r/technology • u/IndicaOatmeal • 10h ago
Artificial Intelligence YouTube’s AI slop detector incorrectly targets Kurzgesagt as other creators fear same fate
https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtubes-ai-slop-detector-incorrectly-targets-kurzgesagt-as-other-creators-fear-same-fate-3395930/1.2k
u/Jmund89 10h ago
And yet they won’t actually take down accounts that literally post AI garbage
120
u/wizard_mitch 10h ago
Do they have any rules against that? They would need to say that AI slop isn't allowed first which I doubt they will do because some of it is quite addicting to kids.
62
u/fivehourworkweek 9h ago
The horrors I've witnessed on my 7yo cousin's Youtube kids shorts tab are mind numbing.
→ More replies (1)20
u/red286 8h ago
Yeah but that's nothing new. Those freakshow Frozen x Spiderman videos that were on YouTube like 10 years ago were already nightmare fuel.
→ More replies (1)70
u/ReadditMan 9h ago
I think it's supposed to be labeled
→ More replies (1)35
u/Secret_Account07 8h ago
Which is weird because I see AI ads constantly on YouTube. I’ve never seen it labeled
→ More replies (2)11
u/ReadditMan 8h ago
Yeah I don't think the ads are required to be labeled, just the uploaded videos
14
u/Secret_Account07 6h ago
I wonder what that logic is
YT- Our users deserve to know when a video is AI generated!
Consumers- okay don’t forget ads!
YT- no that’s different…
Like what
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)9
u/JohnnyBeeGaming 9h ago
If anything they'd prefer the AI slop to replace actual creative videos made by real people. They've launched various AI tools and have done things like enabling AI filters and upscaling that alter the original look of videos.
They seem to have some success with it on short form but maybe that's just where the flood of slop goes because it's easier to generate short form.
→ More replies (1)4
u/Sweaty-Ad-4202 8h ago
I dont think YouTube really cares about it, their problem is that ai videos are uploaded at a way higher ratio and cost a lot to host
8
→ More replies (7)6
2.5k
u/dancrum 10h ago
It's painfully obvious which videos are AI on YouTube, but they somehow target a show known for its human-animated videos. Amazing stuff.
721
u/KyleRM 10h ago
Obvious to humans, but they cant be bothered to use those for review.
621
u/natelloyd 9h ago
It's because Kurzgesagt's content was consumed illegally be AI generators so you have stolen AI-generated art that looks like the original. And the original gets flagged while the flood of slop can't be controlled.
41
u/Poonchow 9h ago
And with language it's even worse. AI gets trained on the collective works of all communicators in known history, it copies patterns and styles and repeats it, people use AI as a shortcut for their own productivity and start synthesizing AI speech patterns.
→ More replies (1)58
u/IkLms 9h ago
Can that please happen to the Simon Whistler family of slop content channels?
That would actually be a huge improvement.
→ More replies (9)23
u/FormalProcess 9h ago
Out of the loop, what's wrong with Simon Whistler other than that it's a B-quality entertainment podcast family?
47
u/IkLms 9h ago
It's literally regurgitated wikipedia slop. It's often highly inaccurate and it's spammed out all over the place and often pops up in search results for a topic over better researched and produced information that is actually factual.
Simon also consistently mispronounces names of people or places and has stated publicly when that's pointed out that he "doesn't care" about doing it properly.
If you're going to mass produce wikipedia slop, the bare minimum you can do is at least look up how to say someone's name or a place properly but he can't even be bothered to do that.
12
u/almightyllama00 7h ago
To this day, his video about the mai lai massacre has a photoshopped picture of (now deceased) internet famous lolcow kingcobrajfs as the thumbnail.
31
u/ERhyne 8h ago
As a small-sized channel (23,000) it really bothered me how he would literally have a script handed to him and he would shit down and start recording. Brother has a whole ass staff writing, recording and editing his five or whatever channels and he just half-asses his basic hosting duties. 🙄
I mean sit down but the universe is funny sometimes.
