Children and seniors are victimized by AI content on a huge scale. Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds.
I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated.
It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content.
I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence (animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points), a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content.
Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person.
Currently, AI videos are a gold mine for black hats.
The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
this stuff always reminds me of There is no antimemetis division [0]
From Case Hate Red:
> With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around.
My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.
I've found a curious variety of AI videos: releases of motorbikes that don't exist, brought by Youtube algorithm. I guess the point is just clicks or ads money. Some comments, by bots or gullible users.
No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)
> Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds
I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.
Many parents find parenthood difficult and are happy that something distracts their kid. Further, kids that tend to get more addicted to stuff like this tend to live in stressful circumstances.
It's easy to say be a better parent, or produce a better environment for your kid, but it's not as easy to help people with that. If we can make social media healthier for everyone, that's a big deal.
I guess it depends on the age of the kid , if a kid is 11-12-13 yo , you can hardly do anything about it. I remember of how I was at that age , now I am 38.
What's even worse is that these videos are being used for shady purposes as well. I start to fear a lot for our future elections. I have heard parents/grand-parents mention videos they have seen from politicians that are simply fake. They totally believed claims they said these politicians made, but when you look it up you discover these things were never said and that they fell for AI deep-fake style videos. So far most of these videos have been made to promote scams. I'm sure many of us have seen these videos. Like the classic Elon Musk promoting some crypto scam videos.
This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos.
And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war.
Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.
My girlfriend mindlessly watches those sometimes. I think they are from China maybe.
I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this:
"A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!"
Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.
Last weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key.
Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.
I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.
What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.
> What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field.
I feel like one of the less discussed issues of the hyper-connected world is there are no small ponds to be the big fish in anymore. Used to be you could be the best in your school, church, town even city etc - even if you weren't that good. I remember being astounded as a kid by a woman who juggled 5 tennis balls in a local talent show. Now I can hop on youtube and watch people do way more impressive feats it doesn't seem so unique. I suspect that 5 ball routine might still be the greatest juggling I've seen in person, but it still doesn't compare to random acts I've seen online.
But especially with the para-social relationships of social media people feel connected even to big names now. You might not compare the local young singer to Taylor Swift, but people will to the tiktok singer they 'know' who liked their reply once.
It's gratifying and inspiring to be top of your class in something, but in a world where it's always a class of millions, you know you'll never reach the top.
This is why I don't consume feeds, have social media accounts and only use youtube to find specific things which is very rare for me. I maybe watch 10 videos on YT per month at most, these days mostly about machine shop and millwright operations.
Consuming all that content leaves you feeling small and isolated. The talents you thought you had are nothing in the face of a global pool of YT/TikTok/Insta superstars.
Currently, I share things with people I care about and who care about me. The rest of the world can remain ignorant of me and I of it. It's a good place to be.
I think it's part of the main character syndrome that social media invoked in most of us. Everybody wants to tell the story of their lives (but nobody really cares).
In the old days e.g. concerts were for enjoying the music together with people you did and didn't know. The best concerts were those where you were left sweaty from (slam)dancing with everyone in the pit on music that was even better-performed than on CD. Showing the experience afterwards was not really a thing that existed.
Thing is, if you are not a person who blends into the mass of ”normal”, you need to tell the story of your life. You already stick out like a sore thumb, and you need to explain to others why.
In other words, you need to be in control of your own narrative, or someone else will do it for you to fill the void. For example, someone can use cold reading to deduce what others suspect and fear and then paint you in that specific light, essentially planting individually targeted nasty rumours about you while increasing their rapport with others. That kind of rumours tend to spread.
Eventually you become the outcast in your social circles and you will be hard pressed to regain control of ”you” in the eyes of others.
I promise most people don’t care enough about you to spread rumors that paint you in a nasty light. If someone is doing that, you need to hang out with a new crowd and make some new friends. But most people have too much going on to care about you not being “normal”, if they even recognize your existence.
What? You absolutely don't need to tell the story of your life to be in control of it. Constantly worrying what other people will think of you, is how you loose control over your life, by not doing anymore the things you enjoy.
But yes, there are very confirmists circles and some will outcast you for not doing what everyone does - your choice for trying to still belong there or find a better group.
But if you really do what you want and you do it with confidence, you might find the conformists are suddenly coming back and think you are cool.
I can't play like Lang Lang. Only Lang Lang can play like Lang Lang.
Just because some mfing AI can produce something that sounds like Lang Lang does not make it equal: resemblance is not identity.
If I see a performance from Lang Lang, I don't just perceive the sound, it is the expression of memory, discipline and attention. Learning an instrument is more than attaining the skill of producing the correct notes in the correct order. It shapes attention, perspective, patience, discipline, sensitivity and so much more. You can't replace that with effortless simulation. I mean you could, but it's practically meaningless.
Sure, but because this argument works just as well whether "effortless simulation" means "GenAI" or "a recording", I don't know if you're objecting to one or the other or both.
Haha, I get it. Just took him as an example because, in my experience, he is a famous pianist people recognise even if they don't listen to that kind of music. Maybe Vladimir Horowitz would be a better example.
It's not even just music anymore. I love motor racing, but at the last meeting I went to, sat in the stands at an iconic first corner, tense with anticipation as the race started... Everyone around me sat there holding their phones up, filming it. I couldn't even see properly because of the forest of arms. People don't just... experience... something now.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
Its mostly about sharing it with friends and social media. I dont know why these people feel the need to do this either. The healthiest thing I did last year was quitting all (common) social media platforms like Instagram, reddit and stuff like that. Life is much slower and I dont feel the need to check my phone every few minutes anymore (I barely posted anything anyway).
I guess people are addicted to new notifications. They are lonely and drawn to human interactions and attention through social media because they are incapable of getting it through real life.
I guess people want to prove they were authentically there, experiencing it themselves instead of watching it on TV. And I sort of get it. When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it. Somehow the ones I made mean more to me. And I don't even share those photos on social media.
So on the one hand making your own photos and movies at events is less authentic than just experiencing it, and yet at the same time more authentic than relying on professionals to film it for you.
When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it.
I have found when looking a photos from 20 years ago, I skip most of the shots of only landscapes, buildings, etc. The only interesting shots are shots with the people that I travelled with in them. They bring back all the fond memories, the things we did together, etc.
So I now, when making pictures of sceneries try to do it as much with my fellow travelers in them.
As you say, others can make better pictures of the scenery.
Totally! And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
I still take pictures of monuments, or the sky, or the landscape nowadays with my phone, at least trying from some unusual or less common perspective, but I do take a lot of pictures of my family as well, especially in day to day moments. And print them, from time to time, in physical albums. It's just so different.
And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
Same, we went to the US a lot when I was a teenager. I have many good/fun memories of all the places we visited together, people we met, etc. A few years ago I went through some of the photos that my parents still have with about the same ratio of pictures with us in it. Random desert shots are even more frequent than people shots :).
I try to make memories. While you are correct that the people are what make the vacation, the time getting everyone to pose for a picture is wasting time they could use to make memories. Even if you are getting an action shot (and thus now posed) you could be out there playing with them instead.
Nothing with with a few photos. However make sure you are making memories not just getting photos of someone else.
They are going to the event in order to broadcast to their friends (or their profile feed) that they have gone to the events. Once I understood this, it made sense why filming is the most important thing for them in the event. They are not there for the race.
Glad I left social media (if you don't count HN). It'll be almost a decade soon since I deleted all my accounts.
This is really hard these days because up and coming artists can only do so nowadays via social media. In practical terms it means musicians if they want to succeed they need to be good at music AND self promotion through social media.
While theoretically access to everyone has been democratized when compared to music labels of the past since everyone can put their music on Spotify and social media, effectively that also means social media is now a required skill besides musicianship.
It's harder than ever to create your own thing and stay on track. I think this is why so many people are going bonkers with angine de poitrine for example.
>> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!
All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.
> But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.
30 years ago you weren't recorded and if you were your recording didn't share across social media networks. This and awareness of it I suspect drives a greater fear of embarrassment. Although you did mention this, I wanted to emphasize it
>In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
Trying to “level the playing field” is antithetical to what art is. Art is about self-expression and communication.
If we viewed art as some sort of competition or race, then someone using neural–network-based generative tools could avoid losing the race; however, everybody would be participating in some sport A and the person using ML participates in a completely different sport B. Everyone is running, but one person is riding a scooter.
However, art is not a finite zero-sum game[0]. Despite what formal music education for kids sometimes tries to make it look like, it’s not a competition, there is no global ranking and scoring system for your skill. Many people have an intuitive understanding of that; try going to a live jam to see people participating regardless of their hypothetical skill level.
[0] As further reading on this topic more generally, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
I’m really in the middle of what I should think about Gen AI, and to be honest, it disturbs me.
I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.
Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.
But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.
So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.
If you asked an "agent" to make something for you, you yourself did not create it. By definition. Whether it's AI or a person. You contributed only a piece. It's no longer yours. This is why any piece of art/music has everyone involved documented in credits. The phonies in the industry have ghostwriters write songs for them, like a majority of pop artists. Pop music is going to be even more fake soon.
I think AI is good as a 'muse' or getting idea (not just for music)...Creating anything with AI is as a ghostwriting. You are labeled as a creator, but you aren't.
"...but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity." I totally agree...This could be the reason of AI in any kind of art.
That sounds fantastic but it's essentially a different subject.
You seem to be dismissing any music that you don't have some pretty close participation in. Did it all start to go downhill with the invention of the gramaphone? Listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Vera Lynn or Elvis or Frank Sinatra was irrelevant for those that weren't actively jamming along with them?
I'm being facetious, I know you don't really mean that. My point is, listening (on your own, with no musical skill) to good quality music made by a real human is a valid activity. That's under threat, and the fact that making your own music with your friends isn't (or at least is less so) shouldn't detract from that.
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.
More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.
This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.
On the other hand it allows teleportation. When I'm vibing in an Infected Mushroom concert with a few hundred people I can feel as if I'm on a beach stroll listening on my headphones, just the other people can actually hear what I hear and being neurally activated the same way I do.
When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.
A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
There's probably more original music being created now than any time in history. Constant promotion of AI music is why you think it's not the case.
> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
If you think being a DJ is more consumption than shouting cover songs near a lake, maybe you should try learn be a good DJ
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
If you are a musician you know there're absolute geniuses who have ZERO formal music skills completely self taught. Some are world famous names we all know. That was never the problem.
> I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
You contradict yourself. If music really doesn't matter then why AI? The crippling fear of supporting a real human musician somewhere?
Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
The way I see it. The saxophone player is annoying other people but he is showing his skills to the public. I can tolerate that and let it slip. On the other hand, the boombox jerk is playing music that anyone can privately play. The park is a public space and you should use headphones for that.
When I first moved to NYC I was enchanted and delighted by the various people singing or playing music on the subway but over time it became an annoyance - if I want to listen to music I’ll play it myself.
Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.
Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?
A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?
Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves
A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?
I use AI as an amateur producer simply to get ideas
I would NEVER EVER consider using AI in something I actually release to listeners
I don't care if its good or bad. If I'm making someone listen something, it should've been touched by my hand - even if that means turning a knob in a DAW
I think many people do see value though in the knowledge that a human took the time to create a creative work though. Its the same sort of difference you see between music made by someone who makes music because they like making music, and corporate music. The latter was historically kept in check though by the amount of talent necessary to get taken seriously to make anything.
To be honest, this comment reads to me like LLM output.
You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.
I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.
Curious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.
There is plenty of artists making music analogous to 80's and 90's classics. Not to mention millions of 80's and 90's songs she's never heard.
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys? Plenty of artists plain suck and discovery is a problem that requires time and effort. If somebody makes decision to like what they like (and made, to some extent) that’s their choice.
>What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys
If you need it to be explained to you why it's a tragedy that a person's curiosity can atrophy (or fail to develop) to the extent that she can't seek meaning in what she engages with every day for enjoyment, then you might not have met the minimum requirements for this conversation.
Yeah people seem to forget that before AI music, there was already a huge amount of "slop" music out there - background music, muzak, mood music. Hell, Spotify was put in the spotlight not that long ago for commissioning music to mix into their own most popular mixes (the casual background listening ones), so that they own the rights themselves and don't need to pay artists as much. A lot of music is for mass consumption / inactive listening, and honestly I don't think it makes much of a difference whether it's AI generated or churned out by a WFH producer. When it comes to whether I want to listen to it anyway, not so much whether said producer gets paid.
Also the almost industrial score music machines: trailer music, like two steps from hell, even Zimmer. Those are also can be considered as slop, even worse - highly formulaic, almost standard (YouTube “heroic music chord progression”). And those were written by humans
I’m not going to devalue your opinions—music is mostly a matter of taste—but you and your parent comment are stretching the term “slop”, like when a software user misuses “bug” to mean “something which doesn’t work like I want, despite it working exactly as designed for fifteen years”.
“Slop” is specifically about AI content lacking in effort, quality, meaning. You may not like Zimmer, but saying it lacks in those areas seems a tad too much. “Formulaic” isn’t an indicator of slop either, most stories are formulaic following a variation of the hero’s journey. It’s especially not problematic when you’re someone like Zimmer who invents or popularises the formula.
Agree. I didn’t say bad. I said that the adjectives that people use to describe ai slop are as applicable to human creations as to ai.
There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art (my pet peeve is many “instrumental guitar albums” that are just pentatonic scale and standard licks in all shapes and forms) and ai art can be good.
I will say even more. I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great. Critics will be in ave “triumphant return to old form” and everybody will avoid looking in the eyes and say the truth about how they were able to write new good songs, given that they weren’t able to do it in like decades.
In fairness, you did say “even worse”. That’s not an expression one tends to use unless calling something bad. I can’t imagine someone saying “this is the best album ever, and even worse this is the second best”.
> There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art
There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box. Even the people who used to wax lyrically about “prompt engineering” have mostly subsided. AI pictures (not necessarily “art”, I don’t think that term should apply to any random image, even from humans) created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
> and ai art can be good.
What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
> I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great.
Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it? Then sure, can’t argue there. Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure. I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
For “even worse” - I meant different, and I think your analogy is unfair.
One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
But again, my native language is not English and the way I say things may surely sound unnatural.
——
How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts and give humans mich more benefit of the doubt and leeway than you give to ai.
> There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box.
There sure is. And that’s what separates results. Most of the things that I enjoy are clearly have good deal of thought in inventing lyrics (again, I watch lore channels and the way the lyrics are made is clear that there is a good amount of thought, prompt and maybe even manual tinkering), in doing montage of videos. I’m skeptical about prompt engineering but your criticism here is as same as painters criticizing photographers: “they just press the button”.
> created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
I used to thing along this line too, but later I realized that this is not an argument in any favor. Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors - costumes of wrong epoch, or made wrong way, or worn wrong way. Wrong guns, wrong ammo etc etc etc. I saw some pro criticising ai generated picture of a woman on a horse, and it was about same - the things used to steer the horse are like upside down, some other things don’t make sense. And then it clicked to me - it doesn’t matter. It isn’t unique to ai.
Humans did same stuff forever. As long as result is enjoyable, it’s fine.
> and ai art can be good.
What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc. On first albums of Metallica you almost can hear how they are learning and getting better (except drummer). Yes, if it’s pleasing enough people and bringing joy to their life then it’s ok. It doesn’t matter is it ai or human. Again, there are many cases in music when apparently the solos weren’t played by artists but by uncredited session musicians. Is it slop? Musician acted as tool here.
> Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it?
Fans like it. Not only me. It brings new fans or even casuals may enjoy it
> Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure.
You do you. It’s fine.
> I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
Why Metallica does new albums? They already have enough super hits, that stood test of time even
By your definition (decades) to not care. Why other bands do the same?
—-
In very short. To me it feels that there is an attempt to steer into public conscience that
Ai = slop
And I disagree with that wholeheartedly. To me
Human Slop = Ai slop = slop
No matter who produces it. Yes, unfortunately ai enables slop generation significantly easier. I hate searching for reviews or even analysis now, but it isn’t unique. Netflix documentary was a meme like 5-10 years ago already, if not more. And many of them are are exactly what ai slop is today, made by humans though.
> One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
Except no, that doesn't make sense. It is not clear at all to say “This is not your best job. It is a solid job. Even worse…”. That is very confusing communication. “Even worse” means “something was bad but then it got even badder”. “Even better” is the opposite: “something was good and became even gooder”. Using “even worse” to mean “this part was good but this other part was bad” is incorrect. The word “worse” already requires things to be bad. It is an adjective adding to the situation, never contradicting it.
See how all of them are “more <bad>”, “<bad> to a greater degree”? Worse always means something was already bad.
> How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts.
I don’t think I have. But because you only made the accusation without explaining your reasoning, you’re not giving me any fair chance to clarify any position. Considering we’ve already established, by your own admission, that English is not your strong suit (not a criticism), doesn’t it seem more likely to you that you’ve misunderstood my point? Or perhaps that you should consider that a possibility? As per the HN guidelines, assume good faith. I assumed good faith in your argument and responded respectfully and clearly (to the best of my ability) to it. I would appreciate the same courtesy.
I am sorry for confusion. I’m typing on the phone and accidentally preessed reply before writing full answer.
I started updating my comment above as soon as I saw that I posted reply (the one that your answer addresses). Hope that clarifies my position and gives you an explanation where I disagree with your comment.
I don’t think we’re making ourselves sufficiently understood to each other, and if you keep lobbing accusations at me without understanding what I’m saying, we’re not going to have a productive discussion. I’ll address just a couple of quick points.
> Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors
> This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc.
I like gore. I find Cronenberg and old Japanese movies and anime aesthetically pleasing. I have done work based on gore. Not only am I not making a straw man or arguing in bad faith, I’m not insulting or discrediting you in the slightest. Please stop making assumptions and responding to those assumptions in your head. I didn’t use gore as an example to discredit you, I used it because it’s an example of a niche art that I understand and respect. It‘s the exact opposite of what you took from it.
> Why Metallica does new albums?
Metallica is not making new albums with AI, are they? That has nothing to do with your original point of an artist coming back to make a new album after decades using AI. How can you, in good faith, accuse someone else of shifting the goalposts while engaging in such a textbook example yourself?
The thing is that there is already enough ai content that is not lacking in effort, quality, meaning too.
I clearly see talented author who just didn’t had chops or resources previously to realize his vision, and now he can and I can enjoy it.
At the same time I probably feel and define slop slightly differently, for myself.
In my birth city there was a street that was closed every weekend for art sellings. You walk about 1km (or less), and there are tables with sculpitures, paintings, crafts etc. In the beginning it’s fun, but after some time (and especially after several visits) you see how repetitive and formulaic it is. Somebody chooses kittens and draws 100s of things with them, somebody chooses nature etc etc etc. I didn’t even know the word slop then, but looking back - it was it.
After watching Bob Ross (and I love the guy) it’s clear that many “creators” were producing slop that is technically similar to what Bob Ross was teaching. Did Bob Ross produced slop? No. Do people who just reuse same approach over and over again (here is how we will paint the tree by using this then than brush) produce slop? In my book - yes. And it’s fine, if they or somebody else enjoy it. I don’t judge them and I don’t judge people who use and enjoy ai.
