AI Slop Is Drowning Out Human YouTubers

0:03Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast. Joseph and Sam are out this week. So you get me Jason Kebler and I'm here with Emmanuel. What's up Emmanuel? Hey. How are we feeling about a full on takeover? of this here show. Finally, the time has arrived for us to do a four-hour podcast of us just rambling about whatever, not related to technology or our reporting at all. That's what I wanted to do, but you seemed scared. You seemed scared to do it. You didn't want to upset the listeners. So we're going to talk about our stories. Speaking of, Joseph and Sam are both out reporting. so they're not gallivanting they're doing stuff that you'll hear about quite soon I'm sure people might have seen Sam was in the courtroom for the sentencing of Michael Pratt who was the ringleader behind the Girls Do Porn case which he has covered for years and I think she was the first to post about the sentencing and some shocking statements from the Jane Doe involved in the case so people could check that out But yeah, that's why Sam is not here.

1:18And Joe is on a secret mission in unnamed parts of the world. Unnamed parts of the world. We can't even contact him. So hopefully he's okay. But he'll be back, I think, next week. In any case, yeah, check out Sam's Girl Soup Porn reporting. We are not going to talk about it on the podcast because we think it will be still relevant when Sam is back. So more to come there. In cybersecurity, speed is everything. Breaches often begin with a single exposure, an open cloud bucket, a forgotten subdomain, or an API spun up without your knowledge. The question is, who finds it first, you or an attacker?

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2:38The platform helps you save time and speed up fixes with integration with Jira, Slack, Microsoft Sentinel, and more. Plus support from Greg, your embedded AI security analyst. Stop breaches before they start with Intruder. Plans start at just$99 a month. Start your free trial today at intruder.io slash 404media. So for the first story, we're going to talk about one that I wrote, which is called AI-generated boring history videos are flooding YouTube and drowning out real history. Okay. Should we do a confession? yeah i mean there's a lot to get into here but i wouldn't mind if we spent most of this podcast talking about how you stumble upon these videos because they we can't go into this without going into like your youtube consumption habits can you please explain to our audience when you watched slash listened to the videos we talk about in the story?

3:46Yeah. So all of the videos that we're about to talk about, I discovered at 3am or later. Because most nights, not all nights, but most nights, I will put my AirPods in and I will turn on a YouTube video. Well, I go through phases of what listen to. And my most recent phase is listening to history videos. So for a while, I was listening to history videos about indigenous cultures in the Western Hemisphere run by a guy called Ancient Americas, who I actually talked to for this story. He talks about the Mayans, the Aztecs, but then also like the Toltecs and other indigenous societies that we don't hear about very much.

4:40Incredibly interesting. But also he speaks at a cadence that puts me to sleep very quickly. And so for a few months, I would be listening to his hour long videos and I would make it like five minutes and fall asleep. And then I would just leave it on. And eventually, you know the video would end and youtube would auto play something else and like one night i guess a couple of weeks ago i uh like woke up like i jolted awake listening to this and maybe we'll play the clip here in the end anne boleyn won a kind of immortality not through her survival but through her indelible impact on history. Fee...

5:28By the early 1770s. Before we move on, let's just dwell on the fact that, I mean, this is probably a night where you're having trouble falling asleep. So you put in your AirPods, put on one of these videos, and try to lull yourself to sleep. And I have done that before, but I feel like it's probably one of the least healthy things that I do to myself. That can't feel good to fall asleep that way. That can't be a restful good night's sleep. I really don't know. I really don't know. I tried to do research on this topic once. So back at Vice, we had theme weeks occasionally. And I think it was 2017, we did something called Sleep Week.

6:20And so everyone on staff would write an article about some aspect of sleep, the techification of sleep, the science of sleep, whatever. And mine was, I was trying to figure out if my falling asleep with a TV show on habit was bad for me. because we hear quite a lot about blue light, which is emitted from your cell phone, is emitted from a laptop, a game console, whatever. It's not good. It disrupts your sleep. It messes with your melatonin and circadian rhythm, etc. But what was unclear to me was that I was watching these TV shows with my laptop facing away from me. At first, because I was doing it on a laptop for a while.

7:11And then that eventually morphed into listening to YouTube videos. So I would start the video on YouTube and then put my phone face down because I didn't pay for YouTube premium. It's so funny that it's a premium feature. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I've now started paying for YouTube premium because of this. I've been listening to these videos now for years. and literally within the last month, I want to say, you pretty much can't listen to... And I always say listen to things on YouTube because I so rarely actually watch it. I just am listening to it. But every five minutes, you're getting an ad.

