I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm.
Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question.
My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage.
And ~90% of google searches now gives you 10 videos as answers to any query rather than just the web pages that have been turned into videos because youtube makes them more money than regular ads. Assholes.
I find doing more focused searches with bang patterns work well for me, I.E searching wikipedia, manpages, mdn etc directly. Sometimes coupled with LLM to more quickly understand the syntax because docs tend to be sparse with examples.
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
Kagi systematically doesn’t return any good answer whatsoever. It’s such an awful quality that I can’t imagine anyone seriously promoting it, therefore I bet these comments about Kagi are advertising posted by bots. It’s not possible otherwise.
I find it to be more reliably useful than the other non-Google alternatives I’ve tried. I find its “PDFs Only” filter to be awfully handy too. Proudly not a bot, but I freely admit that, because I pay for it and our incentives seem aligned, I’m biased toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
Haha… no bot here. Been using Kagi for years now. Not sure what you‘re searching for. My own tests, admittedly early, found no instances, where Google gave better results.
I share the same sentiment. I know many people praise Kagi, and I respect the effort behind it too. I tried it for three months and realized it was not for me. Google works just fine for my needs.
The most insidious aspect is that tech CEOs and influencers keep parroting how "AI" will bring global prosperity and empower the masses. When it's clear to anyone with an ounce of reason that the exact opposite is happening. The amount of hypocrisy and manipulation is sickening.
I feel like the search result of YouTube videos on Google search is much worse than the result on YouTube itself. It's strange because Google develop both Google and YouTube search. It's like reverse Reddit, where the website's search is so unusable you have to search on Google like "xxx reddit".
9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all.
To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth.
edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.
I searched for that exact phrase out of curiosity because I haven’t used Google in years… and it’s even worse than you say.
I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..”
Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS.
I knew you'd come back with a comment like this one. You never argue in good faith. No, I wasn't talking about AI generated videos because then I would have written a different comment. Bye now.
There are a lot of AI generated shorts around animals.
A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable.
I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI
I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?
So I searched "cat lets brick fall onto mouse" and got... 100000 AI generated videos of cats with bricks? And cats with mice and cats being rescued by people (like you said). But not the video I was looking for.
We've totally passed the point where real information is impossible to find anymore. Video generation was really out of reach / delayed for a long time, and honestly all of those probably have a digital watermark in them that could be detected. YouTube could have prevented this if they'd have just been more proactive with detection and filtration. A simple "AI generated" and "not AI generated" filter would have prevented this.
I see a lot of educational animal videos that copy the content of BBC Earth only to replace David Attenborough voice with AI, and it unreasonably irritates me.
That's an improvement as before people would abuse real animals to fake seemingly wholesome "before-after" videos by showing snippets in the wrong order.
Another common theme is to kill rare animals to stage cool photographs.
However, I don't assume AI slop will (fully) replace that cruelty, unfortunately. But maybe using AI slop will be easier than animal abuse/killing so that those business models run dry for the most part.
My feed is full of AI generated shorts summarizing books, animes, movies. The original piece name is never mentioned, and it tells the story in a very descriptive way, such as "The man was alone in the woods when...".
Cats getting totally excited to see their owner, because they dearly missed them. Cats filmed in night cam dropping weird animals from the forest on sleeping boss. Olympic athletes, gorgeous, but not real. Countless disasters where people die, generated. Youtube shorts is a pile of steaming garbage. As long as it sells, your brain may rot.
Worst are imho on the regular long vids side, the geopolitical advisor deep fakes, giving background to the news. Some with well over a million followers. Many of those have the same "we are a fan of the real person" disclaimer, many have no disclaimer.
And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part.
My wife and I pay for YouTube and the prevalence of AI Slop definitely reduces the value we get for our money.
YouTube has done a fairly good job over the years of providing useful recommendations but lately I always immediately ‘back out’ of any AI generated videos or materials with robot-voiced narrations. I keep hoping that the algorithms quickly learn to not show me this stuff, but in the meantime I have had to change my viewing habits to following specific channels - and this reduces ‘discoverability.’
It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me.
The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.
Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.
Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
The end game is that computer generation beats human content for a subset of the population who becomes accessible to advertisers and propagandists through model alignment, and unresponsive to word-of-mouth.