For me art’s purpose is to invoke some emotion in person, experiencing the art. The way how art is produced is secondary.
You can have buckethead who does music, and you can have someone (even highly technical, with great timing, control, mechanical chops) who “produces song” while sitting on a toilet and an “instrumental album” in a day, by running pentatonic scale all over again. And this is the slop for me. And it has nothing to do with ai.
I watch bunch of Russian speaking Wh40k lore channels, and the authors experimented with ai music. Now they finish many of their videos with ai banger, based on lore. Mostly rock, but they experimented with different styles. And I like it. “80/90s” generated music is way too easy target. Niche topics (or just topical music) is much harder to get in nice amounts.
There are several channels with pure ai Wh40k music. Some Star Wars creators are doing similar stuff.
I’m actively resisting desire to dump bunch of YouTube links, but if you want to hear what many people already vetted great, I’m happy to share.
I find super HARD to believe that we ran out of musicians doing music in the styles of the 80s/90s maybe your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy, not a crime; but saying nobody is making such music is a sad excuse.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.
If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.
With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.
Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.
Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.
Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.
> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.
"your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy"
Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.
Prompting a machine to generate random slop that sounds like other music isn't really involving yourself in the creation process. This person applied no taste or knowledge to the creation process, didn't learn anything. Just asked for a pattern matcher to give her something like what she already had.
Nobody generating anything on Suno is showing any kind of creativity. It's somehow worse then regular plagiarism.
easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
Nobody does that. Literally nobody likes a piece of music just because it was made by a human.
But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.
I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.
If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.
You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?
As someone with very specific tastes in music across several genres, yes, it's hard to find new bands making what I like. Every so often I'll find one, but it's pretty rare because- surprise!- the market for people with my tastes is really small so quality production targeting me is a bad career decision.
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
You can also treat lazy not as an insult, but a behavioural description. Everyone likes to be lazy for sometime, and if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout. In fact, that's precisely what was done here: "it's ok to be lazy".
> if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout
I'm not sure how using AI to generate songs will save anyone from the burnout of searching for songs, but what I understood from context is "intellectual laziness" and I see that as an insult. I'm not a native speaker though, so thanks for offering another perspective.
This was a comment on the meaning of the world lazy, not an answer in the general context.
The "intellectual laziness" you describe can be seen as a way to not spend attention and effort on things, you don't care for, in other words being rational and mindful.
Not that I agree with this, there is tons of good music from the past centuries, which I already can't all hear in my lifetime, that I don't need to start consuming never ending output from greedy, soulless and evil corporations. I also don't like modern music that much.
Well, it is kind of true though. I used to listen to bboy (breakdance) music; this was ok in the 1990s for the most part. Then things changed. The music today just ... sucks. I can't listen to it anymore. And bboying is now just a tricking contest, with a certain company abusing the dancers as advertisement-robots for them ... I also see that on youtube, with constant product marketing and product logo flashing. It's annoying.
I did the same too. I listen exclusively to my own songs made with the help of AI.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
That's actually a bit creepy to me. How do you deal with a lack of novelty factor here though? Because ultimately, if you yourself generate all music you listen to, how could anything be surprising? I often listen to songs that surprise me in one way or another.
When I said exclusively, its not that I am not exposed to other songs as well. I do follow certain artists that I really enjoy listening to because I find their lyrics and melodies resonates with me, even when its not in the genre that I preferred.
It's just I don't go and explore songs actively. If my playlist suddenly randomize itself (which YouTube Music usually do even when I already selected a specific playlist), I usually just keep it randomizing the songs, I either skip the songs based on the intro or just the title.
Sometimes, I only write the lyrics without any melodies, or just give a base chords for the AI to work with without any melodies, and AI might surprise me on how it suddenly chose a certain melodies or chord progression.
So you can say I'm exploring, but only within the boundaries of the lyrics that I wrote. Or when YouTube Music randomly plays a song for me and I immediately resonates with it.
That's like saying that in order to not be stressed you can only read books that you write yourself. Are we seriously going to act like any of this is normal or healthy?
This is extremely hyperbolic. The guy says he has a specific taste that chills him out. Why are you guys so judgmental?
I love me some Deleuze and Hegel, but my life is full of "interesting" bits already. Sometimes you need something simple. Your example is wrong as well: he did not create his own music, he directed it and yes I would definitely love to read a book about some weird sci-fi ideas I have written in some style I love but myself cannot reproduce.
If you write your own songs, you'll realise that they are infinitely surprising to you, much like one's own children. Just endlessly fascinating. I sing my own songs all the time, probably more than other people's.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't want to listen to new music by other people, or create more of my own. I'm simply sharing what it is to experience songs written by yourself. I saw Sting the other day talking about the very same thing to Rick Beato regarding songs he wrote 40 years ago, and I remember Brett Anderson of Suede saying that he loved listening to his own music. In fact, wouldn't it be weird if you didn't want to?
That's the feelings right? What's wrong with enjoying your creation right?
The song that I wrote has more values because it carries memories, emotions, and my internal state. I'm not saying other songs doesn't have values. It's just harder to resonate with, unless the melodies or lyrics align with my emotional state.
I listen to my own songs because I am songwriter, and still am even when I stopped doing it professionally. I am not doing it for the sake of "I just want to listen to my own songs and I will never listen to others". I listen just because "This song is meaningful for me"
And the "this song" in that quote above, can be mine, or other's.
Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) said something similar when asked if he listens to his own music. Paraphrased: There's this weird stigma about listening to your own music like it's egotistical. When you make yourself a sandwich, do you feel egotistical when you enjoy eating it?
Im a hobbyist songwriter (melodies and lyricist) of decades feeding my trove of MP3s/songs to Suno. Listening to Suno produced version of my songs is way more satisfying then listening to other peoples music. My Suno slop of many decades has the most meaning as they all reflect a time, experience, a feeling in and about life to current world events, etc, etc. Before Suno I was singing my songs heard in my demos (play piano & guitar) and Im a terrible singer now they all sound pro and again are way more meaningful then anyone elses songs.
I might misunderstood you or you might misunderstood me.
I was moved by a lot of songs made by artists I never met. But I was moved because of the song, not because of the reason why the artist wrote it. If I can truly understand the emotional state of the artist when they wrote it, I might be able to empathize with them. But that's me empathizing with the person that made the art as a human. Nothing stopping me from doing that as a human, even when their song didn't move me.
I publish my songs under a pseudonyms. They can infer what am I as a person based on the songs that I wrote. They can infer what emotions and feelings that I am experiencing while I write the songs. But it's all inference, unless they know me behind the pseudonyms, they won't be able to relate with me personally, as my real self, not as the songwriter. And I am okay with that.
Well, I was being overly cynical for no reason. Do what makes you happy man, if that's AI songs who am I to judge. You clearly care a lot about it and it brings you something.
I also want to state that I think this is the perfect use-case for generative AI. You have a desire, and you use the AI to scratch your particular itch. Where it goes wrong is the people who want to make a quick buck by shoveling out heaps of random crap in the hopes that there will be some clicks to generate revenue. I mean someone is going to accidentally discover the prompt for the next "Baby Shark", get a billion views, and then the real onslaught will begin.
I wonder about the social aspect. People growing up with listening exclusively to their own AI-generated music will never dance together and scream to the same old songs, even if it just became “bad taste”. Its such a huge part of our culture that they will just miss.
Same goes of course to all other parts of arts and culture. A good start to read is „ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ by Walter Benjamin.
Lots of artists! They are not even remotely hard to find. They are literally a google search away. Typing stuff into Suno because you can't be bothered to search "new artists that sound 90s" is crazy
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
Plenty of people? There are gigs every week in my city by bands who make music in 80s and 90s genres and many of them still make new music, some of it really good. And you can usually find it at both Bandcamp and Spotify.
Even for making new music Suno is a godsend. My workflow has changed from making a whole track to just creating some nice loops with my favorite VSTs and asking Suno the rest. I get a song in the exact BPM and style that I wanted, while saving me a ton of time.
I might be an outlier, but I grew up listening to some genres that have fallen out of fashion, and I don't feel like I need more songs from them--we've explored enough of what they can do. What I miss from the 90's isn't third-wave ska as people trying things and bizarre songs becoming hits.
This is interesting. I think AI music will be massive in a few years.
It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you
I think its the exact opposite. One of the best features of art, in any form, is that it offers different perspectives, viewpoints, ideas. Think of how many people changed something major in their life due to a song, a movie, a photograph. Now think of how little would happen if AI just repeated back what "it knows" you already like. Your entire life would just be a derivative of things you liked as a 6-year old. Nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing fresh.
There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?
You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.
That's a really ironic comment. I think accepting AI music as a substitute for all but the most unimportant background noise, is a sign that one doesn't really care about understanding other people.
> It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.
It can be, but you'll need to look up the human made / curated playlists; definitely avoid Spotify's own (as they've been seeding them with their own songs for a while now, even before AI), and don't enable the auto mixing / radio feature.
I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
Thing is, did it take effort and creativity to make it? I suppose you could argue that fine-tuning a prompt takes effort, creativity and knowledge, but I argue against that that it's only a fraction of what it takes to make real music.
If it didn't take effort to make it, if you can repeat it a hundred times in a week, it's slop. It's a good descriptor, even if to an untrained ear it's convincing.
I don't mind it, because there already was a lot of slop before AI, which a lot of people seem to forget. But that's also because they weren't the consumers / target audience so it's off their radar.
I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.
What? Those things were absolutely not criticized in the same way. Most of the time they weren't criticized at all lol.
The problem isn't about it being "easier", it's about people who want the praise and attention of being a maker but don't want to put any thought or effort into it. They have no thoughts and nothing to say and what they generate reflects that.
I just don't get it. Music isn't just what comes out of the speaker. There are artists, with lives and influences behind the music. There is personal expression in the lyrics. Even when the artist chooses to remain anonymous, or they choose to not have lyrics at all, there is still something personal behind it. A DAW is just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used badly, for example, over produced metal with quantized and sample replaced drums. Sure, AI can be a tool for music production just like a DAW can, but when it crosses the line into, lets call it "vibe-produced" music, it is indeed slop, and deserves to be referred to as such.
Yeah this is how I feel. People who like AI music seem to be a same people who would just throw on random "deep work" or "lofi" youtube playlists and let them run all day. That has never appealed to me. I like to learn about the artists and history.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I love music and I frequently go to live shows, so the bar for me has kind of become "Can I go see this artist live, OR is it so good that I don't care that I can't?" If it passes that, I'll listen. I've found one AI generated song that has made it onto my top 100 favorite songs I've ever heard.
The thing that really shits me with AI music is when it outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics. There's certain tells and boy do they give me the ick.
> Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I don't necessarily agree. Read the lyrics to the "irony is a dead scene" EP by the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. It's nonsense. Still genuine expression.
Most Carpenter Brut songs don't even have lyrics and there is endless expression there. I know that I consume music in a very different way than most people, and that's probably why I have such a strong opinion here.
YouTube is excellent. Aside from my main account I have one that I mainly just use to listen to music, and I just surf the algorithm listening to whatever is in the recommend list, which is usually a handful of songs I've got on heavy rotation, but YouTube also tends to cycle back some old favorites, and some new gems. I just keep surfing it day in day out letting it take me where it will as one of two main ways I listen to music. I regularly find new gems pretty reliably. All the gems then go to my playlist in Spotify, which I listen to during my commute.
I think the cost pressures just make most AI generated stuff slop. Its not that AI can't make good stuff its that the slop to good ratio is 100s of times worse with AI published music than with human stuff. Simply because AI generation cost is essentially zero.
Purely a economic argument but also the rare good music from AI I am still looking its generally speaking not that cohesive and for unremarkable. A lot of human work is that to but the discovery of good music from people feels much less daunting
I have no issue with individuals choosing to listen to generative AI. I even occasionally listen to it myself when I’m deep working and just need to occupy that part of my brain (having previously listened to algorithmically generated music or those endless copyright free trance mixes for the same purpose). But I don’t like how it’s flooding discovery platforms to the point that it gets impossible to wade through slop and find actual bands that I could see in person.
It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.
Hard disagree, there is just music people make because it's what they want to make, if all you're looking at is the top 10/pop radio music, yes it will be tailored for the largest market but by no means is there a conspiracy to only accomodate the 'young people'.
I'm in a similar boat. I don't like modern music. I was never a big music fan TBH though I did like a few really good pieces from my day. That said I never cared much for lyrics because I didn't find them relatable. I'm only interested in the tune... I like lyrics but only for the audio properties of the words; literally, I like the sound of human vocal chords.
The way I use Suno is sometimes I play Ukulele and discover a tune I like; I record it and generate a song from it.
I didn't take any music lessons. I'm 100% self-taught so my recordings are a little rough but the melody comes through and Suno polishes it up nicely and adds lyrics based on a topic I've been thinking about.
I find both the creation and listening aspects relaxing and therapeutic. I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song. It's very clearly my melodies, my songs but it's enjoyable to hear them as a finished product. There is definitely an element of surprise, the lyrics are sometimes quite insightful and clever too and I can actually start appreciating the poetic aspect of music in a way which eluded me before.
I suspect that by the time most musicians finish refining and producing their own songs, without AI, they're probably tired of hearing it. Suno avoids that. It's a truly novel thing to be both a producer and consumer of your own music. Perfect for an introvert like me who can't relate to anyone except himself.
It's nice to see that some other people also like my pieces though I'm not trying to make a career out of it.
Same as i almost only listen to my own AI Slop yet Ive wrote melodies/lyrics since a kid. Ive always recorded my guitar or keyboard along with my vocal (terrible singer here) track then mixed it in GarageBand and exported each song as an MP3. Now in 2025/2026 I feed my MP3s of my songs to Suno and they sound pro. Also, they have a ton more meaning to me then anyone elses songs. I dont care if others listen to my slop its mine and again more meaningful then all others music.
I personally like an AI cover version of Nirvana's "In bloom" song in country style [0]. Just because it is AI generated doesn't mean that I enjoy it less. Labelling videos as AI is fair and I welcome youtubes changes in that regard nonetheless.
Wow I had no idea there were already popular AI artists. Xania Monet has ~500k monthly listeners on Spotify and some of her (its?) youtube videos have millions of views. This is depressing.
I don't think it's people deliberately seeking this stuff out. For whatever reason, the algorithms love recommending AI content, and I'm sure the numbers are juiced to some degree with bot farms.
Even if the courts won't uphold the copyright, that doesn't prevent people from claiming your videos and initiating YouTube's copyright process against you. This is a recurring problem for people who upload their own original performances of public-domain compositions, particularly solo piano.
An often repeated talking point that's broadly false without further context. Mechanical output on its own can't be copyrighted, that hasn't changed. However it can be if sufficient (as determined by the courts) human creativity went into causing it to be output.
I think the op mean people writing stuff like: "Amazing what a human soul can create", "This is such a beautiful song. I'm so happy it's not another AI slop" type of comments. I have a fairly popular youtube channel with AI generated music, I make it very obvious that it's AI, yet I still get hundreds of those comments a month.
That's actually how I fell down the rabbithole --- found these long mixes and started listening, enjoyed what I heard, then tried to find out more about the author and realised it was AI-generated.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
Yeah, I had the same experience, and it makes sense for companies like Spotify. I do hope that this doesn’t hinder “innovation” in music (eg people being creative and introducing new types of music), because as usual with AI, it’s just really good at imitation, not necessarily creating new things.
To be honest, as long as the music is to my liking, I don’t really care all that much.
It also seems that there is a big percentage of people who are completely against AI music for a multitude of reasons. Even if they liked the sound they would still hate it if it was AI generated.
But to me this seems silly. Yes I want real artists to make music and be able to make a living not some faceless company spitting out endless music until something works. However at the end of the day if something sounds good then one should enjoy it not refuse to accept it simply because it is AI.
Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child? Or what if AI could could sort through a massive backlog of evidence in unsolved murders and other violent crimes giving new leads previously missed?
I am just curious if some people will simply be against it no matter what the use is.
As for myself I think it has it's uses but also think it comes at a heavy price as in massive power and water consumption and other issues it comes with. Anyways
It's not created any cure or solved crime though. The times it's been applied to those problems, it's either regurgitated stuff that's already in the data or led to the arrest of innocent people.
Also, re: music, if I was fine with listening to AI music, why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
Because you might not be as good as someone else in doing it, just like it was before AI. "Why would I listen to the output of someone else's piano instead of playing it on my own?"
> Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child?
The problem with this type of argument employing hyperbole ad absurdum to demonstrate irrationality is that it’s self negating.
If AI cured cancer then by definition it would no longer be the technology that’s primary use case is churning out various forms of derivative slop. And so the balance between its value vs the economic/social/environmental costs would immediately and fundamentally change.
Losing my job, spending 3x as much to replace my PC while my favorite websites devolve into a cesspool of spam might not feel worth it just because I can now vibe code a todo app in 2 minutes while listening to a 600 hour playlist of personalized elevator music.
But if it cured my dad’s cancer and my mom’s Parkinson’s? Well, that’s a different story…
YouTube music doesn’t seem to care much about where the music comes from. They do have formal album libraries but not everything is carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify. That’s what makes it good, because you can find tons of lost mixes, old unreleased track and vinyl rips, leaks of new stuff from current artists
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
Over the last few months they have served me multiple slop tracks in the discover weekly playlist. Probably more I didn't notice when just listening without focus, but several had generic artist name without bio and dozens of nearly identical tracks.
There are completely fake bands, who are 'on tour', 'giving interviews', cranking out albums. Like "Shunned at a Funeral" [0] for instance, an AI Christian rock band. Mentioning nowhere that it is all fake.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
I was at the gym the other day with my bf and there was some godawful lame crap on the playlist. I asked my bf if it was AI generated in his opinion, he laughed and said it was Harry Styles…
Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.
People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.
I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
> I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
What's the difference with AI doing it instead of your script ?
Is human-scripted art (e.g. https://nannou.cc/) art? Is music programmed to play on an orchestrion art? Is the music produced using a modular synth setup art?
If your answer to any of these questions is "yes", and your answer to "can AI create art" is no, then there is a difference between AI doing it and a script.
That said the discussion around "human" art and "AI" art often lacks nuance, and I believe there's lots of space to explore art that uses AI. Humans produce a lot of crappy art, this crappy art requires humans to invest time and effort. With AI it is possible for humans to produce lots of crappy art without investing time and effort, so an deluge of crappy AI art follows.
If I use AI to strip backgrounds instead of traditional greenscreen methods, is the end result "crappy AI art"? I'd hope no one sets those standards. I'd hope my videos would be judged as "crappy human art" since I still did the camera work the acting and the editing. If I use AI for visual effects in my video because I don't have visual effect training and don't have money to hire someone with experience (I don't make money from my occasional fun video projects), does that make it "crappy AI art"? I don't believe so. But somewhere between there and the content farm AI slop filling the Youtube servers there is a point where it becomes "crappy AI art" and I can't tell you where that point is because I'm still trying to figure it out.
Yeah, you make some good points, and it's an interesting question. There's far more nuance I guess that I considered, I guess what's a bit disheartening about the amount of generated music in this case is that it does make it harder for those who create and put really a lot of effort into their work to find some traction. Then again they said Spotify would ruin the music industry also, and to some degree it has only benefited a minority of artists.