7:53And the ad is really loud. And that would be really jarring. So I would be falling asleep listening to this stuff and then an ad would come on and I'd be like, Oh, that's probably not healthy. And then sometimes you get a YouTube ad that was like 35 minutes long. So I would like wake up and I would be in like minute 20 of some ad. Anyways, I talked to sleep scientists and it's like, it's not studied that well. It's not really studied that well what like audio does to your brain because your brain is nominally consuming these voices. But I feel like I'm not processing really any of it once I actually fall asleep and I find it to be like quite calming and soothing.

8:34And I think a lot of people like fall asleep to a podcast. There's various boring history podcasts. There's soothing sleepy time stories podcasts. Trust me, I tried them all. ASMR stuff. There's a thing that's happening on YouTube now also where it's like whatever YouTube algorithm you're in, it will suggest that. But you can sleep to this format. So I listen to comedy podcasts and I get offered via the a recommendation algorithm, like four-hour compilation videos of this comedy podcast to fall asleep to. So it's doing that for everything. Sorry, two more things quickly because Joe is not here to stop us.

9:21And then we can go back into the journalism. One, I do this sometimes, but when I do it, I definitely feel like shit. When I wake up in the morning, I'm like, that was bad. That was a bad choice. And the healthy thing to do is not watch anything and read a book. And whenever I do that, I'll read half a page and fall asleep like a baby and have a really good night's sleep. But I don't know, for whatever reason that you understand, I'm sure it's hard to do that. And then the second thing, there's a really good episode of Dexter's Laboratory, the cartoon. Yeah, yeah. Where he falls asleep, he's trying to learn French in his sleep.

9:55So he puts on a learn French record when he goes to sleep, but the record skips. And the only phrase he hears is omelette du fromage. And then the next day... I remember that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the only thing he can say, but somehow it's the best day of his life because it's always appropriate for the situation. Great episode. Okay. Wait, wait, but so not to the journalism yet though, because it's interesting though, because I agree with you entirely. And I actually rarely use YouTube to fall asleep initially. Like I will often fall asleep, but then like one hour later, I will wake up and it will be the middle of the night.

10:36And I don't want to turn off. Maybe I could get a Kindle or something, but I don't want to turn something on to read from. And I also don't want to have my eyes open staring at my phone. And so this is why I do it. I'm like, I'll look at my phone for 30 seconds to put on one of these videos and then try to fall back asleep. And it usually works. And at some point in the night, I usually toss my AirPods away unconsciously. And so, I mean, I agree it's probably not the best, but there's a huge market for this. There's a huge market for this because of what we're about to talk about. It's like...

11:17Yeah, so anyways, I was listening to these human creators who spend a lot of time... You're watching these history videos. Yeah. Let's talk about... because it sounds like in the story, you in the morning realized that you were listening to something that was AI generated. But in order to illustrate that, can you describe what a good one of these videos is like and then what this AI generated video sounded like? Yeah. So, I mean, interestingly, a lot of the ones that I listen to are not designed to make people fall asleep. They're just like history podcasts, for lack of a better term. usually with visuals.

12:01And sometimes they're more than that. Like this one guy we're going to talk about, History Time, this man named Peter runs it. A lot of Peters in this story, actually. He will read four or five books on a topic. And then he will consult academic journals. And then he often does site visits. And so if he's talking about an ancient war or something like that, he will go to the battlefield and will film there. And so he's making documentaries that are often two, three hours long. And any given one of these documentaries can take months, they can take years. He told me some of them he worked on for over five years.

12:47Just in terms of like, he was doing other things also, like other videos came out, but like, he will be working on multiple of these at a time and they're really popular like he became quite a big youtuber he has i think like 1.2 million followers and um you know he puts out like a video every month or two and that is probably like the upper limit of what a human being who's trying to make really high quality, really well-researched videos can do. If you're reading multiple books for each one, if you're reading multiple academic papers about different perspectives on some ancient war, some ancient civilization, or the types of food that they ate in medieval times, there's all sorts of different videos that I've become interested in.

13:41I've become interested in this channel called Let's Talk Religion, and they will talk about the different perspectives on drinking alcohol in Islam, for example. And where did the idea that Muslims shouldn't drink alcohol come from? Through a historical perspective. That's an example of one of the videos that I've watched. There's another one that's an entire history of Zoroastrianism, which is a religion. I did a project on in eighth grade. and I'm like, oh, now I've like, it's a predecessor to Christianity and Islam and Judaism and it's still practiced by some people. But I was like, oh, what's the deal with this?

14:26And it's like a very academic look at these sorts of things. It's a human being who's doing like a ton of research and then like, not only are they doing a ton of research, they're then also finding imagery to go with it, which I don't watch, but like a lot of people do. And this imagery is often like, Creative Commons licensed stuff. It's stuff where they're getting permission from universities to use it. Like a lot of the people I spoke to for this article said that they are doing a ton of legwork just to script the video. And then of course, like edit the video, you know, add music to the video, record it with their own voices, like all of this stuff.

