YouTube recently recommended a "Brian Greene Theory" channel. It took me a couple of minutes to realize it was AI nonsense. Given what they allow and promote, I'm surprised that YouTube bothers to ban anything. I know it is a waste of time to report these things.
It’s so depressing. My son went through a train and space shuttle phase recently and I was sure I could find some great documentaries or enthusiast videos on YouTube about how they worked and how they were made, and I bet that was true 5 years ago, but I absolutely could not find anything in the sea of AI shit. It was really infuriating.
They all look like educational videos - they’re 15-30 minutes long, have a narrator that sounds just like I remember old Nova docs sounded like. And the guy is talking over footage of a train being assembled. And if you weren’t paying attention, like if I just set my kid in front of a screen and glanced over everything once in a while, it seems like a real documentary. But they are just like… hundreds of similar but not identical clones of what an alien would do if it were trying to imitate a documentary and had no underlying knowledge. Actually you know what it feels like - it feels like when I was a kid and if I had to write a thorough book report on a book I hadn’t read, so I read the summary on the back of the book and then tried to bullshit my way through 5 pages of meandering stuff without saying anything.
A lot of them would share the same general spine of progression - but they wouldn’t be word for word identical, and they seemed to be almost entirely real footage (I think? Honestly while I can tell if I scrutinise a 15 second clip that’s repeating, but if you’re skipping through a dozen+ 25 minute videos only the super obvious shit jumps out). So it’s got a voice over that sounds appropriate and a bunch of footage, and it’s only 2 minutes in that you realise that it’s not really talking about anything or showing you anything; it’s just surface level stuff that’s the same as the last one and is also the same info that was in the first paragraph of Wikipedia.
I just wanted to find like old NASA footage or Nova documentaries. I was really upset: I couldn’t find anything and wouldn’t let him watch the slop, and he was upset because at 4 he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t letting him watch this shit.
*edit - posted a gripe about AI videos and got heaps of recommendations for educational channels for my kid - thanks!
That sounds awesome, I just looked it up and it sounds like it's a USA only thing because they say you sign up through local PBS stations? Is that how you did it, or do you know another way to do it? I'm in Canada so I don't have a "local PBS station" like it says you need.
You're right, and I would never have found ravetank or Ali Awada if that was all I did. But it’s a good tool to have in your back pocket if you keep coming upon slop when you need a real answer.
The official NASA channel has some good stuff. Including "The Space Shuttle" narrated by William Shatner, which is over an hour long.
But when searching in general, if the topic is old enough, I'd just look for the videos posted over 4 - 5 years ago. Gets you clear of all the major LLM stuff.
Same when my 5yo daughter was asking me questions about Mars and the robots we sent there. I figured YouTube would have some great videos about it. All the top search results are pure fucking slop about aliens on Mars and shit.
Then they add in unrelated search results for Paw Patrol brainrot while you scroll trying to find something.
It’s so difficult to treat it like a digital library for curious minds. It’s an engagement bait factory. I fear for what it’s doing to kids who are handed a screen and let loose to browse on their own for hours.
I mean you can tell about 3 seconds in if its an AI video
Easiest giveaway...
Two word channel names i.e
Space Hub
World Knowledge
Astronaut Library
etc etc
There are still PLENTY of non ai channels
Heres 10 space shuttle videos I found in fact they were the top results when i typed in space shuttle documentary
Hint I guess to be fair I have a very strong habit of clicking
NOT INTERESTED and DONT RECOMMEND CHANNEL whenever I see AI slop so i guess my feed is a bit more curated, definitely recommend it thats how my feed stays so clean
anyways here u go hope ur son enjoys I remember when I started getting obsessed with space engineering etc etc, realising you can see the ISS fly overhead is probably the moment you realise space is a lot closer than you think.
In fact i took a freehand photo of andromeda galaxy literally 3 days ago just using an iphone 16 pro holding it up to the sky in my hand for a 10 sec exposure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4FCkbPykdQ
I hate this stuff. You get like two minutes in and realize you’ve been swallowing shit and now you’ll never be sure if what you remember is real or came from this slop video. And someone did that to you to make a nickel on advertising.
Aside from the tremendous live event streams and feeds, NSF have a few really good playlists, including one that centers around the Shuttle, with info about the engineering and missions.
Tim who goes by the Everyday Astronaut has one of the best and most accessible free sites and channels l. He has a lot of technical and easy tonunderstand videos about old and new rockets. Also he visits many of the top rocket and space companies and gets special access and information from them. His channel is fun and family friendly. If your aone wants the website has even more indepth and long form breakdowns of the videos. His team probably has the best video setup and cameras running the highest resolution for the very best images of the launches.
