r/technology • u/IndicaOatmeal • Aug 07 '26
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-3395930/2.9k
u/dancrum Aug 07 '26
It's painfully obvious which videos are AI on YouTube, but they somehow target a show known for its human-animated videos. Amazing stuff.
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u/KyleRM Aug 07 '26
Obvious to humans, but they cant be bothered to use those for review.
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u/natelloyd Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Poonchow Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/grendus Aug 07 '26
Yep.
Kurzgesagt's art is highly stylized. Very easy for AI to generate, and easy for humans to produce a lot of (which is likely why they use it).
I wonder if that's why their new After Dark channel (history, instead of science, often... darker portions of history) now includes time lapse videos of them creating some of the panels.
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u/IkLms Aug 07 '26
Can that please happen to the Simon Whistler family of slop content channels?
That would actually be a huge improvement.
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Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 22 '26
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u/IkLms Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/almightyllama00 Aug 07 '26
To this day, his video about the mai lai massacre has a photoshopped picture of (now deceased) internet famous lolcow kingcobrajfs as the thumbnail.
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u/ERhyne Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Anonymus828 Aug 07 '26
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
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u/Upper-Management-AI Aug 07 '26
He says right in the beginning who wrote the paper he’s about to read.
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u/TheRealVilladelfia Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/nagrom7 Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/noodlesalad_ Aug 07 '26
I always found it funny how he reads each section heading. Reminds me how Ron Burgandy reads anything on the teleprompter.
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u/OneArmedZen Aug 07 '26
Yeah and it will create this vicious circle until no more human-made content is left.
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u/pagerussell Aug 07 '26
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
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u/Obanthered Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/737Max-Impact Aug 07 '26
There's a million+ videos uploaded to YT every day. At some point human review simply isn't an option anymore.
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u/LawfulNice Aug 07 '26
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
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u/KeyMyBike Aug 07 '26
But paying people is bad. Hence why AI is allowed to hide 1.5T and counting in debt.
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u/toothpaste_tube Aug 07 '26
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...
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u/nnomae Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/fizzlefist Aug 07 '26
And this is why everyone should be disgusted by the plagiarism done to train these clankers.
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u/ar34m4n314 Aug 07 '26
And there isn't like a single bit that Youtube has that says this is a verified channel? That seems so basic.
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u/Skaar1222 Aug 07 '26
Gen AI is the death of the Internet
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u/Squalphin Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Yingletofthecorn Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/FLBrisby Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Raptor-Johnny Aug 07 '26
Youtube asked me if an alt rock song from 30 years ago (posted on youtube 20 years ago) was low effort AI content.
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u/Jmund89 Aug 07 '26
And yet they won’t actually take down accounts that literally post AI garbage
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u/wizard_mitch Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/fivehourworkweek Aug 07 '26
The horrors I've witnessed on my 7yo cousin's Youtube kids shorts tab are mind numbing.
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u/red286 Aug 07 '26
Yeah but that's nothing new. Those freakshow Frozen x Spiderman videos that were on YouTube like 10 years ago were already nightmare fuel.
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u/BoginTheOrange Aug 08 '26
Is it weird I feel kind of nostalgic thinking about those even though those videos should have no place on YouTube at all.
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u/ReadditMan Aug 07 '26
I think it's supposed to be labeled
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u/Secret_Account07 Aug 07 '26
Which is weird because I see AI ads constantly on YouTube. I’ve never seen it labeled
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u/ReadditMan Aug 07 '26
Yeah I don't think the ads are required to be labeled, just the uploaded videos
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u/Secret_Account07 Aug 07 '26
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
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u/JohnnyBeeGaming Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Sweaty-Ad-4202 Aug 07 '26
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
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u/Dokii Aug 07 '26
I started looking up cases for my new phone and literally every channel was just AI review garbage
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u/FrostyCartographer13 Aug 07 '26
AI rips off creators so much that they are now getting flagged as AI.
Welcome to the dystopia folks
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u/Akabander Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/s0_Ca5H Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/FootwearFetish69 Aug 07 '26
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!
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u/stormdelta Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Alarmed-Secretary207 Aug 07 '26
Flagged as AI by AI, I assume. Would any human with the job have flagged Kurzgesagt?
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u/-__-zero-__- Aug 07 '26
A.I. got it wrong again... surprise to no one.
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u/Karibou422 Aug 07 '26
Artificial Idiocracy
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u/Hackwork89 Aug 07 '26
The idiocracy is not artificial, it's completely genuine.
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Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/RedEyeView Aug 07 '26
I've lost count of how many of those shitty AI story adverts I've blocked.
All from Pocket FM.
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u/stoffejs Aug 07 '26
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!
