making side hustle or I could be selling merch to maga and then closing shop.
So this is what the power grids burn for?
I report each one. And then I tell YouTube I never want to see anything from that channel again. I even pay for premium because I don’t want ads and I want to support some content creators (not shorts, no AI, etc). But this AI shit is really making me wonder what I’m even paying for?
Sadly, you’re paying for the fascists in Google’s leadership to continue pushing alt right pipeline crap to people in the default YouTube feeds, all over the world.
I’m sure a small sliver of your payments go to the content creators you support though, so there’s that.
And yet you participate in society! I am very intelligent.
that’s disingenuous. you don’t need to feed google with money to support creators who want to be supported, they’ll have multiple channels for donations
but also you don’t need to pay google, or watch youtube at all, to participate in society.
My niece loves these things. I’m super unhappy about it.
I remember a panic some years back about YT funnels of cartoon content aimed at kids, that would lead to weird and sometimes disturbing stuff like “elsa ariel and moana drown together” … I guess the algo has evolved to target nonchildren now
Garbage site, even if the Alphabet CEO wasn’t an oligarch fash toady. Happily running health scam woo ads and refuses to act on reporting of scam advertising.
shit the internet has become a toilet and I have to go outside and look around and talk to people but everyone’s on the internet now I’m fucked
There’s always the homeless encampments.
Unironically, a lot of cultural sociologists I follow on bluesky/mastadon are saying that being offline and meeting people through niche hobby spaces and your existing extended social circles is starting to see an uptick, with a lot of younger people seeing posting on major social media or dating apps as “cringe”. You’re at the forefront of what’s cool, nutsack.
welcome to your life
There’s no turning back
It’s become unbearable, as has 90% of the web.
90% of the web is porn tho…
AI generated porn
Once Peertube’s able to provide the minimal feature parity, I’d bet that most would abandon YouTube similar to what happened with Reddit and Lemmy
i think that’s cope unfortunately
It really is, YouTube to the best of my knowledge stands alone in the service they offer.
Anyone can, at no cost to them, create an account, edit and upload a video up to 12 hours long I believe, and in decent quality. They also have a revenue sharing system where a creator with enough of a viewership base can get a cut, often more than half, of the ad revenue from their videos.
I don’t believe anyone else does that, outside of uploading SFW content to Pornhub or something.
I do not think anywhere near most Reddit users came to Lemmy. I wish it were true.
Do we know if Lemmy mods are doing quality content moderation? That and their locking out open source and third-parties is why I mostly avoid Reddit. But I’m not entirely gone.
Anecdotally, my closest friends are all senior level tech workers who are fully aware of what reddit did and the current state of everything, but I’m the only person that’s left for Lemmy. They are all still regulars on Reddit. In the same vein, I’ve written off doing business with many companies due to their shitty practice. Other than my sister also dropping Target, I’m the only person that I know that has stopped giving business to shit companies.
So yea, unfortunately the reality is that the vast vast majority of people just don’t care enough change even the smallest of behaviours for ethical reasons. I mentioned something today at my family Christmas that I don’t buy Reign energy drinks anymore because I stopped buying PepsiCo after they rolled back DEI. The response was, “get over yourself”. That’s probably the above average response for most people I know.
and according to fediverse observer, lemmy has been losing a lot of users…
on the other hand, according to statista, reddit has been gaining users and now has more than when the lemmy exodus happened
the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(
but well, let’s keep the flame alive and not lose hope
I highly doubt Reddit is actually gaining that many new users, but the number of accounts created? Sure.
Reddit never has enough bots for their AI slop machine. They create more bot accounts to “boost engagement” via posts and comments.
Honestly, I wouldn’t really want everyone on Reddit to come here. With the risk of sounding like some immigrant hating dickbag, they just bring their dumb takes and bot farms with them. What makes Lemmy good right now, is that it’s so small and intimate.
At least with lemmy we can make our server and defederate with the bigger ones if things get bad like that
the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(
Most people don’t really care about anything. They won’t put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.
And they verified those users are not bots?
That’s what I was thinking too. I browse r/all once in a while just to see what’s going on, and both the posts and comment sections are AI cesspools
Not at all. Scaling is an issue with P2P video, which is the basis of how Peertube works. Also, FFS, like 0.01% of Reddit is on Lemmy. They talk themselves out of Lemmy in real time in any thread where it comes up.
For real, sometimes it’s OK to just serve a smaller community with better truth.