There is no “end game” it’s just hustlers out for a buck for themselves — YouTube, the slop makers, the ad companies, the bots scraping videos, all of em.
Same as it ever was. When this cash cow proves worthless or runs out it’ll be another thing.
The end game is eliminating the last remaining human element in the engagement optimization pipeline, so that the corporations can control 100% of it.
Platforms like YouTube and TikTok already have almost full control of how the majority of users spend their time on their platforms. They open the app, they immediately get a feed of content algorithmically selected to keep them on the app for as long as possible. They don't need to search, they don't need to think about what they want to watch, they just consume. Fully automated consumption with 0 human effort involved.
Well, almost. There's one last thing remaining: you still need humans to produce the content that you then put on people's feeds. Or rather, needed. Now that the actual production can also be automated, those platforms no longer need to put effort into finding existing human-created content that will keep people watching - they can just generate new, algorithmically perfect content. This is their endgame.
Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass.
Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".
Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.
Why can't it be the actual tiktok? By simply winning competition with humans i.e. whereas vast majority of humans see their pay go too low to bother to continue?
Someone figured out how to make computers be able to create content that is costly to distinguish from human-made content. Someone else is using it to pump out AI slop in the hopes that it will make them a quick buck. The platform becomes unusable for anyone that values their own sanity. No "end game" to be found.
AI will be the worst thing that happened to society in a very long time.
I have noticed people on the subway watching them. I sneaked a peak on a few of their phones and it was legit AI slop with clear signs (for me at least) that it was AI generated. The end user (viewer?) seemed hooked but they are mostly shorts (10-20sec videos) and you can see their fingers swiping to the next one.
The other day my mother told me if I watched some random AI slop (Putin getting in a physical fight with Trump) and I asked her why she watches this stuff and her answer is that it comes up in her feed. She said it was funny.
What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?
Out of curiosity, do you have watch history enabled/disabled?
I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about.
I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly.
It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)
It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before
I follow N YouTubers who produce genuinely useful and insightful videos on the state of the market and personal finance etc, but the algorithm just recommends people with stock tips and scaremongering junk
Probably there not enough content. Just the same repackaged in human or machine produced slop.
People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.
Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.
Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.
Not only that but also the same short videos keep repeating. I have tons of great suggestions from Youtube on the main feed from creators I like, yet the Shorts feed is almost 90% garbage and AI slop.
It's deliberate, I'm sure. People say they want the vegetables, but then go on to watch hours of fast food / Shorts. Clearly the algorithm knows.
do you have an account about which "you care somehow", like banning/disabling specific channels explicitly?
Ive found out: If I tell youtube what I want by sometimes thumb-up/down and explicitly clicking on "no more vids from this channel", then the results a) much better and most of the trash is removed.
Though, new AI-slop channels popup some days - esp. new/fresh channels, but these you can ban anyway since most new channels are AI slop. or "XY ... official" or "XY .. best of" or "XY .. clips" or "XY... fails"
I honestly haven't tried putting effort into the platform for a while now. I have very targeted things I watch (links to the channels) and go direct instead of navigating the homepage at all. I think my upper confidence bound on the value of the YT homepage and improving it is pretty low so it will be a while until I give it a try again.
AI is OK. I used to ignore AI stuffs on YouTube but in recent months the channel “Napoleons Hill Notes” helped me tremendously. It is an AI voice reading channel.
That ain't exactly a study as people think of, something scientist do and that get published in a journal, peer reviewed, approved, etc.
It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted.
Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers.
And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.
It has really become horrible in the last some days, probably weeks
now. It is not just fake-videos AI generated, without Google having
any decency to mark it, as it wastes my time and the time of others -
but there are now also videos where some videos are real (I know
because some of these videos came from years ago), mixed in with
AI fake crap. Now, I am able to spot many AI videos, but I bet many
other people simply don't have the knowledge. That is also a generational
problem, where people have a harder and harder time to separate real
from fiction. But I have no desire to waste my time with fake, so
Google now has started to kill youtube. I still have use cases of
youtube without this problem, e. g. good music (here, whether it is
AI generated or not, makes no real difference IF the music is good;
but most AI music is crap anyway but I can not listen to it and only
focus on good music), but this is getting more and more of a dead end
here.
Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing
on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had
problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by
Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing
the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently
gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine.
Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here.
There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now.
I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven...
Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
I noticed that too and it’s kinda scary. Soon we will have the opposite of canceling, where the target will be deepfaked to say everything and its opposite to nullify their signal to noise ratio.
Youtube is horrible, specially the force-fed "shorts". Its 95% AI slop with the same generic graphics and voice-over. From the actual videos most are also AI generated, making me quit the video as soon as i see it.
My shorts are mostly of the creators I follow or adjecent creators. I do get the occasional AI slop, but it looks more like the algorithm is testing someone new, to learn what they are, than the algorithm feeding me slop.
Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.
Skimmed through the article, some interesting numbers but not a single statistic is per capita (or per million, whatever). How do I understand the scale of the phenomenon without the per capita figures? Sorry but seems a bit useless.
Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules.
Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine.
YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader.
You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
At a societal level [if that's what we should be worried about], it's not what percentage of results are slop. It's what percentage of people believe the slop. Arguably, that seems to be decreasing proportionally. What I mean is: Slop is on a parabolic, hockey stick upward, and trust is on a logarithmic decline. So, good? - let it blow itself out? Bad information is worse than no information, and evolutionary pressures have many ways of proving that.
YouTube promotes slop and "brainrot" irrespective of AI use, this through the client being tuned for clickbait title presentation, forcing back shorts after every relaunch and promoting clickbait select single frame thumbnails.
Turn off watch history and there’s no feed whatsoever, they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago. Yes that includes even Shorts, you’re not allowed to doomscroll without watch history.
> Recommendations are off
> Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for videos instead. Learn more.
> they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago.
I remember when that happened. It was hilarious to me because the way they phrased it felt like they think of it as a punishment or incentive, but not having anything on the homepage is incredibly refreshing, exactly what I wanted. YouTube’s homepage (at least in my country) is just garbage videos no one should be watching.
E.g.: Just for entertainment I recently searched for information on a new LLM model. The result was filled with AI garbage. I stumbled upon videos with AI generated content, presented by an AI generated voice and an AI generated human. And if it is not something like that, YouTube at least lies to me about the language of the video and tries to make me listen to an AI voice which is equally vile.
There are times where I constantly have to close videos after a couple of seconds. It is unbearable. At least they should mark these videos clearly. At best they should allow me to filter them out but of course they won't do that or else they couldn't make the experience on their platform even worse than it already is, what seems to be their real goal.
That's a skill issue on your part. Do not use YouTube to search for information. If you need to find information on a new LLM model, look for official documentation from the model's maker. This applies to everything.
No, it's not. I search for videos and i get AI garbage as a result. It shouldn't matter what i search for or if you think that it is dumb to search for it. It shouldn't return garbage in the first place unless I explicitly ask for it.
> Do not use YouTube to search for information. If you need to find information on a new LLM model, look for official documentation from the model's maker.
That is what I do but I like the entertainment factor of some YouTubers. I know that I do not get the best information from them but sometimes I'm entertained. That's why I'm using YouTube after all. Entertainment (and I'm not entertained by AI).
> This applies to everything.
So you are saying: In this glorious new AI world I need a search diploma just to evade the endless AI slop YouTube is filled with nowadays. And than there are topics that are taboo to search for at all. From what angle do I have to look at this to discover the good part?
The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.
This is definitely true for my mom's feed because she watches so many random pet videos.
Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too.
Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess.
Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.
How can I block AI generated videos (especially AI generated scripts) in my browser? Youtube has to give the viewer an option or the website is going suffer greatly from AI slop...
Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...
Do you believe we can automatically detect AI generated videos, without having too many false positives and without spending huge amounts of resources playing the cat and mouse game?
It's not possible and it's not economically viable. Best we could do is some sort of signature to prove that the source of a video is trusted by the proof issuer.
Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question.
My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage.
Surely I'm not alone but it surely feels like it.
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
Gemini can be a powerful model but it's just infested with the stink of Google
"how to configure arducopter gps"
9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all.
To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth.
edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.
I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..”
Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS.
Google has *completely* lost the plot.
I presume you want that to be the default, but I’m sure you understand that Google can’t grant your wish, because it’s subject to market forces.