15
→ More replies (2)10
u/Anonymus828 6h ago
I've heard word that the reason is because he's a paid VO guy, and that most of the channels he's "the face" of aren't actually his. I don't know exactly how true this is, but don't beat yourself up over it if it does happen to be the case
→ More replies (1)6
→ More replies (3)10
u/TheRealVilladelfia 8h ago
Of course he cares, he does it for engagement. Whenever you see a youtuber do something suspiciously wrong, it's usually to bait out angry comments.
25
u/nagrom7 9h ago
He was basically AI slop channels before AI was a thing. Just making a ton of channels that are just him narrating a script, written likely by just skimming a Wikipedia article, narrated in one take and mispronouncing a bunch of stuff (kinda like AI narration) and just spamming youtube with that shit.
→ More replies (6)17
u/noodlesalad_ 8h ago
I always found it funny how he reads each section heading. Reminds me how Ron Burgandy reads anything on the teleprompter.
→ More replies (9)13
u/OneArmedZen 9h ago
Yeah and it will create this vicious circle until no more human-made content is left.
→ More replies (1)15
u/pagerussell 9h ago
I mean, usually get downvoted for this take, but the Internet has not turned out to be humanity's best idea.
If it eats itself and we end up without a functional Internet so we all go touch grass....I am not convinced that would be the worst timeline
41
u/Obanthered 9h ago
Since AI slop producers can create hundreds of channels a day with thousands of videos, so to a degree YouTube needs to fight fire with fire. However you think it would be obvious to hard code in some exemptions for channels with x numbers of views or y numbers of subscribers.
→ More replies (2)10
u/grendus 8h ago
It's pretty trivial to get huge numbers of views or subscribers for AI though.
It would be better to hardcode a list of verified human channels. Put all the big channels on the list, and then add to it as the "anti-slop AI" locks channels and they get unlocked upon appeal. But you have to start by whitelisting a very significant number of channels.
→ More replies (2)6
u/Gladwulf 8h ago edited 4h ago
It isn't that trivial, you can't fake years of organic growth in a channel's subscribers without spending years doing it.
→ More replies (3)10
u/737Max-Impact 9h ago
There's a million+ videos uploaded to YT every day. At some point human review simply isn't an option anymore.
→ More replies (3)50
u/LawfulNice 10h ago
Actually it makes me think. Models that can evade the moderator's controls on finding AI will be more successful and publish more videos, and that will make the moderator tighten controls, which leads to more humans being affected, and the survivors go on to make more content and those weights spread...
Maybe any automated attempt to get rid of AI is doomed to failure without a whitelisting system instead of blacklisting
→ More replies (6)8
u/KeyMyBike 9h ago
But paying people is bad. Hence why AI is allowed to hide 1.5T and counting in debt.
→ More replies (1)50
u/toothpaste_tube 9h ago
Its probably cause Kurzgesagt's animation style is very easy for AI to replicate, so there are tons of AI videos that have a similar animation style, so much that google's AI detection has now been trained to see that style as AI.
Would be my guess anyway...
23
u/nnomae 8h ago
A lot of humans are also likely reporting his work as slop.
The reality here is horrendous, Google stole his art, used it to create a tool to make slop copies of his art, sold access to that tool to a whole bunch of scammers and now that those scammers have made everyone hate his style of art for being associated with slop they are going to ban him along with the slop they created by stealing his work.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)26
u/fizzlefist 9h ago
And this is why everyone should be disgusted by the plagiarism done to train these clankers.
57
u/Skaar1222 9h ago
Gen AI is the death of the Internet
7
u/Squalphin 9h ago
It may as well be, but I think not because the Internet will drown in it, but more because genuine content creators may lose motivation to continue creating.
→ More replies (7)7
u/Yingletofthecorn 9h ago
Only if you count just the major sites, which a lot of those “most web activity is just AI” studies do. While AI scrapers put a bunch of pressure on smaller sites, it’s much easier for an invite-only mastodon instance or similar smaller forum to keep this stuff out.
AI is the death of the platform-centered internet that rose to prominence in the 2010s, but the internet as a whole will survive.