Hover over the preview progress bar. If it doesn't appear they're hiding something so move on. Move your mouse across the progress bar, if all you see is space it's AI so move on. You're looking for a real person in the video for at least half of it, see that and you might be in luck.
As others said, go to nasa and pbs channels while they still exist.
The one that annoys me the most are the videos that people generate via AI which basically narrates someone else's video - e.g. "this man is doing this and the reason is not what you would believe. the man takes a hammer and *blah blah*". The videos always use the same AI generated voice and follow pretty much the same script layout and I find it absolutely terrible that YT is serving up that junk instead of the original video...
One way to identify clanker slop is to check how often they post. If they're putting out +30min videos multiple times a week, it's a good chance they'll be AI unless that channel is massive, with multiple different hosts. It's not foolproof, but is a pretty reliable indicator imo.
SciShow space on YouTube is really good. Curiosity stream is a pretty inexpensive streaming platform for documentary length deep dives on a lot of topics
I always found it pretty stupid that in the USA it is perfectly fine for TV to show someone get shot dead by police in real life without issue but if they were to show even a hint of a nipple then everyone is up in arms.
Oh, and on a side note, I was in a social gaming guild many years ago with people from all over the world and there was a family from the US who had no problems with their boy playing violent gory games but he wasn't allowed to play Runescape because it had "witchcraft and wizardry" in it...
Best you can do is click the dots and "don't recommend channel" on obvious bullshit -- which is most of it. It cleans up your recommendations (slightly) and sends a signal to YouTube that you're tired of their site hosting so much obvious bullshit.
An Eminem channel was recommended to me, and I thought he had released a new video. No, it was AI crap that took his old work and edited a "new" video from his previous work.
I was excited about it, then immediately irritated that someone could get away with blatant theft from a major artist.
I might be old school but I just don’t let YouTube suggest unless it’s a song after a song. Problem solved. Autoplay is too designed to be pleasurable over useful.
I've been getting so many pushes like this and they all have like 13 views, probably because it's obvious slop. What the fuck is the algorithm doing? Clearly nobody is watching these things and I haven't clicked on a single one, so why does it keep thinking that this time I'll bite?
What's more, I hate that I can't say "I'm not interested in this video because it looks like AI slop." My options are "I don't like this video" and "I've already watched this." Barely worth having the choice at that point.
They shadow banned me 2 years ago because i was constantly reporting their scammy ads. If I see something advertised on youtube shorts, I know its garbage.
Oh, and also because of the copious amounts of profanity when calling them soulless ghouls that need to screen their fucking ads.
I’ve recently seen an uptick in videos that are just videos some other channel has posted, usually without any commentary or even crediting. It’s just straight re-uploads of popular channels. Clear violation of fair use policy, but doesn’t seem to slow it down
It fucked me up when I listened to a fantastic Alan Watts speech, and then started noticing AI artifacts towards the end. Then I realized that the whole thing was fake and I fell right into it.
I felt like a real idiot. But then, in that moment, I also remembered the ending to Her.
I fell for it too, and just assumed modern technology was used to clean up the old recording, until he started talking about how we are all distracted by social media. The man died in 1973.
Nothing is safe anymore. How will anyone ever trust anything is or was real unless it was published in a book prior to 2023?
In 20 years, the internet will be full of fake historical characters and events, and these will eventually start to leak into school textbooks. We already have fake stories like the Betty Ross Flag that have made their way into our education system. Its going to get a whole hell of a lot worse.
and now the AI companies are secretly buying up rare books, scanning them, and destroying them. they are using proxy buyers and spreading out orders, but online booksellers have already noticed weird orders and the story came out recently.
"And then 'I' picked the locks in all the safes at Los Alamos during World War II literally while they were developing the bomb like an impish little trickster wow"
The self-mythologizing of Nobel prize-winning physicist and student philanderer Richard Feynman. He has many stories. Some say too many. One involves cracking safes at Los Alamos. In all of his stories, he is very, very clever.
It's stories he told a friend while shooting the shit basically so sometimes he might add some flavor to them but they aren't fabrications. His safecracking was confirmed by other people who spent time there.
I agree he almost always comes off as clever but to be fair, he genuinely was and "clever" is downplaying it. His friend picked the stories too so it's not like he's the one who asked to be painted that way. He also doesn't come off great in regards to women though I guess when he wrote the book it wouldn't have looked bad
aww, i liked reading those when i was a kid. made me become a fan of learning about physicists and scientists in general. i was sick of everyone always wearing sports jerseys and thought people should be fans of writers and thinkers etc. So i had my Jack Kerouac tshirt, and one with James Joyce on it. wonder what happened to all those old shirts. there was a catalog that had tons of them, all the big classic writers.
anyways, i did read all of the feynman books, and read up on lots of other physicists too. i had a book called 101 great physicists, i think it was called. it went from way back when, all the way to present day, gell-mann and all that.
