YouTube and AI

According to a recent article YouTube will use AI to direct the content that people make, how it looks how it sounds and more. In so doing YouTube will be even less interesting.

AI tools will also begin informing what kind of content creators make. A new AI feature in YouTube Studio will generate topic ideas and outlines for potential videos. The AI suggestions will be personalized to individual creators, YouTube says, and based on what’s already trending with audiences. Additionally, an AI-powered music recommendation system will take a written description of a creator’s video and suggest audio to use.

Human Interest

The beauty of YouTube, back in the day is that it was user generated content. People would go out, live their lives, film something interesting and then choose to share that on YouTube, whether it was a bird flying in an interesting place, a swollen river, and more.

Clickbait and Uniform

The problem with YouTube, with algorithms is evident enough. The videos have clickbait descriptions with absurd images and the videos that are promoted are those with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views. With AI chosen topics, AI generated backgrounds and AI chosen music everything will become as formulaic as the Hollywood film industry. Nothing will be unique and creative. Everything will be uniform.

Personal Content

The entire reason for using YouTube was to find original content created by individuals. With the imposition of AI driven content so the originality and imagination will take a back seat.

He said that YouTube creators have expressed that editing and brainstorming can often be time-consuming. The tools were developed to assist with these tasks.

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That's the entire point. I spend hours trying to think of a topic blog post, and then I spend yet more time writing. With video it's the same thing. We think of a subject, we shoot the material, and then we spend time thinking about how to edit the video so that it's interesting.

Creativity Takes Time

It's time consuming because it's creative, because it's artistic. It's time consuming because it's about learning to think for the edit. The more experience you have as an editor, the faster you become. That time consuming moment is about learning to be creative. If AI replaces the thought process then, with time, all content on YouTube will be boring and unimaginative.

Bland Uniform Content

To some degree it already is, which is why I stopped paying for Premium and reverted to conventional video content sources. Television shows, films and more. YouTube forces us to see specific content, and makes it impossible to browse. They did it for viewers, and now they are doing it for viewers.

It is not that I don't like AI. It's that I don't like AI to replace imagination and the decision making process of content producers. It goes back to my old question. If you can't be bothered investing the time to create content and find new ideas, then why should others take time to watch that same content?

The Mountainous Levelling

In a cnn article Neal Mohan said, “We want to make it easier for everyone to feel like they can create, and we believe generative AI will make that possible,” which, in theory is fantastic, except that when you login to YouTube to see videos you see content with millions, or at least tens of thousands of views. You don't see video content with 15 views, or even zero views. You see the content that is already popular, either because of algorithms, or large subscription numbers.
Those ordinary people, for whom the field has been levelled, is now even more uneven, because videos with millions of views will be shown to everyone, and so become more popular, whilst other videos will have five views. The algorithms don't allow us to find niche content, like they should.

The Cult of the Amateur

One of my personal gripes with YouTube, TikTok and other platforms is that they encourage amateur producers with no film and television theory, to create content, seen by millions of people. Back in 2007 or so I joked that it was User Generated Crap, and I still feel that way today. Rather than worthwhile content we're encouraged to watch dull content.

As the film and television industries have been drained of funds they have been replaced by amateurs creating content for online platforms. People who love music hate auto-tune because it allowed people who never learned to sing to be seen as singers, and so music has degraded over time. The same is true of youtuber, TikTokker and other content. The rules and conventions that made film and television art forms, have been undercut for mediocre modern videos. What was once seen as crap, is now seen as good, and those that want to create legacy content are forced to create clickbait rubbish.

And Finally

I went from potentially watching several hours of YouTube content a day to watching a few minutes every few weeks. I grew tired of the clickbait headlines, and mediocre content that the promoted accounts produced. I found myself thinking "Why am I watching this rubbish" and eventually stopped.

If AI generates topics, video backgrounds, chooses music and recommends what to watch then we have lost the freedom to find and watch spontaneous content and ideas.