→ More replies (7)21
u/Awrykyr 9h ago
The whole thing is fucked beyond belief, we have:
AI Slop identified as such, still being there
AI Slop evading detection
Real work being labeled as AI
And a persistent ambiguity between the two, now people will ask if Kurzgesagt is really using AI or not. Real work will get discredited, AI will get praised.
Everyone thinks they're good at recognizing AI because they only keep track of when they catch it, you have a 100% success rate, because if you didn't catch the AI, you wouldn't know it.
Welcome to hell.
→ More replies (6)6
u/FLBrisby 9h ago
That's fairly common though - a lot of human made art is squinted at and analyzed for the merest error these days, and if it's found there's a whole hullabaloo about whether it's AI.
4
u/Raptor-Johnny 9h ago
Youtube asked me if an alt rock song from 30 years ago (posted on youtube 20 years ago) was low effort AI content.
→ More replies (41)5
u/BriefCautious7063 7h ago
That's exactly why it targets human made videos. Human team makes video -> AI trains off of it without paying anything -> AI slop spams home feeds -> People wanna avoid AI slop -> AI trains off of other AI replicating human work to detect AI -> AI adapts to bypass detection while the original human team w/ human flaws gets flagged as AI for being what was good enough to copy. The AI based AI detection only knows what looks like AI slop because it flags anything that resembles the copies, including the original non-slop work that was copied and redistributed without royalties. Oh and piracy is illegal btw because it "steals" digital assets and causes a financial impact on the author
543
u/FrostyCartographer13 10h ago
AI rips off creators so much that they are now getting flagged as AI.
Welcome to the dystopia folks
191
u/Akabander 10h ago
As someone who has used em dashes and semicolons for decades, and never once used generative AI assists, this particular hell is already quite real.
71
u/s0_Ca5H 10h ago
The other day I was reading a document and my first thought was “this sounds like AI.” My second thought was “wait, this is exactly how I write.”
turns out it was, in fact, AI.
→ More replies (4)22
u/FootwearFetish69 9h ago
lol I feel that. I used to use em dashes constantly because some of my favorite fantasy authors growing up used them. Now I try to consciously avoid them.
Shame too because they are fucking useful!
→ More replies (1)4
u/sadhoovy 5h ago edited 4h ago
Go back to using them, please. What you're doing is like people saying "sewer slide" IRL because they don't want to offend people regarding an actually important topic.
Also, it's kind of fucking over people who've known what symbol's made by typing Alt+0151 for years. If you're not honest in your relationship with AI — and that includes how you honestly express yourself to others in a post-AI world! — you'll never get the respect you truly deserve.
In other words, you'll never give yourself the respect that you should.
Fuck the machine.
→ More replies (8)7
u/stormdelta 9h ago
I don't think semi-colons get the same association with AI that em-dashes do.
But unfortunately em-dashes are one of the more reliable signals at least on social media that something is AI-generated, as most humans just don't use them vs the regular dash that's much easier to enter on most keyboards.
→ More replies (10)→ More replies (2)3
u/Alarmed-Secretary207 8h ago
Flagged as AI by AI, I assume. Would any human with the job have flagged Kurzgesagt?
606
u/-__-zero-__- 10h ago
A.I. got it wrong again... surprise to no one.
97
9
→ More replies (4)3
189
u/BenDante 10h ago
If you have a YouTube channel, you should go to YouTube Studio, click “Content” and then click “Inspiration”, and then throw up.
This shit is wholesale, and actively encouraged by Google at this point. The self-sucking AI lollipop is gonna keep sucking itself while we let this happen.
→ More replies (5)32
u/RedEyeView 9h ago
I've lost count of how many of those shitty AI story adverts I've blocked.
All from Pocket FM.
11
u/BenDante 9h ago
Definitely don’t do a web search for YouTube AI content blocker 🤔
→ More replies (10)9
u/stoffejs 8h ago
Still not as bad as the ridiculous miracle device the size of a toaster that will cool your entire house faster than an HVAC system, even during a power outage somehow. I see so many of those obvious scam ads that I wonder how Google hasn't been charged with being an accessory to those scams!
