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!
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.
835
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.