Optionally with a custom CSS rule to block the starting video block: [data-layout="videos"]
AI summary and videos dominating it.
Videos, on the other hand, are a cancer.
A common thing I see is a baby animal needing rescue by a human (which it does) and it comes back later on and rewards the human with a gift of some kind it thinks is valuable.
I watch a few podcasts as well and there are more that have their scripts generated and voiced by AI
I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?
So I searched "cat lets brick fall onto mouse" and got... 100000 AI generated videos of cats with bricks? And cats with mice and cats being rescued by people (like you said). But not the video I was looking for.
We've totally passed the point where real information is impossible to find anymore. Video generation was really out of reach / delayed for a long time, and honestly all of those probably have a digital watermark in them that could be detected. YouTube could have prevented this if they'd have just been more proactive with detection and filtration. A simple "AI generated" and "not AI generated" filter would have prevented this.
Another common theme is to kill rare animals to stage cool photographs. However, I don't assume AI slop will (fully) replace that cruelty, unfortunately. But maybe using AI slop will be easier than animal abuse/killing so that those business models run dry for the most part.
Worst are imho on the regular long vids side, the geopolitical advisor deep fakes, giving background to the news. Some with well over a million followers. Many of those have the same "we are a fan of the real person" disclaimer, many have no disclaimer.
And no one in the comments, of which many look fake too, notices it is AI. That is the most scary part.
YouTube has done a fairly good job over the years of providing useful recommendations but lately I always immediately ‘back out’ of any AI generated videos or materials with robot-voiced narrations. I keep hoping that the algorithms quickly learn to not show me this stuff, but in the meantime I have had to change my viewing habits to following specific channels - and this reduces ‘discoverability.’
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Most important links are available through a simple search
https://rumca-js.github.io/search
I have also RSS search
https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts"
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.
Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.
Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
AI sloop ads for dating apps full of ai chat bots , YouTube watched by AI bots.
I was a bit surprised Spain has the most subscribers to ai sloop. Kinda weird considering the population size compared to the US
Same as it ever was. When this cash cow proves worthless or runs out it’ll be another thing.
Platforms like YouTube and TikTok already have almost full control of how the majority of users spend their time on their platforms. They open the app, they immediately get a feed of content algorithmically selected to keep them on the app for as long as possible. They don't need to search, they don't need to think about what they want to watch, they just consume. Fully automated consumption with 0 human effort involved.
Well, almost. There's one last thing remaining: you still need humans to produce the content that you then put on people's feeds. Or rather, needed. Now that the actual production can also be automated, those platforms no longer need to put effort into finding existing human-created content that will keep people watching - they can just generate new, algorithmically perfect content. This is their endgame.
Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".
What makes you think that there is an "end game"?
Someone figured out how to make computers be able to create content that is costly to distinguish from human-made content. Someone else is using it to pump out AI slop in the hopes that it will make them a quick buck. The platform becomes unusable for anyone that values their own sanity. No "end game" to be found.
AI will be the worst thing that happened to society in a very long time.
shorts get paid by the view, ppl put on long videos to fall a sleep to and youtube premium does a rev share based on watchtime of the premium user.
this is why you have like 10 hour playlists and white noise videos.
The other day my mother told me if I watched some random AI slop (Putin getting in a physical fight with Trump) and I asked her why she watches this stuff and her answer is that it comes up in her feed. She said it was funny.
I don't know what to make of any of this.
Mispronunciations could be a giveaway, but then some people may have naïve pronounciations.
So many videos about nerd-sniping niche subjects.
As though we need to have a new regimen of thought discipline since so much could so easily be list.
Imagine 50 years down the road impossible to tell which things Richard Feynman really said in his lectures and which are all made up.
I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about.
I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly.
It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)
I follow N YouTubers who produce genuinely useful and insightful videos on the state of the market and personal finance etc, but the algorithm just recommends people with stock tips and scaremongering junk
People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.
Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.
Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.
It's deliberate, I'm sure. People say they want the vegetables, but then go on to watch hours of fast food / Shorts. Clearly the algorithm knows.