I guess either way we will see. Art is only appreciated by those who appreciate it so who am I to judge.
Music may be a special case because generative/algorithmic music has been a thing for much longer than AI (in the 2020s sense) has existed. So it's more a question of how/whether it gets integrated into an existing generative market than it being a new category.
I wonder about false-positives too, or just disagreements with what is stated vs. "detected". In what I guess is a reaction to the huge amount of AI music, I notice a lot of other music gets posted with titles or tags saying in extent "made without AI". Yet when I listen to it, at least half the time I suspect AI was used, and they are just lying to get increased reach from the AI-hater crowd...
Yeah this is why I'm sceptical of just about any video game covers or remixes posted in the last year or two. There's just a flood of blatantly AI generated content in this niche, with many of the channels involved pumping out dozens of videos a day.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
I mean the whole point of music like that is you're not really listening to it and it's kind of on/blocking out noise, right? It's hard to think of a situation where completely AI-generated music would be more competitive or less objectionable.
There's certainly a bit of that. Years ago, I had various generative musicish on my phone that I'd listen to (e.g. https://endel.iohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_(app) ). There are also some soundtracks that are ok to listen to on repeat (though once you start recognizing what's next, then they become less useful because you can start listening to them - sim city https://youtu.be/j6mQc-9vCuE and eve online - looking now I see people have remixed that to 8h long tracks). I've also supported My Noise ( https://mynoise.nethttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075 ) and have some 1h long tracks that I can put on repeat (love the white noise rain, but gotta give a callout to 88 keys with some slider adjustments to get it "right" for what I want - https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/acousticPianoSoundscapeGen... most often equal parts brown, red, orange and light purple).
But yea... I want a soundscape and it doesn't bother me if it was something that was generative in 2018, or in 2026... or loops of recorded sound... I want something that isn't silence and that I can not listen to for four to eight hours... bonus if its enough "noise" that it doesn't even get picked up after noise suppression in a Teams call.
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).
This is much needed. I’ve had family members sending me videos about what looked like news when in fact it was 100% AI.
There are photorealistic AI videos pretending to be an old man giving life advice, or business advice, etc. and the disclosures were all the way at the bottom of the video description, very hard to find.
Note that the uploader apparently still retains control over labeling in most cases; uploaders that intentionally misrepresent AI-generated content might not be discouraged by this. Whether youtube will (and can) ban accounts that do that might determine in practice if this matters or not.
This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Maybe they could hand out lifetime bans to people who upload untagged AI music? Obviously that wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I could see it helping.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
It's clear that YouTube doesn't want you to have much influence over your feed. You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you, which would be the simplest thing to implement, and other knobs that previously existed were silently removed.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
> You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, just let me hide all the AI content. Far too often I stumble onto something that looks interesting, and halfway through I realise it's not really saying anything. It's just AI drivel designed to capture my attention and hold it for a while.
When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
I've already got more interesting, informative books on my to-read list than I'm going to have time to finish in my lifetime, so I think I'll be fine without youtube.
This is exactly how I consume YouTube as well. I do keep the side recommendations on since they mostly contain music or videos I've already watched, which I don't mind.
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
It's somewhat deceiving practice IMO although it could simply be my insecurity.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
Yeah exactly, they could have made their service useful by showing your subscriptions instead. Yet, they decided to enshittify for people who want choices.
Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)
Last year a non-technical friend sent me a YouTube video about a niche history topic that we had been discussing. I was surprised because there wasn't much information online. The video was clearly AI generated, with that sheen on the pictures and that perfect voice. I couldn't listen to it. I told my friend and he was adamant it was original. Yikes...
This biggest offender creeping into my feeds currently seems to be long form history videos. I'll be 10 minutes into a 90 minute WWII video and notice a completely incorrect pronunciation of something and realize what is happening. They're certainly getting better at fooling us. Especially when they speak slowly with a calm voice.
Why don’t you have preferred channels and content creators?
Things I would do before committing time to a random channel on a topic I’m interested in:
- Search my trusted communities and channels for alternative recommendations on that topic
- Ask (create a post) for recommendations on a topic in my trusted communities
- Request my preferred content creators create content on that topic
- Search for sentiment regarding the new channel (accuracy, trustworthiness)
It’s kind of surprising to me that people don’t curate trusted communities / channels, like 3Brown1Blue, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Hardcore History, etc.
lol I didn’t mean it at you personally, but I’m just surprised that these AI channels flourish, presumably because people don’t do any of the above 4 things that I listed. Like 10 minutes into an AI video is wild to me - if only because there are so many ways to avoid getting duped before even clicking on a video.
It matters because of the inability to measure up front whether the content is sufficiently good. AI's best skill is making something look right and look good when it is, in fact, not right. It does this all the time, as opposed to human-made things, which are like that only for specific attempts at deception.
I see it as previously content could be categorized as:
- Clearly amateurish production, which should be met with skepticism until proven otherwise
- Clearly professional production, with good reputation (e.g. long-running with few controversies), meaning it’s probably trustworthy
- Clearly professional, with poor reputation (e.g. propaganda funding), meaning one should be skeptical while consuming
But now the bar for “appearing professional” has changed, and it’s not as easy to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy new sources.
For pure entertainment maybe, but in the case of a history video how do you know whether the history you're being presented is accurate, or even has any basis in reality for that matter?
I honestly think your questions has more profound implications than other responders seem to appreciate.
I think a correlating answer can be found in visual effects for movies. And the answer "depends". When it's poorly done, the scene feels off or unbelievable somehow. But when done well, people have an enjoyable experience.
This same conversation existed when moving from practical effects to digital. and in the end, audiences only cared about quality.
And that is a serious problem. That means those people are easy to mislead, and can be made to believe anything if you just put it in an AI video. I've seen people get upset or feel touched by what to me were blatantly obvious AI generated videos. It's as if reality just doesn't matter anymore. (See also the state of politics lately.)
I hope their detector is better than the typical 'AI detection in text' services. False negatives are bad, false positives are worse as some creators could lose their source of income.
At least for now, YouTube honors the uploader’s label of whether or not the content was AI generated. Only when it’s left unset do they do any automatic labeling. And those labels can be overridden manually by the uploader if they get it wrong.
I'd say that if anything AI generated ends up in the final product then it should be labeled as AI made. So using AI as a prototyping tool would be fine but using it either to generate the end product itself or using it to generate a script would require tagging.
I watched a documentary recently that had an indicator in the top right corner when the content was AI generated. I found it incredibly helpful.
Every online video platform should let you label specific segments as AI generated, even better if it is a requirement with validation checks for certain kinds of content.
Yes, it seems like the creator applying the label is the most scalable approach. But you could have the requirement and random sampling with consequences if it isn't followed. You could also sample based on video traffic and user reports.
It's a really valuable feature that I expect will eventually be the gold standard, it was surprising how helpful it was. I think a lot of creators will embrace it, it adds credibility/authenticity. You aren't just labeling the AI content, you are labeling the content that isn't generated by AI, with a validation layer to back it up.
Plenty of big artists like Kanye use AI to experiment with ideas before releasing the full studio recordings. That’s going to become more common. Just like how developers use LLMs to make a POC to test new ideas before putting the hard work into making it real.
- Footage created by "Extend Scene" features in Premiere Pro and others
- Word correction from tools like Descript
- AI relighting or colorization
- Reaction video to a video containing AI-generated content
And in general, what amount of combination of any of these applications constitutes as "AI generated"? If I have a 30 minute video with a 3 second AI generated clip, do I get the same label as full-blown AI slop video?
All of them in any amount and yes, your specific 3 seconds should be labeled as being AI generated in your video (or description) and your entire video should be labeled as made using AI by youtube.
A 30 minute speech by a president where I use AI to change 3 seconds in order to make that person say something they never did should also get the label. The label shouldn't be about how much AI was used, but that it was used at all.
Other than your last bullet point I don't see anything ambiguous. It's a very clear line. I do not want to see an explainer video with AI generated content, end of story.
I absolutely hate those full-blown AI 'explainers' that just have AI voiceover and a bunch of auto-placed b-roll. I don't want to see them. But I don't think that falls in the same bucket as a creative short film with some AI-generated SFX or someone doing a tutorial with an AI-generated lofi track in the background.
I have a hard time believing that AI can be used to label AI-generated videos without there being a significant number of false positives/negatives. I think back to ZeroGPT and it labeling the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
Considering YouTube's current level of detection of absolutely anything, this will likely be an absolute disaster with no way of appealing to a real human.
There's a reason why they led with simply labeling author self-reported AI videos as AI, and then casually mentioned they'll also try to detect AI videos automatically. They're not confident in it working reliably and want people to have low expectations. This is probably realistic. Using AI to detect AI is not reliable. Detecting AI videos is likely to become an arms race and will require an ongoing commitment of resources.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
You're wrong from your very premise. The world isn't going to shit. It's better than it's been at pretty much any time in human history, in almost every facet.
On average Steven Pinker is at best a fake hyperoptimist-by-aggregate who puts billionaires on pedestals and rewrites history to entrench shitty systems. Sometimes he says smart stuff but he ignores or actively disregards massive problems with a painfully self-serving neutrality.
Yeah I get the pretty much, the car was near the mountain top in the 80s and 90s and "pretty much" flew off a cliff more recently. Sure, we're still alive but everyone is going to die in about 5 seconds.
Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.
Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house
This isn't even at the level of the spam filter on your email account. Are there some false positives and negatives? Yes. Are there some people sending emails who are negatively affected by falsely ending up in the junk mail folder? Yes. Are we going to turn off spam filtering because of this? No. Why should we accept video spam any more than text spam?
The problem is that it's not SOME false positives, AI detectors so far have been all so comically bad that they might be classified as pseudoscience. Or an artificial false positive generators even.
We'll I'd think that YouTube would have incentive to get it right. Either there are too many false positives and the content creators go away and YouTube collapses. Or there are too many false negatives and the viewers go away, and YouTube collapses. I mean there is a chance that garbage people will ruin video sharing platforms for everyone.
Having the incentive to do something and having the ability to do it are not the same thing.
It's not like human-generated content is made of carbon and AI-generated content is made of silicon and the science of chemistry can unambiguously tell them apart. If you asked a million humans and a million LLMs to write a sentence on a specific subject, it's not implausible that one of the LLMs and one of the humans would output the exact same sentence. Maybe more than one.
A thing that can take only the output and accurately tell you if it was AI-generated or not is therefore impossible, because if it said no it would be wrong when the LLM generates that sentence, but if it said yes it would be wrong when a human generates the exact same sentence.
All it can do is try to calculate a probability. But then what do you want to do with that? Suppose the probability it estimates for some content is 45%, and that probability estimate is an accurate measure of the true probability, i.e. can't be improved when the only information you have is the content itself. Do you want to ban the 55% of that content which is human-generated, or allow the 45% which is AI-generated?
Right now the problem is the flood of low-quality AI spam that might (or might not) be low hanging fruit. We can worry about high quality AI artifacts later if that becomes a problem. (and yes, there is no guarantee that YouTube won't fail due to these spammers)
I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale, ship it as a screening tool.
Is such tool feasible at all with current state of AI technology, or is it just a reasonable take from the past that may not be so reasonable anymore?
> I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale
The issue is, that's not a thing. AI-generated content and human-generated content have significant overlap. No amount of training data can allow you to distinguish them with that level of accuracy because many outputs exist that could have been generated by either one. Additional training data allows you to say that the probability is 55.0374% plus or minus 0.0001, rather than only being able to say that it's 55% plus or minus 5%. It can tell you with greater precision exactly how ambiguous it is. What it can't do is remove the ambiguity.
We will find out shortly? YouTube is the one saying they are going to implement this:
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"
This isn't a choice between "perfectly fine how things are now" and "destroying credibility". If it were, you're right - "good enough to be useful" wouldn't be a high enough bar.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
People make a living off this platform though, this could be really bad for someone that lives off of YouTube to have their videos labeled as AI generated. This would still be OK if there was a person at YouTube you could contact to manually review and reverse the decision, but that doesn’t really exist so there’s no one you can really appeal to in a timely manner.
Lots of people making a living off the platform clearly use LLMs to write their scripts. Its kind of weird hearing a person talk to me about something, and then notice characteristic chatgpt patter in their speech.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
Wouldn't the human creators be the biggest advocates of labeling, so that their content can be more easily found among the AI dross? And that's not considering the fate of the platform as a whole if it descends into low-effort AI spam swamping out everything else. I guess it will be interesting if it is all bots consuming bot-generated content in a parallel economy.
Please tell me this is a joke, or that you're not building anything important at work. It's a very well known problem that YouTube's algorithmic moderation hurts a lot of honest creators, and their ability to make a living, when there is a false positive or is abused.
Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.
I don't know how YouTube's detection will work, but if it were based solely on watermarks, there would be many false negatives, but there shouldn't be false positives.
If it simply costs more time and money to generate videos that pass the filter I'm all for it. The time and money cost of creating videos has tended to zero so there is a lot of low quality stuff now.
It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.
I mean, between SynthID and C2PA don't you already have labels and watermarks that covering a lot of major players like Google, Adobe, ElevenLabs, NIVIDEA? No real concern about false negatives there.
As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.
It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.
This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.
videos and images have non-ai methods for detecting if its ai, its easier than text. There are some image artifacts in AI that can be found statistically.
All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
Not sure why you appear to be downvoted. Cryptographic provenance is indeed the only solution to humanities digital woes. But only the government could make that a rule so it's not going to happen - at least not in my lifetime.
I really want Spotify to follow. I feel cheated and deceived when I'm enjoying some music, then I realize that there's no bio for the artist and they released 7 albums in 2025. Users should be empowered to filter out AI content if they choose.
Based on measured studies, people are not able to discern AI generated music from real ones on average and to your point, I agree, if you enjoy the output then it doesn't make sense to suddenly change your initial opinion.
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
Connecting to the creator of a work of art provides meaning, which makes the experience of art better and more interesting. It allows you to experience worlds other than your own. I don't go into deep dives of all music I listen to, but I do want the option for music I like.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
People care a lot about the story and the human artists behind their music, probably somewhat more than the music itself. When I discover some great metal songs, I'll look up their info, the band, the artists, their bio, everything related to the creation process and their history.
Normal people doesnt do that, thats just you and a couple others in this thread. Normal people just listens to music and enjoys it without a second thought
I care about rewarding real musicians, actual human beings, with my attention and, even love. AI slop gets in the way. Even "good" AI copies and appropriates from real artists, their style, their voice and even their history and relationship with their audience.
Agree with me or not, there should be a global filter that allows me, the user of the service, to filter out AI generated content.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Are you being obtuse or can you really not understand this. Your girlfriend writes you a letter once a week while she’s away for the summer. Misses you, loves you, can’t stand being apart. You find out later she paid a service to write the letters. Who cares, the letters were nice right?
I heard rumours they're the ones quietly funding some of the AI music. Spotify probably see the most popular musicians flying around in jets and want to redirect all that listening to their own slop.
You’d think, but then TikTok has been notoriously ruthless with their arbitrary unappealable bans and they’re so successful it became an issue of national security.
Good luck with that. I work in classical music and we can't post anything because it gets automatically flagged as copyrighted. They couldn't fix it then and they certainly won't fix it now.
This already happens on Hacker News. People frequently flag comments they strongly disagree with, rather than just downvoting them. Despite the fact that the "flag" was originally introduced to flag spam.
It must be a tricky problem to balance. On the one hand, you as Google want people to create 30 seconds of video per month with your cool Omni, Flow, Gemini, etc. tools.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
Maybe they're just going for "disclosure" as in people understanding it's AI, and hopefully mitigating fake news. Don't know if it impacts monetization?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
Maybe I'm weird, but I believe in the theory that (all else equal) it's good for business to minimize how much your users hate your product/service.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
Google is not a monolith. For all intents and purposes YouTube might as well be a totally different company than Deepmind. Everyone in there own respective google fiefdom is trying to maximize their own metrics.
Why are they saying to not distribute on YouTube they just want to give an indicator. Same with labeling if a video is an AD. I find some of the obvious AI content to be funny or informative .
I mean, here's what I don't get: why does YouTube care? We're already uploading an entire human lifespan worth of videos to YouTube every day, do they really benefit from more content? Or is this content somehow inherently more monetizable than what people are already uploading?
The idea that you can automatically detect AI generated content seems misguided. It will make mistakes. I think I've heard of things being wrongfully tagged as AI generated on other platforms.
_before_? youtube is like the top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities, 5% actual videos, and the rest is slop of various types for me.
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
If you only visit youtube.com logged out in a private window, obviously it's going to show you what's the most popular. What else should it be doing?
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
Agreed. Youtube recommendations are genuinely great for me.
Most of the time I'll be recommended so many more good videos than I have time for, that my "watch later" playlist only keeps growing.
Compared with, say, Netflix, where even though I've been rating everything I watch on there for 5+ yrs, the recommendations still barely feel personalized (if anything, it feels like it personalizes which premade "top list" to show me, but not the titles within them...but it does personalize the cover art/thumbnail, lol).
I'm of the opinion that people who get recommended constant slop are doing something very wrong, likely going out of their way to anonymize themselves as much as possible, then being all Surprised Pikachu when YouTube can't figure out what kind of content they like, so they get recommended the lowest common denominator popular stuff.
My feed is all channels I'm subscribed to or content from other creators that make similar content. I don't get Mr Beast or any other the other crap that people complain about.
You and I must be watching a very different YouTube. I don't see a lot of AI generated stuff in my recommendations or search.
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
I know they can identify them because if I click on one by mistake that's all I get until I go to about:blank, close YT tab, clear cache, close browser, run bleachbit and start browser. I never log into their site.
So far all it does to the video is add a small tag in the corner. It doesn't affect rankings or monetization. A false positive might annoy some subscribers at worst.
If people don’t want to watch AI content, they should be able to avoid it. Just as a vegan should be able to know if a dish is appropriate for them. Besides: if you have to blatantly deceive people into watching your videos when they otherwise would choose not to, what are you even doing? And yes I understand people already do that. But we should not go out of our way to enable that. Plus the moment you are perceived as not disclosing that, you risk getting burned by someone online and facing much harsher, longer term consequences. Reputation still matters to a degree.
Ultimately I’m not sure we should be advocating for opacity in consumer products.
I think that if a video gets accidentally flagged as AI, it might signal to the creator to create better content. If your content is flagged, then it must be of a quality that is not discernable from slop.
Not really. These AI detectors are not quality detectors. I've seen real artists who do quality work have their old pieces they drew way before the invention of gen ai get flagged as AI. It's very detrimental to their business and brand.
It seems like the Google method here is identifying their synthid markings on content. Which won't cause false positives but only catches content from tools that actively adds this mark.
I'm just saying there is monetary penalty to having this tag applied, contrary to the parent comment. So mistakenly applying it to a real video would be very detrimental to the creator.
I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.
I think that is significantly harder to solve for without false positives ruining UX.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.
AI has completely ruined animal short videos on Youtube. Videos of pets behaving like humans are everywhere. At first they warm your heart, then you realize that you've been tricked.
The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.
