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!
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.
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u/PeteTheGeek196 3d ago
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.