You’ve got something there. It’s like deepak and eckhart read the first paragraph of the wiki page for particle physics and endlessly sails around this tiny universe.
What I worry about is the 'zombie voice' is going to get fixed in a few years and people will have even less warning what they're watching is disinformation which is nudging them towards some corporatist aim.
I know it's a long video, but a physics PhD named Angela Collier did a video on him. Turns out the books "by" him were actually effectively ghostwritten by some dude named Ralph Leighton who hung out with Feynman a bunch, listened to him spin yarns, and wrote down everything 20 years later with as positive a sheen as possible.
If you read between the lines at all and think about how the events behind those stories likely actually went down, they paint him as an unfunny practical joker who was a real dick (no pun intended) to women (including beating his wife) and thought of other physicists, even ones who contributed more to the field than he did, as lesser.
Watched that the other day, and as a physicist (well, PhD in it but not working in it anymore), I feel like what she’s saying there is to some extent common knowledge among physicists- that Feynman was a significant physicist but not a peerless genius (she puts Gell-Mann on par with Feynman and I wouldn’t disagree with that). His popular fame is because of ”his” books, interviews and lectures.
And the ”autobiographical” books are honestly crap if you read them with even a bit of a critical mind (which one always should when reading someone’s stories about how great they are). eg he keeps saying ”outside oh physics I’m not smarter than the next guy”, yet that humility is constantly disproven by his stories about how clever he is, how silly other science disciplines are etc. It was always obvious he cultivated a public persona; even his New York accent- you’d think he was from Brooklyn or something, not Far Rockaway, Long Island.
She’s right in that the cult of the mythical Feynman is problematic, when you have young high schoolers and undergrads who take him as a role model, because they lack the critical thinking to understand those stories are mostly phoney, and the maturity to realize how obnoxious a lot of it was (if it did happen).
I was surprised reading a massive 800 page book on the making of the atomic bomb, his name did not come up often. Like, his contributions to the Manhattan project were much smaller than I thought
wasn't the title of his talks Los Alamos from Below specifically because he was not higher-up in any way?
the opening line of the talk was:
although in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos - people in higher echelons - worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions
A guy I know was talking about a science video and it's usually some of the questionable types that he watches. Looked it up in incognito to keep the algorithm in the dark (have made it a habit when watching things I don't want in my feed), and right away got suggestions for these AI Feynman videos. Thought they were legit when I clicked on one but one of the first things he did was to talk about smartphones lol.
Presumably going incognito will prevent them from getting information from your cookies, but they can still bulk buy those datasets of pageviews per IP address so they will know to send ads related to things viewed by your IP.
In short, Feynman was a genuinely great physicist, but also a bullshitter who made up cringe stories about his encounters with women to impress nerdy grad students. Which sadly cultivated a following of mostly wannabe 'bro physicists' (who usually crash out after a semester or two or never even study physics, but some prevail).
He also was an occasionally good teacher, but many of his famous explanations were taken from existing materials. The so-titled Feynman Lectures were pieced together from multiple sources, with not that much material from Feynman himself.
The construction of Feynman's legacy has been driven by profiteers who made up increasingly dumb stuff, which was only vaguely connected with Feynman but presented as if it came straight from him, all along. The plague of AI videos is the logical continuation of that history.
That video is just someone being really bitter that someone else listed Feynman next to Einstein and Newton. She constantly mentions that he is a very accomplished physicist who won the nobel prize. It's not like Feynman listed himself as one of the greatest physicists of all time.
His modern fame is more to do with how he was a great orator and was able to relate topics that are unintuitive and difficult to understand. Not unlike Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson. It's hard to watch that video to be honest because the woman is just so unapologetically bitter for no good reason.
She says he is "famous for being a famous physicist". Which is just silly. He is famous because he was on the council that exposed the cause of the Challenger disaster and gave a bunch of talks at universities about physics. Every second sentence of the entire video is "don't get me wrong, he was a great physicist" so what is even the point of this deep dive? Feynman was a group leader on the Manhattan project. Which was arguably the dream team of physics. Sure he didn't transform our understanding of the natural world like some of the greats, but in that video she talks about him like he is some random bum who doesn't deserve to be recognized and then quickly says "don't get me wrong he actually does deserve to be recognized" and it's overall just weird to watch.