I wonder how are they going to implement it. Many creators with even decent content use AI-generated visuals. In fact, everything could be AI-generated visual and whether that would be like Kurzgezagt, Asianometry or Sabine Hossenfelder content value wouldn't drop significantly. How do you draw the line?
Rich Beato can finally take a breath! Musicians truly hate the AI generated stuff, I guess in a way that only artists understand. I think it's completely different from AI generated code, in the sense that code is made by code, instead of code making music. People make music.
You have a point, but as a musician and programmer, I'm far more fond of AI generating things of a "no wrong answers" nature than things that are ostensibly correct.
Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).
The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.
I can appreciate the talent and effort involved in developing new styles of music by scribbling on paper while being partially deaf, or dropping photographic painting skills for a weird style mimicking the anime of the era, but let's not pretend that average–human–level Turing-test–passing AGArtist has not yet been reached.
At this point, I bet the next human genius is going to be labeled as AI —by an AI.
I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.
What I absolutely loathe and instantly block is AI narration. That’s an instant deal breaker for me. And it’s gotten to the point that without a shot of the creator or obvious humanisms like microphone sounds, I assume a new creator is AI tts reading an LLM generated script. There are thousands of these channels.
I find that most "AI" content I see is an obviously genai script, obviously genai narration, and genai "b-roll", all of which are mostly trash.
I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.
That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.
It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.
What bothers me even more than AI narration is human narration of AI content. I come across so many videos now, especially in the genre of video essays about TV shows, that seems promising at first glance and then after listening for a couple minutes the AI patterns become obvious (it unfortunately takes longer to notice when spoken vs written). It is getting trickier to intentionally find good new channels; the algorithm does a surprisingly decent job as long as you’re consistent about what you’ll tolerate.
> I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.
As someone who doesn't use youtube, this seems conceptually wacky.
i.e. Why aren't those video simply RSS podcasts? Yeah, incentives, but if the video doesn't matter, they'd be a better product as a podcast.
I've thought about making explainer videos for math and CS concepts (with animated diagrams etc., you know). But I really don't want my voice and image out there any more than necessary / they already are. Now I'm wondering if this kind of work would be better off silent than with TTS…
I've resorted to lowering the quality of my recordings because of this. People are fantastically bad at discerning AI from properly produced audio. So now I leave in a couple of breaths and a little environmental noise to tap the brakes on the "AI slop" comments. Thing is, it would be trivial to add those to an AI narration.
I don't think this will do much against AI scripts. Which I feel are pretty common. Formulaic scripts read to utmost monotonic voice and boredom. Or simply just so good TTS I don't notice...
Shorts were what made me install uBlock, even though I was a paid subscriber. uBlock is so handy at removing shorts, already-watched recommendations, etc. They keep making the interface worse.
I dumped my subscription because of it. If I have to use an ad-blocker to make the site useable, and the ad-blocker already blocks the ads which was the reason I subscribed in the first place...no point in paying anymore. Fuck 'em.
No joke, I would pay for this more than i do for premium.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
The filter is what is key. If they label all AI videos but still serve me AI slop as the first response, then it doesn't matter if it's labeled at all.
Something, Youtube should have done earlier. But anyway its a good step. But again there are many open models out there on HF that could bypass this just like synthid is not used is every image, similarly not every chinese AI model wants to get their output detected. Time will tell how this goes...
> Under YouTube’s guidelines, creators will still be required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI. But starting this week, it also will roll out a new internal system to help identify AI-generated content. “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
I don't know about SOTA, but Sight Engine (sightengine.com) has AI image detection which seems pretty solid. It can even identify specific image generators.
I'm wondering how they deal with AI-operated channels with non-AIG videos? I ask this because I'm the author of github.com/eat-pray-ai/yutu , which is a CLI/MCP for YouTube
Youtube has also started AI translating other languages written in roman letters to english in chat for live streamers etc. Will be interesting to see what happens when they start doing this with google translate etc. English usually picks up words from other languages but if everything gets translated it will be interesting to see what happens. I am wondering if it will translate the slang that the current generation uses that goes over my head a lot of the time.
Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, YouTube is in a position here to simultaneously iterate on automatic AI video detection while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect.
I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.
Synthid is a watermark which indicates the video is AI-generated, not a digital signature indicating it's real. Completely different use case and threat model.
I'm not aware of any secure digital signature schemes that don't require the thing they signed to be bit-for-bit identical to pass verification.
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
Perhaps that could work in certain situations, but you don't even necessarily need digital signatures for that. A link to a reputable news site claiming they've verified the footage as real would be good enough in like 95% of cases, people just don't bother to check.
You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't sign its footage, or didn't bother to pay for the notary service.
How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?
Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.
Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.
Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)
I don't think it needs do be raw output. I'm pretty sure that signatures can exist within image and sound outputs that are reproducible when changing to other formats.
Leica started doing this a few years ago in response to the first wave of AI images[0]. Other, bigger manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony as well I believe) have also joined, though with less fanfare. Adobe is in the loop.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
Yes, you're correct about private keys getting exposed, but it's better than nothing. I suspect though, even after key exposure there may be a way to make new private keys so that compromised keys have a known point when they are compromised, which makes public how much skepticism we should all have about authenticity.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
I currently use a 2008 Fujifilm camera and a 2018 Sony. The Fujifilm doesn’t even have a firmware update mechanism, and the Sony camera doesn’t get updated anymore. These devices are rarely connected to the internet and never go obsolete so they get used until they break.
There might be a specialised line of cameras for forensics that signs the output and has lidar to detect when the camera is pointed at a screen, but the average person won’t have a camera with this kind of crypto. It would just be too easy for hackers to extract the keys from.
You still ultimately have the analogue hole here - pull the camera apart, splice your own hardware somewhere between the sensor and the thing that adds the signatures (or in front of the sensor).
Or just straight up point the camera at a computer monitor, without even trying to hide it. Most of the security camera footage online is already uploaded this way.
I intentionally didn't say that because I feel like people might dismiss that with "oh but you can tell the difference with sufficient analysis etc" whereas literally sending data directly through the same path as the real sensor would be potentially less detectable (or more, if the sensor itself has some kind of noticeable fingerprint)
I feel it wouldn't be too difficult to get a social-media video to look convincing enough even with just a regular camera and monitor, at least after compression (if end users aren't served raw footage directly, and instead trust the attestation of the site).
Right, my point is that this should default to "untrustworthy." The idea is that a camera would at the very least include a timestamp and camera type in the signature. That signature should usually be reproducible when being filmed by another camera (these signatures can be part of the physical image). This should mean that a cameras filming screens would have multiple ways to show the images are not legitimate (as something as simple of shadows not matching time of day could show the video is illegitimate).
Why do we keep on seeing that elementary misconception? Cryptographic verification != reality of the underlying data fed to it! Plus vouching for hardware that is in consumer hands? There is the gaping analog hole of 'recording' arbitrary data streams. All that system would do is make it easier to deanonmyize speech.
> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else.
except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
Yeah, like Google doesn't know other hundreds of companies are also generating videos and will without the slightest shred of doubt will use reinforced learning to bypass this detection, meaning directly asking Google's AI if a picture they modified is AI or not to improve their algorithms, they know vouching for video is as useful as vouching for AI generated texts, zero.
Much needed however, the future is definitely a mixture of AI and human in every field going forward. It might be relevant in short term but not for long.
I really appreciate this. AI content - even if we all use AI - and especially AI videos are a pain in the b*tt. Ai voice over with Ai imagery packed in 10-20 minutes lonog videos.
> “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
> YouTube creators who believe their content was incorrectly flagged as AI-generated can modify the disclosure status using the YouTube Studio tool.
What's the general overall state of AI-based AI flagging tools development? They seemed to have absurd false positive rates of not even 50% while it's obvious to whom it is obvious, no matter who or how it's done.
That's not that helpful. For example there's thousands of 'psychology' videos with descriptive bait titles like 'the psychology of people who don't click on video recommendations' which are AI-screipted, narrated, and animated. If you look at the channels the same creator will have hundreds of videos that are micro-targeted to absurdity, like 'the psychology of women who spend too much time on youtube' or 'the psychology of people who don't watch big sports games'. Most of these seem to have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. Maybe the views are botted as well, but clop producers have every incentive to spend a few hundred $ in tokens and generate 50 or 100 new videos to just blanket the recommender engine and shut out regular content that takes time and effort to produce.
I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.
I wonder if they will try to do this for songs in YouTube Music. I've stopped using their auto-generated playlists/recommendations/whatever because it kept playing AI-generated songs.
Harder to detect manually compared to image or video, but not necessarily harder to detect with another model. If it’s AI-generated MIDI (I have no idea if that’s the, or even a, way it’s done) there are probably patterns in the output similar to the way there are in generated text, but if it’s actually generating the audio itself then that should be pretty distinct at the finer-grained level that a model could analyze it at.
Maybe they could fix their moderation and appeal process before adding a half-baked feature like this which is certain to cause more issues requiring moderation?
Hopefully this will also include human-generated content with AI scripts, which are not that hard to detect but require a certain amount of wasted time listening to the slop before I skip the video.
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI, we want to make the process more seamless and reliable. Starting in May 2026, we’re rolling out new internal signals to help identify AI-generated content.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI
Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.
Anyone remember GAN? With enough iterations with a discriminator, we're gonna see more AI generated videos that are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. What then?
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
I see the comments below with the positive and negative aspects of AI, and I think there are very good points made. I've had this discussion before with many friends of mine, and the point I usually make is this: good or bad, there's no going back to the "good old days."
I think of those movie trailers where the cast appears to plead with us to watch their upcoming movie in a theater, "the way it's meant to be seen." Do I agree with them? Yes. Do I think that as a society we're going to give up on streaming and go back to the theaters en masse? Not a chance in hell.
You can always take a side on whether progress or change is a good thing or not, but what you can't do is turn back the clock. So the real question is: where do we go from here?
They do indeed, but the trend is clear. In the 1940's, people in the US went to the movies about 25 times a year. In 2002, it was just under 5 times a year. Today, it's around 2 times a year.
Will a hybrid of AI and man-made content be flagged as an AI-generated video? I wonder what the threshold of the ratio of AI-generated content has to be to be classified as one.
I hope they're able to reliably detect it. I think theres some hope for images and videos, but ai generated text detectors are already throwing false positives at an absurdly high rate.
If they have a large preexisting AI-ERA subscriber base, which many do, it must be tempting preserve the time by reading AI text for segments of their content.
Submitted some pretty harsh feedback about this back in Jan after my old school technical father in law sent me a few AI generated “news” videos in a row about Trump and Venezuela. The AI label was technically on all of the videos but 3 taps away hidden in the video description, and not visible from the search results at all. So thankful YouTube is doing something about this.
1. Allow us to filter any and all content based on category or tag, this would include AI tagged videos
2. Demonetize any and all videos that incentivize antagonizing people (Looking at you prank videos)
3. Allow the reporting of video for "Criminal Activities"
4. Bring back the number of dislikes
5. Put the "not interested" option on video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)
6. Put the "do no recommend this channel" option on the video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)
5 and 6 are enough of a pain point that I habitually open ALL videos in a new tab now, just so that I have the original feed view to nuke the channel from if it's shit.
Hmmm. I have a game on steam that has almost entirely AI-generated graphics (and AI-generated animations/code that move them), but we pay someone to do our promotional videos. Wonder if something like this would tag the video as AI-generated or not.
One field I was wondering about. There are a lot of channels/videos where they take movie summaries, feed it into an AI to generate TTS, graphics... I hate these videos but I'm also like damn good job trying to capitalize on that, why don't I do it kind of thing. I don't have that money making drive/hustle. I need to.
It could be. They seem to be getting enormous amount of politics or crypto related AI fake reels that real people fall for. They probably do need means to control spams.
I can already imagine this won’t be perfect (false negatives / false positives, for one thing) but this seems like a huge step in the right direction. Even just giving the “AI” label a more prominent spot than the description is a big deal, particularly for those who are less tech-savvy than your average HN user. My mom, for instance, can watch your one video that’s entirely AI-generated and not bat an eye, but then watch another video that’s clearly real and say it looks “off.” Say what you will about whether AI-generated content is valid or whether it should be allowed on the platform at all, but more transparency is only a good thing.
is this gonna affect the monetization of those videos too?
Well i think even if not directly, people will somehow loose interest in ai generated videos, people would not want a low effort content grabbing there attention.
Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI content". Work together with the hardware and software layer with an open approach, building on top of contend id. I appreciate the privacy implications here are complex, and Google is dubious on using any tracking/fingerprinting technology for its self-serving and privacy-invading motivations, but an open cross-industry foundation owning and operating it may be a first step?
If only they could automatically label all the videos made by real people with obviously heavily AI-involved scripts. Those "give me the ick" as the kiddos say these days.
if they would offer youtube plus, i would pay:
- no ads. none. nothing
- videos with sponsored content tagged, and option to auto skip
- Option to HIDE ALL AI-videos. ALL. And channels. from search also
- Option to HIDE ALL slideshow-videos (generated) all. From search also.
- Community driven filter list that would auto-update. To hide all the shit content.
Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk
Good. The flood of AI slop has basically meant, when searching for videos of a given topic, having to ignore videos created in the last couple of years because a high percentage of them are garbage - a situation that must be devastating for creators of new quality content.
I am really sick of AI generated videos. I don't have anything against AI videos per se but the fact that it's so easy to generate videos that people are churning out really really bad quality videos out there.
There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.
> There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I find this awful, but it's not a remotely new thing.
I want to believe it (and filter all that crap), but YT recently removing the sort by new/date option because 99% of results being useless AI slop doesn't inspire much trust.
I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
Welcome to the future and the brave new world I guess.
Too bad they are not including the script writing, some people pass on the visual but you can tell in 10 seconds or less it was written by AI - or an AI voice that is reading AI written slop.
I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!
This could backfire.. im thinking of "real" videos with elements of AI in them. Those elements might not get the video flairs as an AI video and people will get fooled
They need to have a way to report AI videos not labeled as such, AND a checkbox to filter out AI videos on the home page and in search results. Not holding my breath for either.
Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
It doesn't remember my preference. Or rather, it seems to remember me picking a specific language, and then loads the dub in that language next time I click a video. It doesn't remember "don't duh videos".
Not if you Airplay to your TV. I get random foreign languages when I watch English speaking YouTubers. No way to enable subtitles or change the language. It's a known bug according to the internet.
The problem is that it doesn't even respect this choice. My native language is not English and most of the videos in this languages will be auto transcript to English. Even the last time I changed both the language and country and YouTube still managed to auto transcript to English.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
That just tells it which languages to serve if the video has multiple tracks, including Ai-generated ones. "Keep original language" should be the default, or at least an opt-in.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
Even worse, sometimes it dubs ads, where there's no way to switch the audio track and no way to see if it's being dubbed. This also makes it look like the dubbed audio is the original audio from the ad, which makes the advertiser look terrible.
It's an option that individual channels can disable. Granted, it's opt-out, but YouTube emailed creators several times about it well before:
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
> As this technology continues to improve, creators remain in control.
Well, some folks disagree that they are in control. See the rise of FairTube - granted, FairTube has infrastructure issues, but the problem is Google controlling videos via youtube. This has to change in the long run.
Also:
> Our commitment to responsibility
^^^ pointless self-promo by an AI slop adCompany. They censor at will. I know that because so many videos I had bookmarked, suddenly were taken down at a later time - and not by the original author. Often you can find the same (!!!) video again on youtube.
Honestly, I'm a bit concerned here. YouTube's automated tools aren't the greatest at flagging content, and quite a few videos have been mistakenly marked as for kids/infringing copyright/being in the shorts format.
The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.
But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:
A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over
B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.
I got Netflix recently because I wanted my 4 year old son to have a bit of screen time. He is very active, loves to play outside, draw, paint and does a lot of different activities so I thought there's no harm in a bit of screen time... But YouTube was awful because he would end up watching creepy AI slop videos of extremely colorful 3D cars or airplanes or whatever... Very repetitive. Or sometimes there would be videos of colorful painted toys being washed with a monotonous voice repeating the same thing over and over and saying stuff like "Wow, it's big" in the most monotonous voice possible (and no, the toy was not even big)... There's something very creepy about hearing emotionally charged sentences being expressed with such dull apathetic tone and saying things that aren't even factually correct. Complete trash. I could feel myself getting brainwashed in realtime. No more YouTube. Definitely this AI slop should not be promoted.
Unfortunately I'm not sure this will affect those at all...it's specifically for "realistic" AI use according to all the quotes. I'm not sure narration or illustration/slides generated by AI would be covered at all in that case.
The flaws can be pretty subtle sometimes. I don't want any subtlety. If I'm not hit in the face with a brick over how mechanical it is, put a disclaimer.
This is great. We don't want to drown in AI slop, and (perhaps more importantly) we don't want people to think that real videos are AI generated. Any signal which helps distinguishing the two is helpful, even if it isn't perfect. This is also why I think it's good that OpenAI is adopting Google's Synth ID watermark for images.
"We've heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content."
As if Google really cares about the opinion of people. They just realised that AI is killing youtube - if you come to that conclusion, then "labeling" the AI slop isn't going to solve the problem really. Personally I already classify ALL AI-videos as slop-spam. I've also noticed the "suggested" videos in the last few weeks, on youtube, to really go down in quality a LOT. Google does not seem to understand how severe this problem is.
Finally a decent change by Youtube! Great job Youtube but overall unsure about the situation at Google itself and what Google itself is doing.
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
Isn’t YouTube applying weird AI processing to shorts?
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
I think the "weird AI processing" might have been someone misunderstanding a compression codec. When laypeople see anything advanced, it's always called AI no matter what it actually is, and that's the word that spreads around.
Children and seniors are victimized by AI content on a huge scale. Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds.
I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated.
It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content.
I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence (animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points), a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content.
Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person.
Currently, AI videos are a gold mine for black hats.
The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
It's time to let people choose their own algorithm and force upon the platforms a marketplace for algorithms.
> process designed to optimize for attracting our attention
namely: "social" media
this stuff always reminds me of There is no antimemetis division [0]
From Case Hate Red:
> With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around.
[0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.
And unfortunately the other way around could be about as bad:
“Don’t believe what you just saw — That’s just AI propaganda!”
I've found a curious variety of AI videos: releases of motorbikes that don't exist, brought by Youtube algorithm. I guess the point is just clicks or ads money. Some comments, by bots or gullible users.
No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)
> Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds
I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.
kids simply shouldn't be looking at a screen, AI-generated or not.
Screen time for kids (and adults for that matter!) should be way way scaled back. That falls on the parents.
Bad parents give their kids phones and tablets and that's a hill I will die on.
Many parents find parenthood difficult and are happy that something distracts their kid. Further, kids that tend to get more addicted to stuff like this tend to live in stressful circumstances.
It's easy to say be a better parent, or produce a better environment for your kid, but it's not as easy to help people with that. If we can make social media healthier for everyone, that's a big deal.
I guess it depends on the age of the kid , if a kid is 11-12-13 yo , you can hardly do anything about it. I remember of how I was at that age , now I am 38.
do you have kids?
What's even worse is that these videos are being used for shady purposes as well. I start to fear a lot for our future elections. I have heard parents/grand-parents mention videos they have seen from politicians that are simply fake. They totally believed claims they said these politicians made, but when you look it up you discover these things were never said and that they fell for AI deep-fake style videos. So far most of these videos have been made to promote scams. I'm sure many of us have seen these videos. Like the classic Elon Musk promoting some crypto scam videos.