Isn’t the whole point of peer to peer to automatically and transparently scale with the number of devices accessing the information?
If every viewer maintains a cache of the most recent videos it’s reproduced and shares them back, then the more interest there is in a video the more distributed it will be and the less load there’ll be on the original holster.
Seems to work fine for torrents (though needing to stream the chunks in a set order instead of randomly does add some inefficiency).
Of course you need a proper client to do that, can’t just use a browser (except maybe with an extension acting as the client), and I’ve got no idea if that’s how peertube works (if it doesn’t, the name is disingenuous and false advertising), but it’s how it should work, if it ever wants to be able to compete with googles datacentres.
As I understand it from an admittedly limited technical knowledge, it’s, yes, much like torenting video by getting the packets in order. So server capacity and the bandwidth of users hosting the video both need to be consistently high for anything to really go viral and not just crash servers. Basically, unless seeders are cultivated for popular videos, there’s always a low ceiling for any video before it maxes out it’s ability to be watched simultaneously.
it already works in browsers. other clients would need to implement it themselves. I have no idea if this is viable with battery powered devices on a data cap
Rise of the small web
Where
here’s your starting point on the veritable “web” as in “the cyberspace website megacomplex”, not as in “the virtual corporate paradise”
Challenge of the day: get 10 hyperlinks deep from that webpage
I just went through the german language links in the list and the third one I clicked was already full of AI generated crap:
Alas, this webring has alot of techbros who does not see the problem in the overuse of genAIs, and even if they kind of pollute the creativity of the web, they are in their right here (it’s the biggest webring i have found to it’s unfortunately expected).
I usually avoid those. You might want to check the no AI webring
Lemmy is so weird.
So much of it is carried over from Reddit but then you have these flashes of something new bubbling up to the surface, instants of clear distinction where Lemmy culture is branching off from the rest of the internet.
I pray that we look back at this time fondly as the beginning of something great, and not with remorse standing outside a burnt down house.
With a can full of gas a hand full of matches.
And still no one found out.
On link #10 I ended up here which is an awesome idea for a site. Basically a museum of popular websites covering all time periods.
Here?
A telling thing is that apparently Youtube’s algorithm knows that these videos are AI slop. I suspect this because at the outset I was aggressively disrecommending any of these that Youtube suggested to me, and basically nothing like them shows up in my feed anymore. Every once in a while one still slips through, usually some manner of synthetic music thing, and I hit the ol’ three dots and choose “not interested” and then “don’t recommend this channel” and I never see it again.
What’s much more concerning is that the average user (i.e. non tech people, i.e. practically everybody) is being handed this shit by default and in my lifetime of experience of people already being widely unable to distinguish truth from blatant manipulative fantasy, the prevalence of false/misleading/nonsense/fabricated AI bullshit being constantly peddled inches from their eyeballs is absolutely eroding peoples’ already limited ability to think.
Interesting, wonder if my watch history having some e.g. Penn & Teller: BS! is why they’ve never dared push me slop… OK, brainrot slop at least, maybe something’s slipped through.
(Haven’t touched the “don’t recommend” stuff that I can recall over these years… er, decades perhaps, whew)
Obvy could be any one of a million reasons. Couldn’t been A/B Test Group B while you were Group A!
If I had never used YT before, that shit would turn me off of it so hard.
But who has never used youtube? Kids are already getting used to it in such a way that it’s probably becoming hardwired into the brain…
Right? It’s gonna be like facebook where if you ever interacted with it the first time you’d ask yourself why people use it. This is good for us
20% of videos shown aren’t AI slop
i havent found you tube interesting in years. I also use 3rd party viewers if I have to watch something there so there is no algorithym to suggest anything.
Works better that way.
probably why you haven’t found anything interesting in years
Could be. But the article here tells me it would all have been garbage recommended to me anyways.
Most people that I follow post videos there, can’t help but use it unfortunately.
You can use a third party tool to keep track of what you want to see, more or less anonymously subscribing.
Do you have any recommendations?
FreeTube
Invidious had been good to me
Freetune works for me, on a roku I use playlet, on android there are a few others.
There was a good recommendation on here the other day, but I didn’t write it down.
You also can create playlists in various media players like VLC.
I would highly encourage whoever you really like to head over to nebula. I know paying seems not great but they do get a portion of that money and there are no ads.
I have a pretty good time with New Pipe but I’ve heard others haven’t had the good experience I have.