→ More replies (1)
19
u/dassketch 7h ago
AI slop detector is probably operating on the Amazon algorithm. Detect high performing channels, copy their work, demonitize those channels and drive traffic to YouTube sources.
For those who don't know, Amazon has been preying on successful small businesses like this. They force store fronts to give up sources of supply under the guise of "anti counterfeiting" measures, contact those sources directly, open up a line of "Amazon basics" that are direct copies, and then hit the original store fronts with frivolous counterfeiting "allegations". They point to the detection "algorithm" as their "it's totally not us, it's unbiased" defense.
→ More replies (2)
52
89
u/leo_of_daat 10h ago
one would think they would make a very basic whitelist first and foremost and yet...
78
u/tophernator 9h ago
But then they’d effectively be allowing successful YouTubers to use a ton of AI while penalising newer or smaller creators for doing the same thing.
The problem here isn’t really that Kurzgesagt got flagged, that just why we’re hearing about it. The problem is their automated detection and flagging doesn’t work very well and has likely falsely flagged many thousands of videos from people who don’t have as big a following.
→ More replies (2)4
u/oops_i_made_a_typi 6h ago
But then they’d effectively be allowing successful YouTubers to use a ton of AI while penalising newer or smaller creators for doing the same thing.
just allow for humans to confirm before autoflagging.
→ More replies (9)14
11
u/shiftyourparadigm 8h ago
Step 1: Train AI models using Kurzgesagt.
Step 2: Create Kurzgesesque AI content.
Step 3: Identify and remove prime Kurzegesesque examples.
158
u/londons_explorer 10h ago
youtube will never detect all AI slop. slop gets better every day, and eventually it will be indistinguishable from real content. In some genres, thats already the case.
Instead, they should just focus on recommending content *I* like. If the slop is so dull I don't like watching it, they shouldn't recommend it.
29
u/wizard_mitch 10h ago
It's been on a steep downhill trend since they removed showing dislikes from videos, they have now removed the dislike button from shorts completely.
They have little interest in respecting what type of content you don't want to see.
8
u/cpMetis 6h ago
It was amazing seeing how fast Shorts went even further downhill once they removed that dislike as well.
It's so so much easier to lie and get away with it in a shorts format so people will just confidently spew bullshit and get millions, and the only indication left is a comment 2 scrolls down the line with 20k likes calling it out but curiously not at the top, buried by 50 almost identical ""line from the video" haha!" comments.
24
u/LlamaRS 10h ago
My gf turns on a lot of AI that she doesn’t realize is AI.
it’s pretty obvious when the person is only on screen for a few seconds at a time and is immediately cut by uncanny stock “footage”
10
u/biznatch11 6h ago
the person is only on screen for a few seconds at a time and is immediately cut by uncanny stock “footage”
That doesn't necessarily mean it's AI. The channel Real Engineering did a video recently on exactly this problem and also discussed the Kurzgesagt situation. He's a real person making real videos but because he rarely appears on screen he's at risk for getting flagged as AI.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Exile56678 6h ago
it’s pretty obvious when the person is only on screen for a few seconds at a time and is immediately cut by uncanny stock “footage”
Both Isaac Arthur and John Michael Godier use a lot of stock footage in their videos and they're both absolute amazing channels for science and futurism type content. The former had to pivot to showing himself on screen a lot now just to get past people thinking it could be AI generated. Especially with him having hundreds of videos over the years which I'm sure has been a massive dataset for AI training.
→ More replies (74)9
u/impulse_thoughts 9h ago
AI slop is the current iteration of e-mail spam which was a then-modern iteration of postal spam. YOU (and I) may recognize them and ignore them (but doubt it's even anywhere near 100% accuracy), but your aunt or uncle or parents or dumbest friend you know absorb it like gospel (remember email chainletters that purveyed all sorts of fake stories you'd get because it told people they MUST send it to 5 other people they know?). They may know all about the Nigerian prince now, but they barely know about "refunding an accidental bank transfer using gift cards," and definitely don't know what harm is there to watch some "entertaining" content despite it being AI ("why's it matter? It's a funny clip!").