This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos.
And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war.
Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.
My girlfriend mindlessly watches those sometimes. I think they are from China maybe.
I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this:
"A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!"
Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.
I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.
There's a bar by me where the owners made all of the decor with ChatGPT. It feels surreal in there.
What do you mean they made it with ChatGPT?
My guess is, at best, uploaded photos of the space and said "give me things to decorate this."
it became for me a quick signal for me that I'm watching an ad, because it doesn't normally pop up in my feeds
Last weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key.
Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.
I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.
What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.
> What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field.
I feel like one of the less discussed issues of the hyper-connected world is there are no small ponds to be the big fish in anymore. Used to be you could be the best in your school, church, town even city etc - even if you weren't that good. I remember being astounded as a kid by a woman who juggled 5 tennis balls in a local talent show. Now I can hop on youtube and watch people do way more impressive feats it doesn't seem so unique. I suspect that 5 ball routine might still be the greatest juggling I've seen in person, but it still doesn't compare to random acts I've seen online.
But especially with the para-social relationships of social media people feel connected even to big names now. You might not compare the local young singer to Taylor Swift, but people will to the tiktok singer they 'know' who liked their reply once.
It's gratifying and inspiring to be top of your class in something, but in a world where it's always a class of millions, you know you'll never reach the top.
This is why I don't consume feeds, have social media accounts and only use youtube to find specific things which is very rare for me. I maybe watch 10 videos on YT per month at most, these days mostly about machine shop and millwright operations.
Consuming all that content leaves you feeling small and isolated. The talents you thought you had are nothing in the face of a global pool of YT/TikTok/Insta superstars.
Currently, I share things with people I care about and who care about me. The rest of the world can remain ignorant of me and I of it. It's a good place to be.
I think it's part of the main character syndrome that social media invoked in most of us. Everybody wants to tell the story of their lives (but nobody really cares).
In the old days e.g. concerts were for enjoying the music together with people you did and didn't know. The best concerts were those where you were left sweaty from (slam)dancing with everyone in the pit on music that was even better-performed than on CD. Showing the experience afterwards was not really a thing that existed.
Thing is, if you are not a person who blends into the mass of ”normal”, you need to tell the story of your life. You already stick out like a sore thumb, and you need to explain to others why.
In other words, you need to be in control of your own narrative, or someone else will do it for you to fill the void. For example, someone can use cold reading to deduce what others suspect and fear and then paint you in that specific light, essentially planting individually targeted nasty rumours about you while increasing their rapport with others. That kind of rumours tend to spread.
Eventually you become the outcast in your social circles and you will be hard pressed to regain control of ”you” in the eyes of others.
I promise most people don’t care enough about you to spread rumors that paint you in a nasty light. If someone is doing that, you need to hang out with a new crowd and make some new friends. But most people have too much going on to care about you not being “normal”, if they even recognize your existence.
What? You absolutely don't need to tell the story of your life to be in control of it. Constantly worrying what other people will think of you, is how you loose control over your life, by not doing anymore the things you enjoy.
But yes, there are very confirmists circles and some will outcast you for not doing what everyone does - your choice for trying to still belong there or find a better group.
But if you really do what you want and you do it with confidence, you might find the conformists are suddenly coming back and think you are cool.
I can't play like Lang Lang. Only Lang Lang can play like Lang Lang. Just because some mfing AI can produce something that sounds like Lang Lang does not make it equal: resemblance is not identity.
If I see a performance from Lang Lang, I don't just perceive the sound, it is the expression of memory, discipline and attention. Learning an instrument is more than attaining the skill of producing the correct notes in the correct order. It shapes attention, perspective, patience, discipline, sensitivity and so much more. You can't replace that with effortless simulation. I mean you could, but it's practically meaningless.
Sure, but because this argument works just as well whether "effortless simulation" means "GenAI" or "a recording", I don't know if you're objecting to one or the other or both.
Every talented pianist in a major conservatory can play like Lang Lang and are trying their best not to lmao
Haha, I get it. Just took him as an example because, in my experience, he is a famous pianist people recognise even if they don't listen to that kind of music. Maybe Vladimir Horowitz would be a better example.
I think the average person has no idea who either of those people are. I think Liszt or Rachmaninov would be better reference points.
The average person sees a synthesizer keyboard and thinks ”piano”.
As an average person, try Beethoven or Mozart.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
>we need to stop filming people
As live music enjoyer and person that was commonly around safe spaces in the techno scene I cant agree more. Fuck filming people.
It's not even just music anymore. I love motor racing, but at the last meeting I went to, sat in the stands at an iconic first corner, tense with anticipation as the race started... Everyone around me sat there holding their phones up, filming it. I couldn't even see properly because of the forest of arms. People don't just... experience... something now.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
Its mostly about sharing it with friends and social media. I dont know why these people feel the need to do this either. The healthiest thing I did last year was quitting all (common) social media platforms like Instagram, reddit and stuff like that. Life is much slower and I dont feel the need to check my phone every few minutes anymore (I barely posted anything anyway).
I guess people are addicted to new notifications. They are lonely and drawn to human interactions and attention through social media because they are incapable of getting it through real life.
I guess people want to prove they were authentically there, experiencing it themselves instead of watching it on TV. And I sort of get it. When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it. Somehow the ones I made mean more to me. And I don't even share those photos on social media.
So on the one hand making your own photos and movies at events is less authentic than just experiencing it, and yet at the same time more authentic than relying on professionals to film it for you.
When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it.
I have found when looking a photos from 20 years ago, I skip most of the shots of only landscapes, buildings, etc. The only interesting shots are shots with the people that I travelled with in them. They bring back all the fond memories, the things we did together, etc.
So I now, when making pictures of sceneries try to do it as much with my fellow travelers in them.
As you say, others can make better pictures of the scenery.
Totally! And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
I still take pictures of monuments, or the sky, or the landscape nowadays with my phone, at least trying from some unusual or less common perspective, but I do take a lot of pictures of my family as well, especially in day to day moments. And print them, from time to time, in physical albums. It's just so different.
And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
Same, we went to the US a lot when I was a teenager. I have many good/fun memories of all the places we visited together, people we met, etc. A few years ago I went through some of the photos that my parents still have with about the same ratio of pictures with us in it. Random desert shots are even more frequent than people shots :).
I try to make memories. While you are correct that the people are what make the vacation, the time getting everyone to pose for a picture is wasting time they could use to make memories. Even if you are getting an action shot (and thus now posed) you could be out there playing with them instead.
Nothing with with a few photos. However make sure you are making memories not just getting photos of someone else.
They are going to the event in order to broadcast to their friends (or their profile feed) that they have gone to the events. Once I understood this, it made sense why filming is the most important thing for them in the event. They are not there for the race.
Glad I left social media (if you don't count HN). It'll be almost a decade soon since I deleted all my accounts.
And I can guarantee that most of them won't rewatch it.
Phoning like that damages their brains for sure.
Hope there will be research.
This is really hard these days because up and coming artists can only do so nowadays via social media. In practical terms it means musicians if they want to succeed they need to be good at music AND self promotion through social media.
While theoretically access to everyone has been democratized when compared to music labels of the past since everyone can put their music on Spotify and social media, effectively that also means social media is now a required skill besides musicianship.
It's harder than ever to create your own thing and stay on track. I think this is why so many people are going bonkers with angine de poitrine for example.
First of all, I 100% agree with you. With that in mind, do things like AutoTune now feel more like creative tools when compared to AI?
> What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button.
A sincere thank you for this metaphor.
> we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face.
Agreed. Filming strangers in public is making everyone scared to have fun trying anything new, as they’re afraid of online mockery…
>> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!
All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.
> But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.
30 years ago you weren't recorded and if you were your recording didn't share across social media networks. This and awareness of it I suspect drives a greater fear of embarrassment. Although you did mention this, I wanted to emphasize it
Absolutely, it's definitely worth emphasising.
>In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
You just described me 40 odd years ago :))
Trying to “level the playing field” is antithetical to what art is. Art is about self-expression and communication.
If we viewed art as some sort of competition or race, then someone using neural–network-based generative tools could avoid losing the race; however, everybody would be participating in some sport A and the person using ML participates in a completely different sport B. Everyone is running, but one person is riding a scooter.
However, art is not a finite zero-sum game[0]. Despite what formal music education for kids sometimes tries to make it look like, it’s not a competition, there is no global ranking and scoring system for your skill. Many people have an intuitive understanding of that; try going to a live jam to see people participating regardless of their hypothetical skill level.
[0] As further reading on this topic more generally, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
I’m really in the middle of what I should think about Gen AI, and to be honest, it disturbs me.
I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.
Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.
But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.
So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.
If you asked an "agent" to make something for you, you yourself did not create it. By definition. Whether it's AI or a person. You contributed only a piece. It's no longer yours. This is why any piece of art/music has everyone involved documented in credits. The phonies in the industry have ghostwriters write songs for them, like a majority of pop artists. Pop music is going to be even more fake soon.
I think AI is good as a 'muse' or getting idea (not just for music)...Creating anything with AI is as a ghostwriting. You are labeled as a creator, but you aren't. "...but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity." I totally agree...This could be the reason of AI in any kind of art.
That sounds fantastic but it's essentially a different subject.
You seem to be dismissing any music that you don't have some pretty close participation in. Did it all start to go downhill with the invention of the gramaphone? Listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Vera Lynn or Elvis or Frank Sinatra was irrelevant for those that weren't actively jamming along with them?
I'm being facetious, I know you don't really mean that. My point is, listening (on your own, with no musical skill) to good quality music made by a real human is a valid activity. That's under threat, and the fact that making your own music with your friends isn't (or at least is less so) shouldn't detract from that.
AI is the latest brick in the wall separating human beings from one another.
Your argument is like "people have been killing each other for centuries so when you think about it hydrogen bombs are not the problem"
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.
More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.
This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.
On the other hand it allows teleportation. When I'm vibing in an Infected Mushroom concert with a few hundred people I can feel as if I'm on a beach stroll listening on my headphones, just the other people can actually hear what I hear and being neurally activated the same way I do.
When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.
A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
There's probably more original music being created now than any time in history. Constant promotion of AI music is why you think it's not the case.
> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
If you think being a DJ is more consumption than shouting cover songs near a lake, maybe you should try learn be a good DJ
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
If you are a musician you know there're absolute geniuses who have ZERO formal music skills completely self taught. Some are world famous names we all know. That was never the problem.
> I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
You contradict yourself. If music really doesn't matter then why AI? The crippling fear of supporting a real human musician somewhere?
Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
I was in a park today, and I watched a man play a saxaphone. Other people had stopped to listen to him play.
It occurred to me that we appreciate this kind of public performance, but we get annoyed if someone plays their boombox too loud in public.
I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.
> I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.
I think we value _effort_.
And skill. Using AI is basically zero effort and tends to produce half-assed output. It's no wonder people are put off by it.
The way I see it. The saxophone player is annoying other people but he is showing his skills to the public. I can tolerate that and let it slip. On the other hand, the boombox jerk is playing music that anyone can privately play. The park is a public space and you should use headphones for that.
When I first moved to NYC I was enchanted and delighted by the various people singing or playing music on the subway but over time it became an annoyance - if I want to listen to music I’ll play it myself.
Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.
https://fuckoffaimusic.com/
Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?
A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?
Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves
A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?
I use AI as an amateur producer simply to get ideas
I would NEVER EVER consider using AI in something I actually release to listeners
I don't care if its good or bad. If I'm making someone listen something, it should've been touched by my hand - even if that means turning a knob in a DAW
I loved reading this, thanks for sharing your take
Imo where I am from, asking people not used to dance to dance in public was always tall order.
And when you look at broader culture, people dancing seem to welcome only small or bigger mockery, unless they dance really well.
I think many people do see value though in the knowledge that a human took the time to create a creative work though. Its the same sort of difference you see between music made by someone who makes music because they like making music, and corporate music. The latter was historically kept in check though by the amount of talent necessary to get taken seriously to make anything.
People can do whatever they want, but they shouldn't expect an audience.
To be honest, this comment reads to me like LLM output.
You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.
I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.
Curious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.
There is plenty of artists making music analogous to 80's and 90's classics. Not to mention millions of 80's and 90's songs she's never heard.
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys? Plenty of artists plain suck and discovery is a problem that requires time and effort. If somebody makes decision to like what they like (and made, to some extent) that’s their choice.
>What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys
If you need it to be explained to you why it's a tragedy that a person's curiosity can atrophy (or fail to develop) to the extent that she can't seek meaning in what she engages with every day for enjoyment, then you might not have met the minimum requirements for this conversation.
Nah, you’re not the person who decides that. Denied.
But they're right.
> What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys?
Some people yearn for the slop.
Me an intellectual is not like the other girls.
Yeah people seem to forget that before AI music, there was already a huge amount of "slop" music out there - background music, muzak, mood music. Hell, Spotify was put in the spotlight not that long ago for commissioning music to mix into their own most popular mixes (the casual background listening ones), so that they own the rights themselves and don't need to pay artists as much. A lot of music is for mass consumption / inactive listening, and honestly I don't think it makes much of a difference whether it's AI generated or churned out by a WFH producer. When it comes to whether I want to listen to it anyway, not so much whether said producer gets paid.
Also the almost industrial score music machines: trailer music, like two steps from hell, even Zimmer. Those are also can be considered as slop, even worse - highly formulaic, almost standard (YouTube “heroic music chord progression”). And those were written by humans
I’m not going to devalue your opinions—music is mostly a matter of taste—but you and your parent comment are stretching the term “slop”, like when a software user misuses “bug” to mean “something which doesn’t work like I want, despite it working exactly as designed for fifteen years”.
“Slop” is specifically about AI content lacking in effort, quality, meaning. You may not like Zimmer, but saying it lacks in those areas seems a tad too much. “Formulaic” isn’t an indicator of slop either, most stories are formulaic following a variation of the hero’s journey. It’s especially not problematic when you’re someone like Zimmer who invents or popularises the formula.
> Formulaic
Also formulaic art isn't necessarily bad, because human appreciation does follow some patterns.
Agree. I didn’t say bad. I said that the adjectives that people use to describe ai slop are as applicable to human creations as to ai.
There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art (my pet peeve is many “instrumental guitar albums” that are just pentatonic scale and standard licks in all shapes and forms) and ai art can be good.
I will say even more. I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great. Critics will be in ave “triumphant return to old form” and everybody will avoid looking in the eyes and say the truth about how they were able to write new good songs, given that they weren’t able to do it in like decades.
> Agree. I didn’t say bad.
In fairness, you did say “even worse”. That’s not an expression one tends to use unless calling something bad. I can’t imagine someone saying “this is the best album ever, and even worse this is the second best”.
> There could be lazy, uninspired but technically competent as ai art
There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box. Even the people who used to wax lyrically about “prompt engineering” have mostly subsided. AI pictures (not necessarily “art”, I don’t think that term should apply to any random image, even from humans) created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
> and ai art can be good.
What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
> I’m sure that soon we will get new albums from old stars (like let’s say) that will be great.
Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it? Then sure, can’t argue there. Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure. I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
Language barrier, sorry.
For “even worse” - I meant different, and I think your analogy is unfair.
One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
But again, my native language is not English and the way I say things may surely sound unnatural.
——
How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts and give humans mich more benefit of the doubt and leeway than you give to ai.
> There’s no technique involved to typing words in a box.
There sure is. And that’s what separates results. Most of the things that I enjoy are clearly have good deal of thought in inventing lyrics (again, I watch lore channels and the way the lyrics are made is clear that there is a good amount of thought, prompt and maybe even manual tinkering), in doing montage of videos. I’m skeptical about prompt engineering but your criticism here is as same as painters criticizing photographers: “they just press the button”.
> created with prompting can look technically competent (e.g. faking an oil painting) but not be technically competent.
I used to thing along this line too, but later I realized that this is not an argument in any favor. Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors - costumes of wrong epoch, or made wrong way, or worn wrong way. Wrong guns, wrong ammo etc etc etc. I saw some pro criticising ai generated picture of a woman on a horse, and it was about same - the things used to steer the horse are like upside down, some other things don’t make sense. And then it clicked to me - it doesn’t matter. It isn’t unique to ai. Humans did same stuff forever. As long as result is enjoyable, it’s fine.
> and ai art can be good. What is “good” here? Aesthetically pleasing? Then sure, that’s a subjective matter of opinion. Even the yuckiest of gore can be aesthetically pleasing to the right person. Cronenberg has a cult following for a reason.
This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc. On first albums of Metallica you almost can hear how they are learning and getting better (except drummer). Yes, if it’s pleasing enough people and bringing joy to their life then it’s ok. It doesn’t matter is it ai or human. Again, there are many cases in music when apparently the solos weren’t played by artists but by uncredited session musicians. Is it slop? Musician acted as tool here.
> Again, what is “great” here? Does it mean you like it?
Fans like it. Not only me. It brings new fans or even casuals may enjoy it
> Personally I believe “greatness” has to stand the test of time at least for a few decades, so we may never know for sure.
You do you. It’s fine.
> I do highly doubt your scenario, though. Why would an old star be interested in generating a simulacrum of their old music without doing it themselves? Apart from a shameless cash grab, that is.
Why Metallica does new albums? They already have enough super hits, that stood test of time even By your definition (decades) to not care. Why other bands do the same?
—-
In very short. To me it feels that there is an attempt to steer into public conscience that
And I disagree with that wholeheartedly. To me No matter who produces it. Yes, unfortunately ai enables slop generation significantly easier. I hate searching for reviews or even analysis now, but it isn’t unique. Netflix documentary was a meme like 5-10 years ago already, if not more. And many of them are are exactly what ai slop is today, made by humans though.> For “even worse” - I meant different
Thank you for clarifying.
> One can say something like “this is not your best job. It is solid product of a carpenter. Even worse, I know you could do much better, like a woodworker”. And nothing here says that the job is _bad_.
Except no, that doesn't make sense. It is not clear at all to say “This is not your best job. It is a solid job. Even worse…”. That is very confusing communication. “Even worse” means “something was bad but then it got even badder”. “Even better” is the opposite: “something was good and became even gooder”. Using “even worse” to mean “this part was good but this other part was bad” is incorrect. The word “worse” already requires things to be bad. It is an adjective adding to the situation, never contradicting it.
See the definition of the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worse
See how all of them are “more <bad>”, “<bad> to a greater degree”? Worse always means something was already bad.
> How going back to your argument. You already subtly move goalposts.
I don’t think I have. But because you only made the accusation without explaining your reasoning, you’re not giving me any fair chance to clarify any position. Considering we’ve already established, by your own admission, that English is not your strong suit (not a criticism), doesn’t it seem more likely to you that you’ve misunderstood my point? Or perhaps that you should consider that a possibility? As per the HN guidelines, assume good faith. I assumed good faith in your argument and responded respectfully and clearly (to the best of my ability) to it. I would appreciate the same courtesy.
I am sorry for confusion. I’m typing on the phone and accidentally preessed reply before writing full answer.