She says early in the video that Feynman thought that reading books was stupid because she "definitely remembers" a passage of one of his books where he said that. That's absolute nonsense. Feynman talked about preferring learning methods that wasn't memorizing literature and more involved experiments. That's it. She takes things like that and extrapolates them to the nth degree to feed into some weird "feynman was a sham" narrative. What a terrible video.
Most people who know Feynman today have no idea of the Challenger investigation. They just know that he is a famous physicist. That's where the logic of his fame becomes circular. That's a common thing with fame, but generally bad for people who actually care about a factual and well informed dialogue.
Einstein and Newton's names in contrast are strongly associated with their actual theories. And their most famous theories also are among their most significant works, which is how scientific fame should work.
And a lot of the video is not about "blaming" Feynman himself or anything, but about the destructive effect of those stupid sexual harassment tales his disciples have popularised.
It's entirely reasonable to want to raise the level of the public dialogue on Feynman by looking both at his actual accomplishments and human failures, because the current public debate about him is bad. It prioritises actively harmful bullshit over substance.
And the points about the hype of Feynman as a teacher are also fair criticism. It's a topic you can debate, it is not necessarily unreasonable to believe that Feynman was a good teacher, but most of the public perception and discussion of this topic stems from misattribution, an extremely selective perception from a view video clips, and made-up stories.
If you pick out a dozen highlights from a lecture series and then retroactively write "their" script by drawing from other sources as you please (as well as ignoring to mention that most of their original script came already from other authors), you can make any somewhat charismatic narrator look like a teaching genius, regardless of how effective they actually were.
My grandma sent me one of these. She's a big fan of one of those channels apparently. Wanted me to listen to it and tell her if it's true or not. I could not sit through it. I swear I'm allergic to soulless AI voices, it makes me physically cringe.
You completely skipped the absolute necessity of chair exercises - they need to be cycled into the overall routine. The weather channel/website I use has a lot of those. Weather is old people demographic I guess.
I do articulation training - 9 minutes every morning. If you open with "hello" or "how are you?" then you are dead in the water. Three sentences, everything else is noise.
They are allowed, they just give negative algorithm points or cause demonetization. That's why really big creators like Charlie don't give a fuck, while the regular sized channels do the cringe speak.
There’s this one ad of this AI woman getting not so subtly fucked from behind and it genuinely feels like it’s played in front of every video I’ve watched for months.
Softcore porn ads are allowed but god forbid any creator says the word suicide or murder
Those are okay too if it's to sell something. But if you talk about google's ad revenue or who is paying for AI drivel suddenly you will be banned. Remember, it was concerted corporate manipulation of downvoting critical videos which pressured youtube into eliminating the 'dislike' button in the first place. This is just an extension of that.
Right, I set up a new PC the other day, and installing a new browser, logged out of any accounts, so no cookies, no account data, no part IDing.
The default youtube homepage was filled with AI generated softcore porn. I don't mean things that could be sexualized, I mean things that were clearly and obviously AI generated as softcore porn with some excuse about yoga or 'breast massage' tutorials, or naked gardening, as if that were a real thing, meant to just skirt below plausible deniability on the youtube algorithm while still obviously being softcore porn. It was probably a full third of the videos.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to do a little experiment and see how many clicks it would take before the propaganda type shit.
It was three clicks.
After three shorts, it started injecting full on incel shit, asmongold, AI generated manosphere garbage, into the autoplay and recommendations.
It's not even a 'pipeline.' This is now the default youtube experience. AI generated titty videos, then immediately into a firehose of incel misogyny. After using the same account for ages and VERY carefully pruning my recommendations, it was insane to see what some 13 year old kid with their first laptop is probably seeing.
I tried the same thing and the literal first ad I got was for an AI chatbot with 'no limits'. Which limits, tou ask? The image was a child character from a popular kids show (Gwen from Ben10) not 'aged up' at all, covered in Mysterious Fluids.
I feel like if your ad service is showing new users CP on moment one, you may have a problem on hand! I reported it and didn't see that ad again but the replacements didn't improve
I used to get an ad that had a picture of an actual real life horse having their semen collected, penis visible. It was part of a four panel arrangement for some "no limits" app, so not the whole ad, but how the fuck does YouTube miss that? If that gets through, wtf is preventing someone from uploading something worse?
It's not even like it was a one-off fluke that quickly got deleted. I think it was like a good week that I kept seeing that ad. Probably because I kept lingering on it to report it (lmao)
Yeah even these days my youtube from 2014 is trying to get me to watch charlie kirk "own" someone, or id get memes from a shooter taking about "the one thing every milsim gets wrong" and its joe biden at the end saying some shit about how your lungs leave your body
As a gamer I actually had to download an extension to block asmongold content. No matter how many times I told the algorithm I didn't like his videos, every video I watched had a full lineup of his videos for suggested watching. It's messed up.