Though, new AI-slop channels popup some days - esp. new/fresh channels, but these you can ban anyway since most new channels are AI slop. or "XY ... official" or "XY .. best of" or "XY .. clips" or "XY... fails"
It's just kapwing employee checking YouTube channel views and reporting it, same for the feed, so I can't say that the 21-33% number can be trusted.
Now the fact that YouTube has ai slop isn't new, but my bet is that many of these 'subscriber' are in fact bots used to inflate their numbers.
And on a more personal touch, I suggest you install YouTube unhook extension to your computer AND the ones of your relatives. The one less tech savvy that are the more susceptible to fall for this. I surprised my father once watching these kind of crap, he couldn't understand it wasnt even human made. Now I know he's safe from at least that.
Google already killed its search engine and other things. It is continuing on its path to now kill Youtube. And, mind you - Youtube already had problems before AI. Many content creators felt violated and abused by Google. I really think we should end Google as a company - it is not doing the world any good now. It changed completely; the old Google is permanently gone. Nobody needs the AI slop infected money-milking-via-ads machine.
Also, Google further ruined its already by-now-total-crap search engine, with crap videos nobody really cares about in 99% of the cases. Or the "others searched for xyz" - what the heck do I care what others did? If I want to find something, I don't want google to distract with excuses. Google abuses people here. It is an EVIL company now. These are not "accidents" - this is deliberately aimed at wasting people's time. I want compensation money for Google wasting my time here. This has been different in the past, so it is 100% Google's fault. No more excuses here.
Google, you are the guilty party.
There are already a lot of impersonating AI-Slop videos appearing, not just faking Yanis Varoufakis, but also many other political commentators. It's hard to find the real videos by now.
I tried to flag these videos, but the process of doing so is so cumbersome that I finally abstained from it. AI-Slop is slowly destroying everything: books, youtube, education, in the end everything that is data driven... Where it could be useful, e.g. high quality video translation, it fails utterly.
YT has hit rock bottom. Just sad.
Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.
YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader. You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
> Recommendations are off
> Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for videos instead. Learn more.
I remember when that happened. It was hilarious to me because the way they phrased it felt like they think of it as a punishment or incentive, but not having anything on the homepage is incredibly refreshing, exactly what I wanted. YouTube’s homepage (at least in my country) is just garbage videos no one should be watching.
Than you are the lucky one.
E.g.: Just for entertainment I recently searched for information on a new LLM model. The result was filled with AI garbage. I stumbled upon videos with AI generated content, presented by an AI generated voice and an AI generated human. And if it is not something like that, YouTube at least lies to me about the language of the video and tries to make me listen to an AI voice which is equally vile.
There are times where I constantly have to close videos after a couple of seconds. It is unbearable. At least they should mark these videos clearly. At best they should allow me to filter them out but of course they won't do that or else they couldn't make the experience on their platform even worse than it already is, what seems to be their real goal.
No, it's not. I search for videos and i get AI garbage as a result. It shouldn't matter what i search for or if you think that it is dumb to search for it. It shouldn't return garbage in the first place unless I explicitly ask for it.
> Do not use YouTube to search for information. If you need to find information on a new LLM model, look for official documentation from the model's maker.
That is what I do but I like the entertainment factor of some YouTubers. I know that I do not get the best information from them but sometimes I'm entertained. That's why I'm using YouTube after all. Entertainment (and I'm not entertained by AI).
> This applies to everything.
So you are saying: In this glorious new AI world I need a search diploma just to evade the endless AI slop YouTube is filled with nowadays. And than there are topics that are taboo to search for at all. From what angle do I have to look at this to discover the good part?
I do worry that yt will intentionally break that functionality in their quest for maximum enshitification though
Mine is like ~1%. I'm actually surprised about how good quality the feed algo has been, and for especially showing small creators and older videos too.
Each person has their own filter-bubble, I guess.
Search engines are definitely worse. DDG shows so much AI shit websites now for specific search queries. Google is almost as bad. I'm having to double quote almost everything because the quality and fuzziness of matching is much worse now. I miss the OR operator and groups parens that were possible way back.
Why is youtube in general making it so hard to block content or channels? and now they made it harder to clean up the user's own viewing history, it just doesn't make sense...
It's not possible and it's not economically viable. Best we could do is some sort of signature to prove that the source of a video is trusted by the proof issuer.