I started updating my comment above as soon as I saw that I posted reply (the one that your answer addresses). Hope that clarifies my position and gives you an explanation where I disagree with your comment.
I don’t think we’re making ourselves sufficiently understood to each other, and if you keep lobbing accusations at me without understanding what I’m saying, we’re not going to have a productive discussion. I’ll address just a couple of quick points.
> Look at like any professional reviewing let’s say old movies. Thousands of errors
Mistakes are not the same thing as slop. It’s not at all related. Here’s the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
> This is strawman and arguing in bad faith by subtly associating my position with liking gore etc.
I like gore. I find Cronenberg and old Japanese movies and anime aesthetically pleasing. I have done work based on gore. Not only am I not making a straw man or arguing in bad faith, I’m not insulting or discrediting you in the slightest. Please stop making assumptions and responding to those assumptions in your head. I didn’t use gore as an example to discredit you, I used it because it’s an example of a niche art that I understand and respect. It‘s the exact opposite of what you took from it.
> Why Metallica does new albums?
Metallica is not making new albums with AI, are they? That has nothing to do with your original point of an artist coming back to make a new album after decades using AI. How can you, in good faith, accuse someone else of shifting the goalposts while engaging in such a textbook example yourself?
The thing is that there is already enough ai content that is not lacking in effort, quality, meaning too.
I clearly see talented author who just didn’t had chops or resources previously to realize his vision, and now he can and I can enjoy it.
At the same time I probably feel and define slop slightly differently, for myself.
In my birth city there was a street that was closed every weekend for art sellings. You walk about 1km (or less), and there are tables with sculpitures, paintings, crafts etc. In the beginning it’s fun, but after some time (and especially after several visits) you see how repetitive and formulaic it is. Somebody chooses kittens and draws 100s of things with them, somebody chooses nature etc etc etc. I didn’t even know the word slop then, but looking back - it was it.
After watching Bob Ross (and I love the guy) it’s clear that many “creators” were producing slop that is technically similar to what Bob Ross was teaching. Did Bob Ross produced slop? No. Do people who just reuse same approach over and over again (here is how we will paint the tree by using this then than brush) produce slop? In my book - yes. And it’s fine, if they or somebody else enjoy it. I don’t judge them and I don’t judge people who use and enjoy ai.
For me art’s purpose is to invoke some emotion in person, experiencing the art. The way how art is produced is secondary.
You can have buckethead who does music, and you can have someone (even highly technical, with great timing, control, mechanical chops) who “produces song” while sitting on a toilet and an “instrumental album” in a day, by running pentatonic scale all over again. And this is the slop for me. And it has nothing to do with ai.
None of that is what I would call slop music. All of that is real music for real people with real use case.
elevator music doesnt need any deep meaning
Elevators don't need any music at all.
Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.
I watch bunch of Russian speaking Wh40k lore channels, and the authors experimented with ai music. Now they finish many of their videos with ai banger, based on lore. Mostly rock, but they experimented with different styles. And I like it. “80/90s” generated music is way too easy target. Niche topics (or just topical music) is much harder to get in nice amounts.
There are several channels with pure ai Wh40k music. Some Star Wars creators are doing similar stuff.
I’m actively resisting desire to dump bunch of YouTube links, but if you want to hear what many people already vetted great, I’m happy to share.
I find super HARD to believe that we ran out of musicians doing music in the styles of the 80s/90s maybe your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy, not a crime; but saying nobody is making such music is a sad excuse.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.
If somebody told me "I choose to only read AI-generated books" I would also silently judge them.
You guys forgot the "silent" bit though.
What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.
Which is why it is also common to silently judge these readers.
I judge people who read those, yes.
If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.
With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.
Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.
Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.
That might be OK if Suno had compensated everybody they needed to.
I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.
Meanwhile you probably use Spotify or other streaming platforms without issue.
Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.
> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.
What resource expenditure? Inference is dirt cheap, especially for a single person's prompt.
"your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy"
Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.
Prompting a machine to generate random slop that sounds like other music isn't really involving yourself in the creation process. This person applied no taste or knowledge to the creation process, didn't learn anything. Just asked for a pattern matcher to give her something like what she already had.
Nobody generating anything on Suno is showing any kind of creativity. It's somehow worse then regular plagiarism.
Yes, and random song of 80s will be as shitty as random song of 2010s and 2020s.
easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
Nobody does that. Literally nobody likes a piece of music just because it was made by a human.
But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.
I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.
If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.
You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?
> people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them
Like what? People say this kind of stuff all the time and it's either not true or they're generating things with very questionable taste.
Like the music being described literally in the thread you're responding to.
definition of "very questionable taste"
As someone with very specific tastes in music across several genres, yes, it's hard to find new bands making what I like. Every so often I'll find one, but it's pretty rare because- surprise!- the market for people with my tastes is really small so quality production targeting me is a bad career decision.
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
Possibly contributing to making it a worse career decision is not strategically optimal.
> it's ok to be lazy, not a crime
It's normal to hate AI being pushed down our throats, but it's a completely different thing when we call people names, who enjoy it on their own.
You can also treat lazy not as an insult, but a behavioural description. Everyone likes to be lazy for sometime, and if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout. In fact, that's precisely what was done here: "it's ok to be lazy".
> if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout
I'm not sure how using AI to generate songs will save anyone from the burnout of searching for songs, but what I understood from context is "intellectual laziness" and I see that as an insult. I'm not a native speaker though, so thanks for offering another perspective.
This was a comment on the meaning of the world lazy, not an answer in the general context.
The "intellectual laziness" you describe can be seen as a way to not spend attention and effort on things, you don't care for, in other words being rational and mindful.
Not that I agree with this, there is tons of good music from the past centuries, which I already can't all hear in my lifetime, that I don't need to start consuming never ending output from greedy, soulless and evil corporations. I also don't like modern music that much.
> I'm not a native speaker though
Me neither.
Well, it is kind of true though. I used to listen to bboy (breakdance) music; this was ok in the 1990s for the most part. Then things changed. The music today just ... sucks. I can't listen to it anymore. And bboying is now just a tricking contest, with a certain company abusing the dancers as advertisement-robots for them ... I also see that on youtube, with constant product marketing and product logo flashing. It's annoying.
I don’t want to copy paste my answer in another thread, but what if I want to listen to music about some lore? Some topic?
Like this, made by a guy who clearly understands who to use ai?
https://youtu.be/6YTjH_7QUT0?t=42
Ai is a great enabler for people who have ideas but don’t have chops.
I did the same too. I listen exclusively to my own songs made with the help of AI.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
> orchestra and symphony pop
You can find a ton of this on archive.org [0]. One of my favorites is from K-Mart background vinyl. AI can't quite do this yet.
[0] https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Kmart%22&and%5...
That's actually a bit creepy to me. How do you deal with a lack of novelty factor here though? Because ultimately, if you yourself generate all music you listen to, how could anything be surprising? I often listen to songs that surprise me in one way or another.
When I said exclusively, its not that I am not exposed to other songs as well. I do follow certain artists that I really enjoy listening to because I find their lyrics and melodies resonates with me, even when its not in the genre that I preferred.
It's just I don't go and explore songs actively. If my playlist suddenly randomize itself (which YouTube Music usually do even when I already selected a specific playlist), I usually just keep it randomizing the songs, I either skip the songs based on the intro or just the title.
Sometimes, I only write the lyrics without any melodies, or just give a base chords for the AI to work with without any melodies, and AI might surprise me on how it suddenly chose a certain melodies or chord progression.
So you can say I'm exploring, but only within the boundaries of the lyrics that I wrote. Or when YouTube Music randomly plays a song for me and I immediately resonates with it.
Does it really have to be suprising? Some people already have a life full of surprises (read: stress). Comforting music can help with that.
That's like saying that in order to not be stressed you can only read books that you write yourself. Are we seriously going to act like any of this is normal or healthy?
I just don't see any reason to actively search for a problem. Yes it's new technology and contradicts "the old ways".
People have made music before, and I hardly believe they only made It for other people, but als themselves.
maybe a closer analogy is, use software that you wrote yourself because it helps you solve a specific needs?
Which in this case, my need is to recall the memories and emotions when I write the song?
Your analogy doesn’t make any sense.
This is extremely hyperbolic. The guy says he has a specific taste that chills him out. Why are you guys so judgmental?
I love me some Deleuze and Hegel, but my life is full of "interesting" bits already. Sometimes you need something simple. Your example is wrong as well: he did not create his own music, he directed it and yes I would definitely love to read a book about some weird sci-fi ideas I have written in some style I love but myself cannot reproduce.
If you write your own songs, you'll realise that they are infinitely surprising to you, much like one's own children. Just endlessly fascinating. I sing my own songs all the time, probably more than other people's.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't want to listen to new music by other people, or create more of my own. I'm simply sharing what it is to experience songs written by yourself. I saw Sting the other day talking about the very same thing to Rick Beato regarding songs he wrote 40 years ago, and I remember Brett Anderson of Suede saying that he loved listening to his own music. In fact, wouldn't it be weird if you didn't want to?
That's the feelings right? What's wrong with enjoying your creation right?
The song that I wrote has more values because it carries memories, emotions, and my internal state. I'm not saying other songs doesn't have values. It's just harder to resonate with, unless the melodies or lyrics align with my emotional state.
I listen to my own songs because I am songwriter, and still am even when I stopped doing it professionally. I am not doing it for the sake of "I just want to listen to my own songs and I will never listen to others". I listen just because "This song is meaningful for me"
And the "this song" in that quote above, can be mine, or other's.
Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) said something similar when asked if he listens to his own music. Paraphrased: There's this weird stigma about listening to your own music like it's egotistical. When you make yourself a sandwich, do you feel egotistical when you enjoy eating it?
Im a hobbyist songwriter (melodies and lyricist) of decades feeding my trove of MP3s/songs to Suno. Listening to Suno produced version of my songs is way more satisfying then listening to other peoples music. My Suno slop of many decades has the most meaning as they all reflect a time, experience, a feeling in and about life to current world events, etc, etc. Before Suno I was singing my songs heard in my demos (play piano & guitar) and Im a terrible singer now they all sound pro and again are way more meaningful then anyone elses songs.
> My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me
What a perfect illustration that while you typed on a keyboard you're so far away from making art.
PS: how many pieces of art that moved you were made by artists you knew or met?
I might misunderstood you or you might misunderstood me.
I was moved by a lot of songs made by artists I never met. But I was moved because of the song, not because of the reason why the artist wrote it. If I can truly understand the emotional state of the artist when they wrote it, I might be able to empathize with them. But that's me empathizing with the person that made the art as a human. Nothing stopping me from doing that as a human, even when their song didn't move me.
I publish my songs under a pseudonyms. They can infer what am I as a person based on the songs that I wrote. They can infer what emotions and feelings that I am experiencing while I write the songs. But it's all inference, unless they know me behind the pseudonyms, they won't be able to relate with me personally, as my real self, not as the songwriter. And I am okay with that.
Well, I was being overly cynical for no reason. Do what makes you happy man, if that's AI songs who am I to judge. You clearly care a lot about it and it brings you something.
I also want to state that I think this is the perfect use-case for generative AI. You have a desire, and you use the AI to scratch your particular itch. Where it goes wrong is the people who want to make a quick buck by shoveling out heaps of random crap in the hopes that there will be some clicks to generate revenue. I mean someone is going to accidentally discover the prompt for the next "Baby Shark", get a billion views, and then the real onslaught will begin.
I wonder about the social aspect. People growing up with listening exclusively to their own AI-generated music will never dance together and scream to the same old songs, even if it just became “bad taste”. Its such a huge part of our culture that they will just miss. Same goes of course to all other parts of arts and culture. A good start to read is „ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ by Walter Benjamin.
>Who else is going to make new songs for her?
Lots of artists! They are not even remotely hard to find. They are literally a google search away. Typing stuff into Suno because you can't be bothered to search "new artists that sound 90s" is crazy
The 80s and 90s were pretty much the golden age of music production in terms of breadth and sheer volume.
This is the distilled essence of a “first world problem.”
> Who else is going to make new songs for her?
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
Plenty of people? There are gigs every week in my city by bands who make music in 80s and 90s genres and many of them still make new music, some of it really good. And you can usually find it at both Bandcamp and Spotify.
> All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her?
How much music do you even need? Is she listening 24/7?
Even for making new music Suno is a godsend. My workflow has changed from making a whole track to just creating some nice loops with my favorite VSTs and asking Suno the rest. I get a song in the exact BPM and style that I wanted, while saving me a ton of time.
I might be an outlier, but I grew up listening to some genres that have fallen out of fashion, and I don't feel like I need more songs from them--we've explored enough of what they can do. What I miss from the 90's isn't third-wave ska as people trying things and bizarre songs becoming hits.
This is interesting. I think AI music will be massive in a few years.
It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you
> I think AI music will be massive in a few years.
Massive like Temu/AliExpress products massive.
I think its the exact opposite. One of the best features of art, in any form, is that it offers different perspectives, viewpoints, ideas. Think of how many people changed something major in their life due to a song, a movie, a photograph. Now think of how little would happen if AI just repeated back what "it knows" you already like. Your entire life would just be a derivative of things you liked as a 6-year old. Nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing fresh.
She's in luck:
https://youtu.be/6JCLY0Rlx6Q?si=xZvid6TWR66LTqhE
There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?
Edit: slop not slob
It's not just look around a little. It's look around a lot. It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Have the ick for AI-gen, fine. But dismissing the things it solves puts you in a position where you'll never understand other people.
You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.
That's a really ironic comment. I think accepting AI music as a substitute for all but the most unimportant background noise, is a sign that one doesn't really care about understanding other people.
> It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
> quirky California college radio stations
I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.
Spotify is full of AI songs so not a good alternative in this case
It can be, but you'll need to look up the human made / curated playlists; definitely avoid Spotify's own (as they've been seeding them with their own songs for a while now, even before AI), and don't enable the auto mixing / radio feature.
I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
> just look around a little instead?
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
Thing is, did it take effort and creativity to make it? I suppose you could argue that fine-tuning a prompt takes effort, creativity and knowledge, but I argue against that that it's only a fraction of what it takes to make real music.
If it didn't take effort to make it, if you can repeat it a hundred times in a week, it's slop. It's a good descriptor, even if to an untrained ear it's convincing.
I've also seen people using the term "slop" for low quality human-generated content (lowbrow movies etc)
It's a cultural affectation like attaching -maxxing to any adjective.
I smile when I come across the term 'qualityslop', which is an oxymoronic term to indicate very good human content.
https://i.redd.it/uvgtw725asfg1.jpeg
I don't mind it, because there already was a lot of slop before AI, which a lot of people seem to forget. But that's also because they weren't the consumers / target audience so it's off their radar.
This is my other problem, people calling things that aren't even AI as "AI slop" which cracks me up but is also concerning.
Now that AI is here, why read Hacker News comments? I bet you can generate quality content with AI! Do we even need to write anymore?
I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.
What? Those things were absolutely not criticized in the same way. Most of the time they weren't criticized at all lol.
The problem isn't about it being "easier", it's about people who want the praise and attention of being a maker but don't want to put any thought or effort into it. They have no thoughts and nothing to say and what they generate reflects that.
I just don't get it. Music isn't just what comes out of the speaker. There are artists, with lives and influences behind the music. There is personal expression in the lyrics. Even when the artist chooses to remain anonymous, or they choose to not have lyrics at all, there is still something personal behind it. A DAW is just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used badly, for example, over produced metal with quantized and sample replaced drums. Sure, AI can be a tool for music production just like a DAW can, but when it crosses the line into, lets call it "vibe-produced" music, it is indeed slop, and deserves to be referred to as such.
Yeah this is how I feel. People who like AI music seem to be a same people who would just throw on random "deep work" or "lofi" youtube playlists and let them run all day. That has never appealed to me. I like to learn about the artists and history.
> There is personal expression in the lyrics.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I love music and I frequently go to live shows, so the bar for me has kind of become "Can I go see this artist live, OR is it so good that I don't care that I can't?" If it passes that, I'll listen. I've found one AI generated song that has made it onto my top 100 favorite songs I've ever heard.
The thing that really shits me with AI music is when it outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics. There's certain tells and boy do they give me the ick.
> outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics
Aren’t you curious how a modern solar panel works so well with no moving parts?
I'll bet you "neon" is somewhere in those lyrics.
> Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I don't necessarily agree. Read the lyrics to the "irony is a dead scene" EP by the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. It's nonsense. Still genuine expression.
Most Carpenter Brut songs don't even have lyrics and there is endless expression there. I know that I consume music in a very different way than most people, and that's probably why I have such a strong opinion here.
Where would you look around?
Previously web search, YouTube, and Reddit would have been my go to but they have all been enshittified.
YouTube is excellent. Aside from my main account I have one that I mainly just use to listen to music, and I just surf the algorithm listening to whatever is in the recommend list, which is usually a handful of songs I've got on heavy rotation, but YouTube also tends to cycle back some old favorites, and some new gems. I just keep surfing it day in day out letting it take me where it will as one of two main ways I listen to music. I regularly find new gems pretty reliably. All the gems then go to my playlist in Spotify, which I listen to during my commute.
I’ve had good luck with gnoosic. Or taking artists I like as a starting point and finding out who influenced them, and who they influenced.
I always found Last.fm great for this. I have no idea what it's like now.
> The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd.
The idea that only humans can make music is absurd.
> I guess she can listen to slob but maybe just look around a little instead?
The idea that AI generated = slop is absurd.
Humans create just as much, if not more slop. Look at 99% of "professional" output in creative fields. It's awful.
A human with taste steering AI tools can be better than a "classical" human with hard skills but no taste.
The old world is going to be run over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4
Completely. Run. Over.
Rather than genuinely enjoying a well-made/actually entertaining AI content, people are just gonna blindly hate on anything AI-generated.
Until AI companies pay for all the content that they stole, I think that is a reasonable response.
Until humans pay for all the "content that they stole" and learned from, I think that is reasonable response.
AceStep XL is a music generation model trained on an open dataset. is the content generated with that one okay with you then?
What dataset? (Honest question! What's in it?)
I don't mind that ChatGPT and Claude were trained on my HN and Reddit comments.
I don't mind that Opus and Codex were trained on my code.
I don't mind that Seedance and Veo were trained on my YouTube videos.
I benefit from the models.
I think the cost pressures just make most AI generated stuff slop. Its not that AI can't make good stuff its that the slop to good ratio is 100s of times worse with AI published music than with human stuff. Simply because AI generation cost is essentially zero.
Purely a economic argument but also the rare good music from AI I am still looking its generally speaking not that cohesive and for unremarkable. A lot of human work is that to but the discovery of good music from people feels much less daunting
As they should. AI can't create art, because AI doesn't have a sense of expression.
You're right, there's always a human driving the AI to create art.
Was that video supposed to convince us that AI music is good?
Huh, I wonder what happens when people stop making real music for AIs to train on, then.
I did not expect that one to show up here on HN, but it's definitely a human artist using AI. He has a few others which are just as entertaining.
Run over in what way?
In that the avalance of slop will make it impossible to find quality stuff, human or AI.
The Midnight are a pretty fun modern eighties band!
Not entirely comparable, but it's easier to find in Korea. "I do" by I-dle [formerly (G)I-dle] for example, has a wonderful 80s sound.