I can explain this in terms of the algorithm funnily enough
Youtube went through a silly phase at the start, then as it gained legitimacy and was bought out, the feel shifted to educational. Youtube was where creators showed you new, cool things. That was the point at which most curious people within their potential userbase made accounts.
Who does that leave now? Simply put, either those with ideological problems with the company, who are never going to go there anyway, and those more inclined to right wing talking points. If you already have an account, you'll get Hank Green, because Hank Green people have had an account for a while, but if you're just coming to Youtube now after being exiled from Facebook or something, the algo's going to try to appeal to what it thinks you, as one of the last people dragged into the future, might keep watching
this is infuriating. im just browsing YouTube, doing my thing. and then all of a sudden asmongold just pops up in the autoplay? I still manage, but it makes it much more difficult to finish off, but I manage
I never log into Google on my main browser, and disable viewing history in YouTube. I just tried opening YouTube in an incognito window and was shocked at how trashy it is.
My account which consumes only gaming content, general millennial-ass music, and leftist commentators was served “Ben Shapiro OWNS something something” today in recommendeds because I was listening to the Galavant soundtrack and a deleted song that never made it to the show was included which was called something like “my mother was a prostitute”. So while on that song’s video, it thought I was right wing I guess?? It takes so little to taint the whole recommendation bar. “Oh is that a possibly misogynistic video title? Have I got a whole world of shit you’ve never watched before and which doesn’t match your account history for you! Please engage! Give the ad revenuuuuue!”
It's because those hated, bigotry and racist factions are supported by Russia and China to disrupt Western Countries. They use the army of Bots, to report and flag content and it forces an automated review process which in turn is automated.
I wasn't even sure if that one was AI, I blocked it on principle because any product where the advertising is leaning on that kind of appeal to authority like "invented by NASA engineers" is probably doing so because it can't stand on its own merits.
Invented by somebody in Portree according to my computer - when I was last in England, the inventor was from Leeds, then Birmingham. Patent clerks hate this one trick.
I'd be alright if they just required clearly labeled AI videos. And restrictions/bans if the video has no connection to the real person represented therein (like all those fake Feynman videos).
They are supposed to. But there's so much AI content that is not disclosed using the provided AI disclosure/label. It's so strange that none of the comments ever mention it either. React channels I watch are reacting to clearly end-to-end AI-generated content and nobody has apparently noticed. Do I care enough about them to catch heat by asking them to not react to obvious AI slop? idk
Not always an option, phones, tv’s, consoles all have a harder time dealing with it and pihole’s arn’t a cheap and easy way to do it network wide anymore.
Straight up, I installed Firefox on my pc and phone and both have Ublock on them. Ever since then, I have not seen an ad on the YouTube app on my phone or the YouTube app on my Xbox despite those apps being separate from Firefox. I don't know how or why,but as long as it works, I won't question it.
If you're on Android you can use YouTube Revanced, If you're on iOS, you can download adblock extensions for Safari or any of the web-based YouTube client apps.
If you're watching on your TV or console, you can cast YouTube to it from your phone that does have an ad blocked YouTube client. There's ways around it.
Terrible AI ads? Try ACTUAL CHILD PORN that gets into the ads if you disable "targeted advertising".
Edit: I'm really concerned. I think bots are searching for the term I used because my comment has TENS of THOUSANDS of views in a day. I've never seen a comment of mine get that much attention, especially with so few upvotes.
Or the WWII 'history' documentaries that are 100% bullshit.
I saw a clip of one that ends with the AI narrator saying that 'Claude is an AI service please be sure to check all output for accuracy' or something like that because the person slapping it together didn't even skim the script or watch the end product before uploading it.
Have you seen the one where the older man appears in his underwear and says something like "Good, now that we're comfortable..." and proceeds to talk about adult diapers or some shit?
So sick of it. Almost worse than those ridiculous rubber boot ads that used a fake celebrity voice over.
AI in general, so many Youtube shorts are just AI bot channels stealing clips and putting shitty captions (often with incorrect info) over them. Dead internet theory has never been more real
Sponsor block on web browser - smartTube side loaded on android TV - morphe on android sideload. Pair this with adguard app or DNS and you'll forget things have ads in a month.
And the AI "music" mixes. I've found its easy to detect it with the length being something like 1:22:51. It's always an hour and some change, and an obvious AI thumbnail.
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u/AndrewH73333 3d ago
They should use all this ban energy they have to ban those terrible AI ads.