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.
Watch with the sound turned up.
But "fortunately" for me, on my main account, my feed is 80%+ decent stuff - science channels, AOPA safety videos - stuff like that. But my other account has absolutely terrible suggestions on the algorithm, so it probably varies a ton on how much and what you watch.
But taking into account all the thousands of not-so-good recommendations I guess you are right
Have you ever found a 10/10 on your own?
If so it's possible you were recommended that by an algorithm but you just didn't register it, because a human recommendation is more of a memorable event.
If I've ever did, it's after having been recommended something. For example if someone sends me a song and then I go to the "most popular" songs from that same artist. Sometimes I would stumble upon something I like even more than the recommendation.
For example if it's a genre that interests me I would search "[genre] mix" on YouTube. In which case it's usually mixed by a human.
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.
There's something with these compilations. Almost as if deliberately AI slop is mixed in to numb the public to it, or for some AI startup to testdrive on an unaware public how good their stuff is.
Take compilations of lightning strikes for instance. There's always a couple that are just too spectacular or just unbelievably. Like a ball lightning going across the street.
It will always be subject to the delay in detecting the bypasses of the latest AI techniques.
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.
I've posted an article on this matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121555
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.
Many who notice won't bother commenting, because most who notice know how pointless that is (counterproductive in fact: a comment is an interaction, any interaction is a positive for the "content"). Those that do notice and comment are either drowned out by
• those too numbed on the brain to care, let alone notice, who lap it up, and praise it
• bots (either those being used to interact with the clip to drive it's interactions counters, or more general spam bots)
or if there is anyone/anybot monitoring the negative comments are removed.
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
As such the only purpose is to make money.
YouTube has started banning some AI channels and maybe with time put serious restrictions. Or maybe not, at least not for big channels because 5 min crafts continues to exist despite producing most bizarre, outrageous and down right dangerous content. YouTube needs that sweet advertisement money.
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".
Same as it ever was. When this cash cow proves worthless or runs out it’ll be another thing.
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.
Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts"
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
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.
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
Imagine 50 years down the road impossible to tell which things Richard Feynman really said in his lectures and which are all made up.
Youtube should give you more options than just block or don't show me this. You should be able to click 'AI fake of real person' so they don't get inflicted on others unless they like that stuff.
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)
Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.
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"
If you somehow curate your YT account, the shit wont show up anymore (only new shit not banned already) and you will see one thing: A curated youtube feed is actually rather empty :-D
On some days, I really have to actually look precisely if there is something new at all: Im a subscriber of 30-35 technical/business channels - its very rare that i could "spend a whole day watching YT", because there is just not enough new stuff.
Before curating my account, I also had the impression that "its endless and not any sort of structure" - but it has.
They consider low quality video produced by automatic programs "AI slop" even when it's not AI. That's not a very accurate title.
The problem is that it’s working; HN voters seem to love the stuff.
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.
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.
Not to say that some of his work is not useful though.
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.
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.
Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.
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.’
Maybe I didn't configure Kagi enough? But I don't want to configure a search engine.
Have you considered the difference between quantity and quality?
I still miss something for quickly finding random facts like "how long to boil an egg" but for programming the above works quite well.
All you're missing on Kagi is a question mark:
2 days ago I was making multiple searches looking for the websites of specific hotels and spa facilities, and none of them showed up in the first 4 pages of results, even when searching by exact name.
Out of desperation I switched back to Google, and, surprisingly, it was willing to give me what I was looking for on the first page. (But not as first result, of course..)
True, but DDG seems, at the very least, no more afflicted than other engines. If I'm supposed to pay for a search engine, I expect something better than DDG.
Always open to new horizons, though—are there non-Google search products that you find to consistently work better?
Which also reinforces already declining literacy rates.
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.
I have to say AI summaries work pretty well for me on Google and my overall subjective sense is the results have been getting better the past 1-2 years.
Here's what I get for your exact search and it looks pretty reasonable?
The very first response I got with quotes was this HN post.
The very first response I got without quotes took me to the docs here: https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-positioning-landing...
I sometimes wonder how much other browsers, countries, or languages play into the search results for a particular user.
Every time I read someone complaining about Google search results, I try to use another search engine for awhile, just to see if I'm missing something. Every time I do this, the alternatives are awful and I shake my head and go back to Google search.
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.
The google ones for me seem to be talking about something unrelated to what I'm looking for a significant percent of the time because it interprets it as a much more popular concept that looks like my query if you squint very hard. Other times it pulls up seo-spam tier answers that are plainly wrong.
> 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?
The only place I see slop on YT is ads.
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.