Every new/popular tech will attract unscrupulous "marketers" to bombard you with garbage. 20 years ago, a huge reason for why people switched to gmail from hotmail, yahoomail, aolmail, etc (all free services), was because it was the best at being able to automatically filter out spam. It's profitable to spammers (and bot farms) because the 0.0001% people who fall for them is enough to justify just how cheap it is to generate and distribute.
It's a persistent cat and mouse fight. I'm actually a bit relieved that Google's finally decided to even attempt to filter them out of youtube, because the current iteration of this type of spam appears to be benefitting the platforms (with higher engagement metrics and thus pricier ad space), rather than being a pure cost to the system, especially since youtube is already dominating market share. They've certainly been losing the battle on the search side of things, if they're even bothering to combat it (in the form of AI slop engagement-bait websites filling up the top search results). And most other platforms are riding the wave of engagement boost that the AI slop generates to juice their numbers (including here on reddit where all the major subs, including this one, is inundated with bots distributing bait and slop content).
21
u/abe5765 10h ago
DanExclaims recently posted that he was flagged likely due to him using an avatar during his shorts rather than his face and trying to fighting he’s up against you guessed it an automated system and not a person
→ More replies (3)
122
u/aqtseacow 9h ago
Kurzgesagt habitually produces content of questionable factual accuracy as a consequence of oversimplification, but they're definitely not an AI channel.
→ More replies (14)97
u/venom21685 9h ago
In the last couple years it's not even due to oversimplification. Some of their videos have just been baseless.
39
u/Overall_Occasion_175 8h ago
I really miss when their videos were more like "What would happen if the moon crashed into the earth?" and less like "The truth about Ozempic"
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (28)31
u/Public-Eagle6992 8h ago
After they left funk I’ve been suspicious of them. Funk is a German thing where YouTube channels (and some other social media stuff) that makes (mainly informative) videos can get some money from the state but which also has some rules (like them not being allowed to take money from other sources and probably about their videos having to be factual)
14
u/Ketapapi 10h ago
hopefully one day there will be a good alternative for this trainwrack of a site
→ More replies (14)
7
u/Crayshack 5h ago
Kurzgesagt even did a whole video detailing how AI poisons the research process and thoroughly explaining their reasons for avoiding it.
14
u/PMME-SHIT-TALK 10h ago
Probably 50% of my recommendations any given day are 52 minute long AI slop videos with 32 views on a brand new channel. Of those recs, a quarter are obviously attempting to imitate a specific major channel to the point where they copy the style of thumbnail and title. A few have just used the same exact thumbnail of a popular video from a major channel. No matter how many channels I tell YouTube to stop recommending my recommendations are full of them.
4
u/2Quicc2Thicc 9h ago
I used to tell YouTube to stop recommending channels to me, but then I found out that counts as engagement and was why I was getting more and more recommendations.. you just have to ignore them until they stop.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/helenius147 7h ago
They posted an AI slop picture in their tweet as a response. Know what? Maybe they didn't miss.
53
u/ImpossibleCreme 10h ago
As much as I love and respect those guys the content has gotten a lot worse in the past few years. I can see why it was labeled slop.
11
u/cylonrobot 9h ago
Yep. I got tired of the channel some time back. The quality has gone down, and I wasn't surprised this happened.
→ More replies (7)37
u/pipian 10h ago
It's basically propaganda for the billionnaire class. Don't worry about global warming, the super smart billionnaires will solve it! Never took them seriously since
36
u/FootwearFetish69 9h ago
Veritasium went down the same road. The glazing they did for AI-driven cars a couple years ago really turned me off from that channel completely. Sponsored content doesn’t mix with science.
→ More replies (1)32
→ More replies (10)31
u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 9h ago
Bullshit. That’s not at all what the video said
It’s an argument against climate doomism.. belief that humanity is entirely helpless and doomed and explained that feeling defeated causes people to give up which then helps the fossil fuel industry.
The videos optimism was throgh looking at how emissions growth is slowing and renewable energy is becoming the cheapest power source on Earth.. it clearly states that our current trajectory is still highly dangerous..