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u/Crayshack Aug 07 '26
Kurzgesagt even did a whole video detailing how AI poisons the research process and thoroughly explaining their reasons for avoiding it.
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u/dassketch Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/leo_of_daat Aug 07 '26
one would think they would make a very basic whitelist first and foremost and yet...
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u/tophernator Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/MaridKing Aug 07 '26
Don't hand out whitelist placements to people you don't trust. Plus, 99% of successful youtubers would never risk losing their audience by uploading AI slop instead of the content that they're known for.
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u/oops_i_made_a_typi Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/abe5765 Aug 07 '26
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
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u/londons_explorer Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/wizard_mitch Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/cpMetis Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/LlamaRS Aug 07 '26
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”
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u/biznatch11 Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Exile56678 Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/impulse_thoughts Aug 07 '26
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).
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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ Aug 07 '26
The music side is tragic.
I know people who are absolutely experts say they can 'tell' or people really versed in that genre will be like "why have I never heard of any of these songs or artists before" but if you're just like "I wanna listen to a dark techno mix while I study" you're going to get hit with a million completely AI music playlists and to be honest...I can't tell they're not human made other than perhaps none of the songs 'stand out' as incredible but are all easy to listen to and 'good enough' for a study session.
That's really sad to me. In 10 years, I think most entertainment is just going to be fucking AI created.
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u/cpMetis Aug 07 '26
The days of shuffle radio are dead. We're being forced kicking and screaming back to albums from artists we can trust, and I imagine that's going to murder small musicians and bands because it means discovery will be zero.
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u/Ketapapi Aug 07 '26
hopefully one day there will be a good alternative for this trainwrack of a site
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u/PMME-SHIT-TALK Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/2Quicc2Thicc Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/aqtseacow Aug 07 '26
Kurzgesagt habitually produces content of questionable factual accuracy as a consequence of oversimplification, but they're definitely not an AI channel.
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u/venom21685 Aug 07 '26
In the last couple years it's not even due to oversimplification. Some of their videos have just been baseless.
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u/Overall_Occasion_175 Aug 07 '26
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"
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u/Public-Eagle6992 Aug 07 '26
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)
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u/morgan423 Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/weirdojace Aug 08 '26
AI slop is trained on legitimate videos. So then the AI detectors are looking for videos that look like the videos being trained with. So then the AI detectors see something that looks like what the AI models are trained with, and then flag it as AI. It's a snake eating its own tail.
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u/helenius147 Aug 07 '26
They posted an AI slop picture in their tweet as a response. Know what? Maybe they didn't miss.
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u/Enorats Aug 07 '26
To be fair, I've wondered if Kurzgesagt was AI since before AI even really became a thing.
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u/Indraga Aug 07 '26
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)
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u/ChaosTheRedMonkey Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/Which-Arm-4616 Aug 07 '26
It's a channel that was so influential, and resulted in so many imitators, that it has become generic.
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u/vector_o Aug 07 '26
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"
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u/ImpossibleCreme Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/cylonrobot Aug 07 '26
Yep. I got tired of the channel some time back. The quality has gone down, and I wasn't surprised this happened.
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u/shiftyourparadigm Aug 07 '26
Step 1: Train AI models using Kurzgesagt.
Step 2: Create Kurzgesesque AI content.
Step 3: Identify and remove prime Kurzegesesque examples.
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u/ashyjay Aug 07 '26
I mean Kurzgesagt has been pretty sloppy for a long time, so it's only right it gets picked up,
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u/SpeakNottheNightYorb Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/MrParadux Aug 07 '26
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.
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u/DaSpood Aug 07 '26
Kurzgesagt is pretty much the textbook implementation of everything AI would do, it just happens that they're made by real people, but every red flag is there and if you didn't know they were a famous channel that has existed for years, it would be reasonable to suspect it's an AI channel. They have such a distinct style that I would bet a lot of AI-generated videos are specifically trying to emulate their style because it works so well and it's so compatible with the format.
There's genuinely nothing that can be done unfortunately, you can't detect it properly via automatic means and Youtube is too big to moderate by humans. At this point the only way out of AI is to sit and wait for it to collapse on itself. Once everyone gives up on creating original stuff and people stop consuming content as a whole because they can't tell if it's AI or not, it won't be profitable anymore and it'll go away. We're past the era of content creation being a viable passion career now, either you produce generic trendy slop filled with ads and sponsorships at a ridiculous rate or you stay niche forever and rely on donations to survive. We'll soon have gone full circle and back to making low-cost videos as a hobby.
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u/-Altephor- Aug 07 '26
Yeah this is unfair, they're pure organic, homegrown slop. Nothing artificial about it.
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u/SudhaTheHill Aug 07 '26
It’s funny because YouTube allows so MANY videos that should literally be exhibit A in court.