I have no issue with individuals choosing to listen to generative AI. I even occasionally listen to it myself when I’m deep working and just need to occupy that part of my brain (having previously listened to algorithmically generated music or those endless copyright free trance mixes for the same purpose). But I don’t like how it’s flooding discovery platforms to the point that it gets impossible to wade through slop and find actual bands that I could see in person.
It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.
> New music almost always targets young people.
Hard disagree, there is just music people make because it's what they want to make, if all you're looking at is the top 10/pop radio music, yes it will be tailored for the largest market but by no means is there a conspiracy to only accomodate the 'young people'.
I'm still discovering music from "my era". Music doesn't have to be new to be new to you.
The large number of actual bands from that era still around?
Consider yourself lucky if they still make music in their vintage style
I'm in a similar boat. I don't like modern music. I was never a big music fan TBH though I did like a few really good pieces from my day. That said I never cared much for lyrics because I didn't find them relatable. I'm only interested in the tune... I like lyrics but only for the audio properties of the words; literally, I like the sound of human vocal chords.
The way I use Suno is sometimes I play Ukulele and discover a tune I like; I record it and generate a song from it.
I didn't take any music lessons. I'm 100% self-taught so my recordings are a little rough but the melody comes through and Suno polishes it up nicely and adds lyrics based on a topic I've been thinking about.
I find both the creation and listening aspects relaxing and therapeutic. I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song. It's very clearly my melodies, my songs but it's enjoyable to hear them as a finished product. There is definitely an element of surprise, the lyrics are sometimes quite insightful and clever too and I can actually start appreciating the poetic aspect of music in a way which eluded me before.
I suspect that by the time most musicians finish refining and producing their own songs, without AI, they're probably tired of hearing it. Suno avoids that. It's a truly novel thing to be both a producer and consumer of your own music. Perfect for an introvert like me who can't relate to anyone except himself.
It's nice to see that some other people also like my pieces though I'm not trying to make a career out of it.
Same as i almost only listen to my own AI Slop yet Ive wrote melodies/lyrics since a kid. Ive always recorded my guitar or keyboard along with my vocal (terrible singer here) track then mixed it in GarageBand and exported each song as an MP3. Now in 2025/2026 I feed my MP3s of my songs to Suno and they sound pro. Also, they have a ton more meaning to me then anyone elses songs. I dont care if others listen to my slop its mine and again more meaningful then all others music.
AI Music is changing music habits ...your friend and myself arent the only ones https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n....
Give it ten years or so and i bet the Taylor Swifts type acts and the big music industry machine wont be as celebrated.
I personally like an AI cover version of Nirvana's "In bloom" song in country style [0]. Just because it is AI generated doesn't mean that I enjoy it less. Labelling videos as AI is fair and I welcome youtubes changes in that regard nonetheless.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNImbw1TABo
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
Indeed. I've heard a few compositions that I knew were AI-generated and still thought were pretty good.
Look up Xania Monet. AI artist “signed” to Warner Bros with a multimillion contract after “she” charted on Billboard.
There’s an appetite for this.
Wow I had no idea there were already popular AI artists. Xania Monet has ~500k monthly listeners on Spotify and some of her (its?) youtube videos have millions of views. This is depressing.
I don't think it's people deliberately seeking this stuff out. For whatever reason, the algorithms love recommending AI content, and I'm sure the numbers are juiced to some degree with bot farms.
Not that it still isn't depressing.
I love my hour long AI songs, I listen to them over and over again. Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfqOEyLFrJI or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-dRotOi01Q
>the algorithms love recommending AI content
wouldn't be surprised if it's because they don't have to pay out for AI music.
Just re-upload it. AI generated work cant be copyrighted.
Even if the courts won't uphold the copyright, that doesn't prevent people from claiming your videos and initiating YouTube's copyright process against you. This is a recurring problem for people who upload their own original performances of public-domain compositions, particularly solo piano.
What if you claim it first against them? You wouldn't be punished for a false claim, since they're not.
Indeed. False copyright claims should be illegal, they're an invitation to fraud.
An often repeated talking point that's broadly false without further context. Mechanical output on its own can't be copyrighted, that hasn't changed. However it can be if sufficient (as determined by the courts) human creativity went into causing it to be output.
I think the op mean people writing stuff like: "Amazing what a human soul can create", "This is such a beautiful song. I'm so happy it's not another AI slop" type of comments. I have a fairly popular youtube channel with AI generated music, I make it very obvious that it's AI, yet I still get hundreds of those comments a month.
I make it very obvious that it's AI, yet I still get hundreds of those comments a month.
That suggests you've done a good job of directing the AI to generate what people like.
or that the comments themselves are AI/bots? (not meant as a criticism, other than of youtube itself)
That's actually how I fell down the rabbithole --- found these long mixes and started listening, enjoyed what I heard, then tried to find out more about the author and realised it was AI-generated.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
One of my favorite dialogues from Westworld [0] is such a perfect fit for the whole creative AI industry discussion:
Are you real? - If you can't tell, does it matter?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaahx4hMxmw
Yeah, I had the same experience, and it makes sense for companies like Spotify. I do hope that this doesn’t hinder “innovation” in music (eg people being creative and introducing new types of music), because as usual with AI, it’s just really good at imitation, not necessarily creating new things.
To be honest, as long as the music is to my liking, I don’t really care all that much.
It also seems that there is a big percentage of people who are completely against AI music for a multitude of reasons. Even if they liked the sound they would still hate it if it was AI generated.
But to me this seems silly. Yes I want real artists to make music and be able to make a living not some faceless company spitting out endless music until something works. However at the end of the day if something sounds good then one should enjoy it not refuse to accept it simply because it is AI.
Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child? Or what if AI could could sort through a massive backlog of evidence in unsolved murders and other violent crimes giving new leads previously missed? I am just curious if some people will simply be against it no matter what the use is. As for myself I think it has it's uses but also think it comes at a heavy price as in massive power and water consumption and other issues it comes with. Anyways
It's not created any cure or solved crime though. The times it's been applied to those problems, it's either regurgitated stuff that's already in the data or led to the arrest of innocent people.
Also, re: music, if I was fine with listening to AI music, why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
Because you might not be as good as someone else in doing it, just like it was before AI. "Why would I listen to the output of someone else's piano instead of playing it on my own?"
because the other people may write better prompts than you
If AI cured cancer then by definition it would no longer be the technology that’s primary use case is churning out various forms of derivative slop. And so the balance between its value vs the economic/social/environmental costs would immediately and fundamentally change.
Losing my job, spending 3x as much to replace my PC while my favorite websites devolve into a cesspool of spam might not feel worth it just because I can now vibe code a todo app in 2 minutes while listening to a 600 hour playlist of personalized elevator music.
But if it cured my dad’s cancer and my mom’s Parkinson’s? Well, that’s a different story…
Q: But don’t you think that some AI music can be good enough to listen to anyway?
A: sorry i’d love to deeply consider this topic with you but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so i won’t?
https://fuckoffaimusic.com/
YouTube music doesn’t seem to care much about where the music comes from. They do have formal album libraries but not everything is carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify. That’s what makes it good, because you can find tons of lost mixes, old unreleased track and vinyl rips, leaks of new stuff from current artists
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
> carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify
I wish I had your Spotify.
Over the last few months they have served me multiple slop tracks in the discover weekly playlist. Probably more I didn't notice when just listening without focus, but several had generic artist name without bio and dozens of nearly identical tracks.
There are completely fake bands, who are 'on tour', 'giving interviews', cranking out albums. Like "Shunned at a Funeral" [0] for instance, an AI Christian rock band. Mentioning nowhere that it is all fake.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@ShunnedataFuneral
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKOtpdDzwyA
You could say almost the same about Gorillaz except for the AI part.
I was at the gym the other day with my bf and there was some godawful lame crap on the playlist. I asked my bf if it was AI generated in his opinion, he laughed and said it was Harry Styles…
Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.
People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.
I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
> I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
What's the difference with AI doing it instead of your script ?
Is human-scripted art (e.g. https://nannou.cc/) art? Is music programmed to play on an orchestrion art? Is the music produced using a modular synth setup art?
If your answer to any of these questions is "yes", and your answer to "can AI create art" is no, then there is a difference between AI doing it and a script.
That said the discussion around "human" art and "AI" art often lacks nuance, and I believe there's lots of space to explore art that uses AI. Humans produce a lot of crappy art, this crappy art requires humans to invest time and effort. With AI it is possible for humans to produce lots of crappy art without investing time and effort, so an deluge of crappy AI art follows.
If I use AI to strip backgrounds instead of traditional greenscreen methods, is the end result "crappy AI art"? I'd hope no one sets those standards. I'd hope my videos would be judged as "crappy human art" since I still did the camera work the acting and the editing. If I use AI for visual effects in my video because I don't have visual effect training and don't have money to hire someone with experience (I don't make money from my occasional fun video projects), does that make it "crappy AI art"? I don't believe so. But somewhere between there and the content farm AI slop filling the Youtube servers there is a point where it becomes "crappy AI art" and I can't tell you where that point is because I'm still trying to figure it out.
Yeah, you make some good points, and it's an interesting question. There's far more nuance I guess that I considered, I guess what's a bit disheartening about the amount of generated music in this case is that it does make it harder for those who create and put really a lot of effort into their work to find some traction. Then again they said Spotify would ruin the music industry also, and to some degree it has only benefited a minority of artists.
I guess either way we will see. Art is only appreciated by those who appreciate it so who am I to judge.
Curious to see if this will apply to music.
I imagine it'll apply to anything with a SynthID watermark. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
Music may be a special case because generative/algorithmic music has been a thing for much longer than AI (in the 2020s sense) has existed. So it's more a question of how/whether it gets integrated into an existing generative market than it being a new category.
Add “before 2024” to searches.
enough music was made already, we don’t need more.
I wonder about false-positives too, or just disagreements with what is stated vs. "detected". In what I guess is a reaction to the huge amount of AI music, I notice a lot of other music gets posted with titles or tags saying in extent "made without AI". Yet when I listen to it, at least half the time I suspect AI was used, and they are just lying to get increased reach from the AI-hater crowd...
Yeah this is why I'm sceptical of just about any video game covers or remixes posted in the last year or two. There's just a flood of blatantly AI generated content in this niche, with many of the channels involved pumping out dozens of videos a day.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
I mean the whole point of music like that is you're not really listening to it and it's kind of on/blocking out noise, right? It's hard to think of a situation where completely AI-generated music would be more competitive or less objectionable.
You can tell when a song is not AI generated these days because people put "no AI" in the title.
There is a third option. We don’t care how the music was made.
There's certainly a bit of that. Years ago, I had various generative musicish on my phone that I'd listen to (e.g. https://endel.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_(app) ). There are also some soundtracks that are ok to listen to on repeat (though once you start recognizing what's next, then they become less useful because you can start listening to them - sim city https://youtu.be/j6mQc-9vCuE and eve online - looking now I see people have remixed that to 8h long tracks). I've also supported My Noise ( https://mynoise.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075 ) and have some 1h long tracks that I can put on repeat (love the white noise rain, but gotta give a callout to 88 keys with some slider adjustments to get it "right" for what I want - https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/acousticPianoSoundscapeGen... most often equal parts brown, red, orange and light purple).
Music for Airports is ok ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports https://youtu.be/vNwYtllyt3Q ... but there are parts in there that I recognize in the loop that bring me out of it being background and into something I'm listening to).
But yea... I want a soundscape and it doesn't bother me if it was something that was generative in 2018, or in 2026... or loops of recorded sound... I want something that isn't silence and that I can not listen to for four to eight hours... bonus if its enough "noise" that it doesn't even get picked up after noise suppression in a Teams call.
Space Banjo is great ( https://spacebanjo.com be it https://youtu.be/CLnHStt4mbs or https://youtu.be/ygYfJSTc_qQ ) ... but I like to listen to that when I can listen to it more.
There's also things like https://youtu.be/_egA9RZrD5k (and in this realm, I get picky https://www.youtube.com/@resomat6474 is pretty good, but some of it hits higher notes ... https://www.youtube.com/@TheJapaneseTown-jt6fy is pretty good too).
Again, this is more about wanting sound rather than music.
Yeah I listen to random ambient music, probably all AI, as background noise when I’m working or reading
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).
Easy to solve: just label ALL music uploads after 2024 as AI.
"B-b-b-but what if I create genuine wo—“
You won’t.
NEXT
This is much needed. I’ve had family members sending me videos about what looked like news when in fact it was 100% AI. There are photorealistic AI videos pretending to be an old man giving life advice, or business advice, etc. and the disclosures were all the way at the bottom of the video description, very hard to find.
Note that the uploader apparently still retains control over labeling in most cases; uploaders that intentionally misrepresent AI-generated content might not be discouraged by this. Whether youtube will (and can) ban accounts that do that might determine in practice if this matters or not.
Oh so that explains the recent explosion of "old man gives life advice" videos!
> in fact it was 100% AI
And you know that how?
And, how do you know news itself is not 100% ai? News corps may simply fail to disclose that it was ai, be taken in, remove watermarks, etc.
The fact is no one can say what one sees on a screen is a true representation of reality. People are acting on a consensus feeling.
I suggest turning off recommendation if you dislike what they suggest
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Maybe they could hand out lifetime bans to people who upload untagged AI music? Obviously that wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I could see it helping.
I would support a law that requires all AI generated content to be tagged, labeled, or watermarked as AI.
> This isn't possible on Youtube right now.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
There is https://aisloplist.com/ that works pretty much like you have described.
> What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck".
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
It's clear that YouTube doesn't want you to have much influence over your feed. You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you, which would be the simplest thing to implement, and other knobs that previously existed were silently removed.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
> You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, just let me hide all the AI content. Far too often I stumble onto something that looks interesting, and halfway through I realise it's not really saying anything. It's just AI drivel designed to capture my attention and hold it for a while.
When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
A nicer way that also works on mobile is turning the watch history off. C
> If you think you can't quit youtube
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
Why don't you have an adblocker for your whole browser?
I do. I don’t have a browser for my television, though.
I have quit most other social media, but yt is still there. I give this a try.
Good luck!
I suggest stopping any and all interaction w/ the algorithm. Get a library card and be intentional about your media consumption choices.
It's a nice thought but it ignores that there is so much interesting, informative media on youtube that just does not exist anywhere else, at all.
I've already got more interesting, informative books on my to-read list than I'm going to have time to finish in my lifetime, so I think I'll be fine without youtube.
Or just use Channel Surfer.
https://channelsurfer.tv
This is exactly how I consume YouTube as well. I do keep the side recommendations on since they mostly contain music or videos I've already watched, which I don't mind.
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
I use Unhooked on desktop and UnTrap on iOS for this. Both work flawlessly, and reduced my YouTube usage to almost zero.
Their recommendation engine has surfaced awesome obscure content I would have never found otherwise so I value it.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"
It's somewhat deceiving practice IMO although it could simply be my insecurity.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
Yeah exactly, they could have made their service useful by showing your subscriptions instead. Yet, they decided to enshittify for people who want choices.
Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)
Same for me. Godsend. It also switches off showing me a follow up "short" after I watch the one I want to watch.
Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)
This ^
Last year a non-technical friend sent me a YouTube video about a niche history topic that we had been discussing. I was surprised because there wasn't much information online. The video was clearly AI generated, with that sheen on the pictures and that perfect voice. I couldn't listen to it. I told my friend and he was adamant it was original. Yikes...
This reminds me of this recent video by JHS pedals about a dire AI video. https://www.youtube.com/live/aQSOWFS6lzE
plot twist, your friend actually created the video and was testing it out on you.
What is this, Reggy?
some people seem to be completely unable to detect AI slop
This biggest offender creeping into my feeds currently seems to be long form history videos. I'll be 10 minutes into a 90 minute WWII video and notice a completely incorrect pronunciation of something and realize what is happening. They're certainly getting better at fooling us. Especially when they speak slowly with a calm voice.
Why don’t you have preferred channels and content creators?
Things I would do before committing time to a random channel on a topic I’m interested in:
It’s kind of surprising to me that people don’t curate trusted communities / channels, like 3Brown1Blue, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Hardcore History, etc.This is easily one of the most insulting things I have seen.
Why would you assume I'm NOT subscribed to those channels? And why would you assume I am incapable or haven't asked for recommendations.
My friend. You are a grade A jerk. Get freaking bent.
lol I didn’t mean it at you personally, but I’m just surprised that these AI channels flourish, presumably because people don’t do any of the above 4 things that I listed. Like 10 minutes into an AI video is wild to me - if only because there are so many ways to avoid getting duped before even clicking on a video.
I mostly refrain from watching any
if the content is sufficiently good, why does it matter that it is ai or not?
It matters because of the inability to measure up front whether the content is sufficiently good. AI's best skill is making something look right and look good when it is, in fact, not right. It does this all the time, as opposed to human-made things, which are like that only for specific attempts at deception.
I see it as previously content could be categorized as:
But now the bar for “appearing professional” has changed, and it’s not as easy to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy new sources.For pure entertainment maybe, but in the case of a history video how do you know whether the history you're being presented is accurate, or even has any basis in reality for that matter?
I'm starting to suspect a lot of the people saying things like this have a plan to get rich from AI content farming.
It's really not hard to understand what the problem is with AI generated history vids.
I honestly think your questions has more profound implications than other responders seem to appreciate.
I think a correlating answer can be found in visual effects for movies. And the answer "depends". When it's poorly done, the scene feels off or unbelievable somehow. But when done well, people have an enjoyable experience.
This same conversation existed when moving from practical effects to digital. and in the end, audiences only cared about quality.
And that is a serious problem. That means those people are easy to mislead, and can be made to believe anything if you just put it in an AI video. I've seen people get upset or feel touched by what to me were blatantly obvious AI generated videos. It's as if reality just doesn't matter anymore. (See also the state of politics lately.)
I hope their detector is better than the typical 'AI detection in text' services. False negatives are bad, false positives are worse as some creators could lose their source of income.
At least for now, YouTube honors the uploader’s label of whether or not the content was AI generated. Only when it’s left unset do they do any automatic labeling. And those labels can be overridden manually by the uploader if they get it wrong.
I'm curious where the line is.. several ambiguous but common scenarios:
- Occasional AI b-roll during explainer videos
- AI generated backing track (music)
- AI generated shots sprinkled in a short film
- Showing examples of AI video as an AI capability update or commentary
I'd say that if anything AI generated ends up in the final product then it should be labeled as AI made. So using AI as a prototyping tool would be fine but using it either to generate the end product itself or using it to generate a script would require tagging.
I watched a documentary recently that had an indicator in the top right corner when the content was AI generated. I found it incredibly helpful.
Every online video platform should let you label specific segments as AI generated, even better if it is a requirement with validation checks for certain kinds of content.
That’s the creator doing that, right? Is YT going to analyze the whole video and put a label on every frame?
Yes, it seems like the creator applying the label is the most scalable approach. But you could have the requirement and random sampling with consequences if it isn't followed. You could also sample based on video traffic and user reports.
It's a really valuable feature that I expect will eventually be the gold standard, it was surprising how helpful it was. I think a lot of creators will embrace it, it adds credibility/authenticity. You aren't just labeling the AI content, you are labeling the content that isn't generated by AI, with a validation layer to back it up.