15:06And they've made careers out of it. Like a lot of them made careers out of it because history stuff does really well on YouTube. Um, you know, a lot of the videos, like the most popular, um, videos have millions of views. And so they're collecting money. A lot of them have Patreon and stuff like that. But anyways, like along comes these new AI slop channels that I started getting auto fed. And, you know, as like a journalist and someone who writes about AI slop, I, I did recognize them as slop pretty much immediately when I was coherent. in the morning and was scrolling through my YouTube watch history.

15:47And it's funny because I had, quote unquote, watched dozens of them according to my watch history, but I didn't even realize it. I was consuming them in my sleep. Yeah, the good videos remind me of a very popular early history podcast, this hardcore history that maybe people have heard of. And I would describe them as meticulous. And then also something that I think it's Dan Carlin, the guy who makes it often jokes about, is that I think he'll go like two years without putting out a podcast because of all the research. And then like you said, the editing, right? It's very carefully put together.

16:27So that's a good version. Describe one of these AI-generated videos. Because in theory, I don't know, you could go to ChatGPT, generate some text about some period in history, feed that to an AI tool that has AI voice generation, and you basically have a video. What does that look like in practice? Yeah, so I would say that the accounts are called Boring History for Sleep, and then there's a bunch of different variations of it. They have clearly AI slop thumbnails, first of all. And all of the visuals are pretty clearly AI slop, although it's pretty hard to tell in some of them because a lot of the visuals are medieval paintings, and AI is pretty good at doing that.

17:14And so if you're not up to date on historic oil paintings, you might not notice them as slop. But here's some of the video titles. Why It Sucked to Be an Aztec Sacrifice Victim and More, totally wrong medieval facts everyone still believes medieval irish food peasant to king the queen who slept with her step sons your life as a eunuch uh crazy facts about queen cleopatra etc um so it's a lot of stuff like that and then you know i watched some of these and there are facts in here um you know i think whoever is making them i'm not exactly sure what tools they're using, I was trying to reach out to them.

18:01I would imagine they're probably using some combination of like chat GPT for scripting, maybe like 11 labs to record the video. It's always the same narrator. The narrator has a British accent. It's not really like whispered. It's like very soft spoken. And one thing I noticed is that it uses a ton of adjectives. Like it just is like, imagine you are, you know, a peasant in 1400s England. It was a cold and dreary night. The willowy wisps, like, it's like really a lot of filler stuff. And then it's like kind of a list of very basic facts. and the, so I basically like, I spoke to the guy who runs Ancient Americas, which is a channel I really like.

18:54I talked to History Time, which channel I really like. And then another one called The French Whisperer, which is an ASM artist from France who does a lot of research as well for his videos. He does like science and history videos. And pretty much all of them were like, yes, we are aware of these things. The guy who does History Time told me I think they may be modeled on my videos, which could be possible because a lot of the topics are the exact same. And then the voice sounds really similar to his, which is concerning. And then the videos are usually like two to three hours long, which is how long he's doing them.

19:32But he's basically like, it's really, really, really, really surface level. It's like glossing over. like a lot of them are maybe not totally wrong, but it's like reading a Wikipedia article. It's like reading a Wikipedia article, but not clicking like any of the citations or anything like that. I've read a lot of AI-generated books for some of our reporting. And I would say two things that the AI-generated content has in common almost always is, A, yes, it reads a Wikipedia article, it's very surface level. And then I wonder if you agree, if you've listened to enough of these to say, but something that is good about what I liked history as a subject in school and what I liked about history podcasts and stuff is usually the person who is making it is not just listing facts about the time or the figure.

20:35It's like there's some sort of point or narrative that they're trying to get. There's some sort of thing that they're trying to say about this period of time. And I imagine that these videos lack perspective, basically. They definitely lack that. And then, you know, I'm not a historian. I've watched a lot of these. But something I really appreciate is that history feels like it's a conversation with different perspectives. And so a lot of these, the best human made channels will be like, well, this, this like academic study or this historian says this, but like this other person who is also a well renowned expert in the field says that, and it's not quite exactly the same.

21:21So you need to like consider it from these different perspectives and then sort of decide, you know, what you believe to be the truth. and I think that there's absolutely none of that in here and it definitely doesn't cite any of its sources. It's so funny, I'll be listening to one of these ancient Americas videos and it will be like, oh, these Harvard anthropologists wrote a study dating these ruins to a specific time but these other historians say that's impossible because the migration patterns that were known during this time period don't line up or whatever. And that's obviously very vague, but it's a lot of that.

22:07And I find that to be extremely interesting, despite... Well, these AI ones market themselves as boring history. None of the other ones say boring. I don't think they're boring, but they put me to sleep nonetheless because I'm tired, not because I think it's boring. so you talked to this guy p kelly who runs history time one of these more popular human uh youtube history channels you talked a little bit about how everyone thinks these videos are very surface level but what did i thought he had some very interesting things to say about how like what does this mean for the audience and what does this mean for how we are recording history or explaining history now on the internet?