It clearly explains this economic shift didn't happen because of a few wealthy individuals and it happened because decades of public pressure, citizen activism, and government subsidies forced clean tech into the mainstream
They show that this data is proof that collective human effort actually works, and encourages people to intensify that pressure collectively to push the transition even faster
Maybe try watching the video before commenting next time?
→ More replies (15)
45
u/Enorats 9h ago
To be fair, I've wondered if Kurzgesagt was AI since before AI even really became a thing.
→ More replies (3)25
u/Indraga 8h ago
Okay thank god I'm not the only one. It always struck me as one of those low-effort "copied from a wiki" channels.
(The 40k content sphere was inundated with these for a while. You'd hear a video, then go to a fan wiki and realize it was just read to you 1:1)
19
u/restricteddata 6h ago
I've been a consultant for several Kurzgesagt episodes on nuclear weapons topics and can tell you that whatever one thinks of them, they aren't just copying them from Wikipedia, and they put a significant effort into their videos. By the time I would see a script it would be draft 4 or 5, there would be a storyboard for the animation, and then I would be giving comments on what I thought they ought to change. I usually did have a lot of notes.
Again, I'm not always sure they go about things the right way, but they are definitely not taking the path of least resistance.
→ More replies (1)7
u/ChaosTheRedMonkey 7h ago
I don't mind a good dramatic reading. When they stumble over it and make it sound like they recorded it without reading through it off camera first it's jarring.
5
u/Which-Arm-4616 5h ago
It's a channel that was so influential, and resulted in so many imitators, that it has become generic.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/EverythingBOffensive 6h ago
they have an ai slop detector? that's all I fucking see is AI slop everywhere.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/vector_o 4h ago
And yet my recommendations are filled with crappy videos with AI thumbnails, AI scripts and sometimes AI voices
YouTube basically goes "oh you like X subject?" - "here's 15 dog shit videos on it"
5
u/morgan423 3h ago
Creator with specific art style has its videos fed into the AI...
AI slop created starts looking like the original videos...
Original creator starts having their stuff flagged because now it looks like the AI slop that's impersonating it.
No way this isn't going to end badly a thousand times repeated across the entire platform, right? YouTube thinks that everything is just great.
15
4
9
u/-Altephor- 9h ago
Yeah this is unfair, they're pure organic, homegrown slop. Nothing artificial about it.
26
u/mascotbeaver104 10h ago
To be fair, Kurzgesagt might as well be AI already. Idk why people are so into that channel
→ More replies (11)
10
5
3
u/fitnesscakes 9h ago
Youtube uses AI to detect AI slop - it would be so ironic. People forget that the line is blurred between AI and the generation before it.
3
u/SpeakNottheNightYorb 8h ago
I feel like I shouldn’t need to explain this but if a history channel is posting 2-3 multiple hour in depth historical videos per day that’s probably a sign they should look at.
3
3
u/griever187 5h ago
flagging ai content using ai but getting it wrong is so funny and dystopian at the same time
3
u/Adventurous_Pea_2007 5h ago
Literally the biggest multilingual channel on planet earth (same guy does German and English)
3
3
u/MrParadux 5h ago
This is just another one of the many, many examples of how the amount of care YouTube uses when dealing with peoples livelyhoods: Nothing at all.
It is crazy that there is no regulation at all that supports people that rely on YouTube for their income which they can just terminate at any point without any reason. If you are unlucky enough to not be able to raise enough public outcry of wrongful strikes or even channel deletion, you are screwed, because there are no people actually reviewing these things at YouTube.
I know we all love the wild west days of the internet, but these things really do need regulation that protect the small creators and make YouTube actually prove stuff for their decisions when they just delete or demonetize channels.
3
u/Glum-Sheepherder-787 5h ago
AI slop is showing up as Youtube Featured for me lately, I do believe they actually have an anti-slop detector.
3
3
6.9k
u/SudhaTheHill 10h ago
It’s funny because YouTube allows so MANY videos that should literally be exhibit A in court.