23:02Yeah, so I think that this one was a really tough one for me, because obviously I've been writing tons and tons about AI slop. And I think that this is some of the most insidious stuff that I've seen. And that is because these real historians, again, spend months making a single video. And these AI slop factories make videos that look and feel the same in form, if not the actual information. Like every day they're publishing one. And there's dozens and dozens and dozens of these channels. And so there's tons of them out there. And there's no way that even all of the world's historians, if they were making videos, they're going to be drowned out by this very quickly.

23:51And so I think the discoverability aspect is a massive problem. Because if you search for, I don't know, what was life like in medieval times, you're going to get a bunch of these. maybe you'll get a really high quality human made video still like at the top right now but like that's that's been changing really rapidly and so i think it's going to be like really really hard to find these things um every creator that i talk to every human creator so that they've seen their youtube views go down this year um and they think it's because they're now competing with this slop so it makes it like less tenable for them it makes it a lot harder for new people to break into the space because um you know if you have no following whatsoever like how are you going to build one if you're competing with with this stuff and then also it just it like again glazes over the intricacies of uh of history and what is like really complicated often really complicated often very contested things.

25:02So you're getting like a really surface level sort of thing. And then, you know, that's to say nothing of the fact that a lot of the companies that make large language models are trying to make them like more centrist and like less woke and whatever. And so you can like see Grok like changing its answers about historical events in real time according to what Elon Musk wants. and things like that. And so I think it is really, really insidious. And I think it's something very difficult for humans to fight back against because there's just not enough time in the day to be competing with the AI on this, I think.

25:47I'll do a slight tangent again because no one is here to stop us. But it's like, I agree that across the board, I think sometimes people wonder if we're like over focused on what we call AI slop. And this is why I don't think we are because this is the most insidious and like terrifying outcome, in my opinion, where AI companies hoover up all the human made research content, art, whatever it is. and then we reach some sort of tipping point where we can't even find that stuff because we're flooded with all this fake bullshit and we're already seeing it. It's like, what you just said is true for news websites, for books, for academic research, for YouTube, for adult entertainment content creators.

26:50It's like everything is being drowned out by AI-generated slop. And it's easy to imagine a situation where we're not even able to find the human stuff. And that's terrifying. And I just had one of those weird weeks where it's like, I was looking at Blue Sky and Facebook and I feel like every other post with someone complaining about some AI-generated slop, they sign a completely different category of life. It's like, oh, I'm watching TV and clearly this art in this ad is AI-generated and it looks like shit. I'm scrolling Instagram and this influencer is AI generated. I'm buying a book from Amazon and all these books are AI generated.

27:28And people are like very fed up. And like, that is why we focused on it and why we continue to focus on it. And it's not clear how it's going to shake out. And it's a very big problem. Yeah. I mean, I think like as we've said, it's also there's very, very little incentive for anyone enabling this to fix it. it's like Google is pushing the tools to make this stuff. And so YouTube has said that it's going to like demonetize low effort content. But it's not, it's not demonetizing this. It's like the, you know, Google has a lot riding on Gemini and VO and like all these other tools that they make that are AI tools.

28:16And so I don't think that it's going away. And I think it's like, it still feels really early days, even though things have changed so much since we started reporting on this. It's like, this is still, there's still probably only a handful of people actually making these videos right now. and they're so easy to make. It's like there's going to be more and more people doing the same thing very soon and I don't know what the internet looks like after that happens. I think it's like a very bleak situation. And then the last thing I'll just mention is that a lot of these accounts are using like spam and like they're basically like all commenting on each other's YouTube videos in a concerted way.

29:11So they're manipulating the algorithm in addition to flooding the platform. It's like I found dozens and dozens of these accounts. I think they're probably all run by the same person because they all link to each other and they all comment on each other. And you can tell that they're doing bot type activity. And so add that on top of all of the other problems we just said and it's like it just gets really difficult and then the other the only other thing i'll mention is that um uh history time told me like he is making a lot of his videos by going to like special academic libraries where you like check out like the old english book like the the old manuscript and stuff and is like going through that sort of thing and you know these ai companies have tried to train their LLMs on as much stuff as they can get a hold of, but they're still largely just scraping the internet and sometimes scraping commercially available books.

30:16Whereas a lot of these history YouTubers and historians are like, I don't know, they're going into the archives in a basement somewhere and reading the old scrolls. So he's like, I'm giving you a real, really diverse, interesting perspective, whereas these AI is just taking what's on Wikipedia and regurgitating it somehow.

30:42Should we leave that there? That was a real indulgent segment. That's good. Only two and a half more hours to go. Alright, we'll leave that there and when we come back, we are going to talk about Instagram and a story that Emanuel did.

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