It's about information, not one all encompassing yes or no. All of those are good pieces of information to include in a disclosure.
Plenty of big artists like Kanye use AI to experiment with ideas before releasing the full studio recordings. That’s going to become more common. Just like how developers use LLMs to make a POC to test new ideas before putting the hard work into making it real.
People still admit to listening to Kanye since he started talking about his love of Hitler?
People are still buying Teslas?
More scenarios:
- AI generated VFX on top of non-AI video
- AI upscaling of low res footage
- AI frame interpolation for synthetic slow-mo
- Modified / composited AI video
- Footage created by "Extend Scene" features in Premiere Pro and others
- Word correction from tools like Descript
- AI relighting or colorization
- Reaction video to a video containing AI-generated content
And in general, what amount of combination of any of these applications constitutes as "AI generated"? If I have a 30 minute video with a 3 second AI generated clip, do I get the same label as full-blown AI slop video?
All of them in any amount and yes, your specific 3 seconds should be labeled as being AI generated in your video (or description) and your entire video should be labeled as made using AI by youtube.
A 30 minute speech by a president where I use AI to change 3 seconds in order to make that person say something they never did should also get the label. The label shouldn't be about how much AI was used, but that it was used at all.
> - AI upscaling of low res footage
I'd say this is far more problematic than plain slop.
Other than your last bullet point I don't see anything ambiguous. It's a very clear line. I do not want to see an explainer video with AI generated content, end of story.
I absolutely hate those full-blown AI 'explainers' that just have AI voiceover and a bunch of auto-placed b-roll. I don't want to see them. But I don't think that falls in the same bucket as a creative short film with some AI-generated SFX or someone doing a tutorial with an AI-generated lofi track in the background.
Deepfakes in VFX is another borderline one.
I have a hard time believing that AI can be used to label AI-generated videos without there being a significant number of false positives/negatives. I think back to ZeroGPT and it labeling the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
Considering YouTube's current level of detection of absolutely anything, this will likely be an absolute disaster with no way of appealing to a real human.
There's a reason why they led with simply labeling author self-reported AI videos as AI, and then casually mentioned they'll also try to detect AI videos automatically. They're not confident in it working reliably and want people to have low expectations. This is probably realistic. Using AI to detect AI is not reliable. Detecting AI videos is likely to become an arms race and will require an ongoing commitment of resources.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
They make a bunch of money off the videos, same as uploaded copyright material (before eventually taking them down).
In theory you're right, in practice you're not.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
This attitude of "individual cases don't matter as long as the average case is somewhat covered" is exactly why the world's going to shit.
The parent post's worry is warranted, IMO.
You're wrong from your very premise. The world isn't going to shit. It's better than it's been at pretty much any time in human history, in almost every facet.
(Individual experiences may vary)
In theory you're right, in practice you're not.
You could say it's trending up, but there is no way you can deny that we are in a regressive period.
You're arguing the world is at its peak, they're arguing it's directed in a shit direction. You're not disproving them at this point.
Indeed. See also Pinker's book Better Angels.
On average Steven Pinker is at best a fake hyperoptimist-by-aggregate who puts billionaires on pedestals and rewrites history to entrench shitty systems. Sometimes he says smart stuff but he ignores or actively disregards massive problems with a painfully self-serving neutrality.
Fair enough. The online world is going to shit.
Yeah I get the pretty much, the car was near the mountain top in the 80s and 90s and "pretty much" flew off a cliff more recently. Sure, we're still alive but everyone is going to die in about 5 seconds.
Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.
Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house
>(it's all AI cheating now)
My daughter's English professor is now requiring people to hand write their essays during class. So at least there is that.
People feel strongly about AI generated content; this is a case where false positives can destroy credibility and disrupt careers.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
This isn't even at the level of the spam filter on your email account. Are there some false positives and negatives? Yes. Are there some people sending emails who are negatively affected by falsely ending up in the junk mail folder? Yes. Are we going to turn off spam filtering because of this? No. Why should we accept video spam any more than text spam?
Excellent analogy. I'm going to use that sometime.
Email spam filtering can clearly cause reputational harm too.
The problem is that it's not SOME false positives, AI detectors so far have been all so comically bad that they might be classified as pseudoscience. Or an artificial false positive generators even.
We'll I'd think that YouTube would have incentive to get it right. Either there are too many false positives and the content creators go away and YouTube collapses. Or there are too many false negatives and the viewers go away, and YouTube collapses. I mean there is a chance that garbage people will ruin video sharing platforms for everyone.
Having the incentive to do something and having the ability to do it are not the same thing.
It's not like human-generated content is made of carbon and AI-generated content is made of silicon and the science of chemistry can unambiguously tell them apart. If you asked a million humans and a million LLMs to write a sentence on a specific subject, it's not implausible that one of the LLMs and one of the humans would output the exact same sentence. Maybe more than one.
A thing that can take only the output and accurately tell you if it was AI-generated or not is therefore impossible, because if it said no it would be wrong when the LLM generates that sentence, but if it said yes it would be wrong when a human generates the exact same sentence.
All it can do is try to calculate a probability. But then what do you want to do with that? Suppose the probability it estimates for some content is 45%, and that probability estimate is an accurate measure of the true probability, i.e. can't be improved when the only information you have is the content itself. Do you want to ban the 55% of that content which is human-generated, or allow the 45% which is AI-generated?
Right now the problem is the flood of low-quality AI spam that might (or might not) be low hanging fruit. We can worry about high quality AI artifacts later if that becomes a problem. (and yes, there is no guarantee that YouTube won't fail due to these spammers)
But is an algorithmic AI detector really a thing?
I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale, ship it as a screening tool.
Is such tool feasible at all with current state of AI technology, or is it just a reasonable take from the past that may not be so reasonable anymore?
> I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale
The issue is, that's not a thing. AI-generated content and human-generated content have significant overlap. No amount of training data can allow you to distinguish them with that level of accuracy because many outputs exist that could have been generated by either one. Additional training data allows you to say that the probability is 55.0374% plus or minus 0.0001, rather than only being able to say that it's 55% plus or minus 5%. It can tell you with greater precision exactly how ambiguous it is. What it can't do is remove the ambiguity.
We will find out shortly? YouTube is the one saying they are going to implement this:
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
They don’t seem to care about false positives anywhere else on the platform. Being at the mercy of automated Google systems comes with the territory.
There will also be tiktok challenges to do a video that YouTube flags as AI without actually using AI.
Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"
This isn't a choice between "perfectly fine how things are now" and "destroying credibility". If it were, you're right - "good enough to be useful" wouldn't be a high enough bar.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
And this philosophy will only lead to Kafkaesque nightmare scenarios for 1-2% of the population, so we're still coming out ahead.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found that one of his YouTube videos had gotten a little less engagement.
This definitely needs substantiation. I've NEVER seen such usable tools EVER. AI flagging in general has always been very sketchy IME.
People make a living off this platform though, this could be really bad for someone that lives off of YouTube to have their videos labeled as AI generated. This would still be OK if there was a person at YouTube you could contact to manually review and reverse the decision, but that doesn’t really exist so there’s no one you can really appeal to in a timely manner.
Lots of people making a living off the platform clearly use LLMs to write their scripts. Its kind of weird hearing a person talk to me about something, and then notice characteristic chatgpt patter in their speech.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
Wouldn't the human creators be the biggest advocates of labeling, so that their content can be more easily found among the AI dross? And that's not considering the fate of the platform as a whole if it descends into low-effort AI spam swamping out everything else. I guess it will be interesting if it is all bots consuming bot-generated content in a parallel economy.
> Wouldn't the human creators be the biggest advocates of labeling, so that their content can be more easily found among the AI dross?
Only if it actually works
Generally things aren't successful unless they work
Please tell me this is a joke, or that you're not building anything important at work. It's a very well known problem that YouTube's algorithmic moderation hurts a lot of honest creators, and their ability to make a living, when there is a false positive or is abused.
> something that mostly works most of the time
Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.
I don't know how YouTube's detection will work, but if it were based solely on watermarks, there would be many false negatives, but there shouldn't be false positives.
If it simply costs more time and money to generate videos that pass the filter I'm all for it. The time and money cost of creating videos has tended to zero so there is a lot of low quality stuff now.
It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.
I mean, between SynthID and C2PA don't you already have labels and watermarks that covering a lot of major players like Google, Adobe, ElevenLabs, NIVIDEA? No real concern about false negatives there.
As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.
It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.
This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.
videos and images have non-ai methods for detecting if its ai, its easier than text. There are some image artifacts in AI that can be found statistically.
All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
> All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.
Unfortunately that could still be true while labeling all human-crafted content as AI-created.
Not sure why you appear to be downvoted. Cryptographic provenance is indeed the only solution to humanities digital woes. But only the government could make that a rule so it's not going to happen - at least not in my lifetime.
I really want Spotify to follow. I feel cheated and deceived when I'm enjoying some music, then I realize that there's no bio for the artist and they released 7 albums in 2025. Users should be empowered to filter out AI content if they choose.
> I feel cheated and deceived
Why? Not trying to argue against AI labeling, but if you are enjoying the music, why does it matter?
Based on measured studies, people are not able to discern AI generated music from real ones on average and to your point, I agree, if you enjoy the output then it doesn't make sense to suddenly change your initial opinion.
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
Connecting to the creator of a work of art provides meaning, which makes the experience of art better and more interesting. It allows you to experience worlds other than your own. I don't go into deep dives of all music I listen to, but I do want the option for music I like.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
> Why?
If nothing else, it feels like a the subscription price should be less for an AI-music service.
For art, I would rather support humans over AI
People care a lot about the story and the human artists behind their music, probably somewhat more than the music itself. When I discover some great metal songs, I'll look up their info, the band, the artists, their bio, everything related to the creation process and their history.
Normal people doesnt do that, thats just you and a couple others in this thread. Normal people just listens to music and enjoys it without a second thought
Citation needed. Here’s an anecdote: all normal people I know care and would rather exclude AI contents from any of their feeds or recommendations.
I care about rewarding real musicians, actual human beings, with my attention and, even love. AI slop gets in the way. Even "good" AI copies and appropriates from real artists, their style, their voice and even their history and relationship with their audience. Agree with me or not, there should be a global filter that allows me, the user of the service, to filter out AI generated content.
I can see not wanting to participate in the road to creating individualized heaven-banned digital silos for ourselves.
I want to share a post from the Red Hand Files blog written by musician Nick Cave, because I think he explains it more eloquently than I could.
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From: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Are you being obtuse or can you really not understand this. Your girlfriend writes you a letter once a week while she’s away for the summer. Misses you, loves you, can’t stand being apart. You find out later she paid a service to write the letters. Who cares, the letters were nice right?
I hope same happens with software. Big unremovable warning if AI was used in generating. Allows us to avoid software with very real risks...
Spotify has every incentive to cut out the middleman (the musician). This will never happen.
I heard rumours they're the ones quietly funding some of the AI music. Spotify probably see the most popular musicians flying around in jets and want to redirect all that listening to their own slop.
There's probably a sizable niche market for an absolutist anti-AI video hosting platform.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just needs one simple policy: Post AI and you're banned for life, no appeals.
No appeals combines very poorly with any detector that sometimes has false positives.
You’d think, but then TikTok has been notoriously ruthless with their arbitrary unappealable bans and they’re so successful it became an issue of national security.
As nice as this would be, one classic problem with the internet is that enforcing a lifetime ban is basically impossible.
Everywhere (reddit, YouTube, Spotify) need to have a button to flag and then flag as ai. Reddit really has it buried in multiple levels of menus.
People are pretty darn good now at spotting ai.
An alternative is just use ai to look at the comments. Almost anything with AI has comments complaining about it.
All of these sites need to deal with it because it does drive away users.
And, as always, flagging will be abused to downrank content that people/bots/spammers/scummy-businesses/etc. would prefer you not to see.
Just penalize people for false flagging, and penalize false copyright claims while we're at it.
Good luck with that. I work in classical music and we can't post anything because it gets automatically flagged as copyrighted. They couldn't fix it then and they certainly won't fix it now.
This already happens on Hacker News. People frequently flag comments they strongly disagree with, rather than just downvoting them. Despite the fact that the "flag" was originally introduced to flag spam.
It must be a tricky problem to balance. On the one hand, you as Google want people to create 30 seconds of video per month with your cool Omni, Flow, Gemini, etc. tools.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
Maybe they're just going for "disclosure" as in people understanding it's AI, and hopefully mitigating fake news. Don't know if it impacts monetization?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
Also they're probably trying to prevent lawmakers from coming up with stricter limits. "We're already marking AI videos as AI, no need to change!"
Is it really any different than Google wants advertisers on YT, but still labels ads as ads?
They don't really want to label ads as ads (no advertiser really does...); they're forced by regulations from multiple countries.
Maybe I'm weird, but I believe in the theory that (all else equal) it's good for business to minimize how much your users hate your product/service.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
There's also the matter of brand reputation. You don't want to make your ads seem like your own or your user's public communications.
Google is not a monolith. For all intents and purposes YouTube might as well be a totally different company than Deepmind. Everyone in there own respective google fiefdom is trying to maximize their own metrics.
Why are they saying to not distribute on YouTube they just want to give an indicator. Same with labeling if a video is an AD. I find some of the obvious AI content to be funny or informative .
I mean, here's what I don't get: why does YouTube care? We're already uploading an entire human lifespan worth of videos to YouTube every day, do they really benefit from more content? Or is this content somehow inherently more monetizable than what people are already uploading?
Good. This should be done everywhere. I have ZERO interest in watching an AI movie or an AI song or an AI video
Genuinely don't care if its good or not. It's not for me
The idea that you can automatically detect AI generated content seems misguided. It will make mistakes. I think I've heard of things being wrongfully tagged as AI generated on other platforms.
I suppose it all depends on the false positive and false negative rates. But better to start now, before AI ruins the platform.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...
_before_? youtube is like the top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities, 5% actual videos, and the rest is slop of various types for me.
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
If you only visit youtube.com logged out in a private window, obviously it's going to show you what's the most popular. What else should it be doing?
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
Agreed. Youtube recommendations are genuinely great for me. Most of the time I'll be recommended so many more good videos than I have time for, that my "watch later" playlist only keeps growing.
Compared with, say, Netflix, where even though I've been rating everything I watch on there for 5+ yrs, the recommendations still barely feel personalized (if anything, it feels like it personalizes which premade "top list" to show me, but not the titles within them...but it does personalize the cover art/thumbnail, lol).
I don't only get to YouTube.com from a Google search and that on a browser that I'm not logged into - so it only shows me things that I searched for.
I'm of the opinion that people who get recommended constant slop are doing something very wrong, likely going out of their way to anonymize themselves as much as possible, then being all Surprised Pikachu when YouTube can't figure out what kind of content they like, so they get recommended the lowest common denominator popular stuff.
My feed is all channels I'm subscribed to or content from other creators that make similar content. I don't get Mr Beast or any other the other crap that people complain about.
You and I must be watching a very different YouTube. I don't see a lot of AI generated stuff in my recommendations or search.
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
Fair enough
I know they can identify them because if I click on one by mistake that's all I get until I go to about:blank, close YT tab, clear cache, close browser, run bleachbit and start browser. I never log into their site.
So far all it does to the video is add a small tag in the corner. It doesn't affect rankings or monetization. A false positive might annoy some subscribers at worst.
No one will click a video that has the ai tag though.
I mean this with all sincerity: so what?
If people don’t want to watch AI content, they should be able to avoid it. Just as a vegan should be able to know if a dish is appropriate for them. Besides: if you have to blatantly deceive people into watching your videos when they otherwise would choose not to, what are you even doing? And yes I understand people already do that. But we should not go out of our way to enable that. Plus the moment you are perceived as not disclosing that, you risk getting burned by someone online and facing much harsher, longer term consequences. Reputation still matters to a degree.
Ultimately I’m not sure we should be advocating for opacity in consumer products.
I think that if a video gets accidentally flagged as AI, it might signal to the creator to create better content. If your content is flagged, then it must be of a quality that is not discernable from slop.
Not really. These AI detectors are not quality detectors. I've seen real artists who do quality work have their old pieces they drew way before the invention of gen ai get flagged as AI. It's very detrimental to their business and brand.
It seems like the Google method here is identifying their synthid markings on content. Which won't cause false positives but only catches content from tools that actively adds this mark.
I'm just saying there is monetary penalty to having this tag applied, contrary to the parent comment. So mistakenly applying it to a real video would be very detrimental to the creator.
Oh you’re talking about specifically if it’s mistakenly applied, my bad I missed that
I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.
I think that is significantly harder to solve for without false positives ruining UX.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.
I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.
Twitter has community notes which fills the role pretty well. If an AI gen tweet goes viral it will get noted pretty fast
AI has completely ruined animal short videos on Youtube. Videos of pets behaving like humans are everywhere. At first they warm your heart, then you realize that you've been tricked.
The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.
I wonder how are they going to implement it. Many creators with even decent content use AI-generated visuals. In fact, everything could be AI-generated visual and whether that would be like Kurzgezagt, Asianometry or Sabine Hossenfelder content value wouldn't drop significantly. How do you draw the line?
Rich Beato can finally take a breath! Musicians truly hate the AI generated stuff, I guess in a way that only artists understand. I think it's completely different from AI generated code, in the sense that code is made by code, instead of code making music. People make music.
You have a point, but as a musician and programmer, I'm far more fond of AI generating things of a "no wrong answers" nature than things that are ostensibly correct.
Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).
The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint#Species_counterpo...
I would remove automatically the video if the creator did not label as AI. Or making a new part of Youtube like AiTube.
I can appreciate the talent and effort involved in developing new styles of music by scribbling on paper while being partially deaf, or dropping photographic painting skills for a weird style mimicking the anime of the era, but let's not pretend that average–human–level Turing-test–passing AGArtist has not yet been reached.
At this point, I bet the next human genius is going to be labeled as AI —by an AI.
One advantage is that if it's labelled as AI, we don't need to have a conversation in the comments about whether it's AI or not.
Only if you view the label as accurate, which you really, really should not.
If an account claims to be a bot, I don't see much downside in assuming it's true?
I wish HN would do the same for submissions.
I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.
What I absolutely loathe and instantly block is AI narration. That’s an instant deal breaker for me. And it’s gotten to the point that without a shot of the creator or obvious humanisms like microphone sounds, I assume a new creator is AI tts reading an LLM generated script. There are thousands of these channels.
I find that most "AI" content I see is an obviously genai script, obviously genai narration, and genai "b-roll", all of which are mostly trash.
I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.
That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.
It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.
What bothers me even more than AI narration is human narration of AI content. I come across so many videos now, especially in the genre of video essays about TV shows, that seems promising at first glance and then after listening for a couple minutes the AI patterns become obvious (it unfortunately takes longer to notice when spoken vs written). It is getting trickier to intentionally find good new channels; the algorithm does a surprisingly decent job as long as you’re consistent about what you’ll tolerate.
> I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.
As someone who doesn't use youtube, this seems conceptually wacky.
i.e. Why aren't those video simply RSS podcasts? Yeah, incentives, but if the video doesn't matter, they'd be a better product as a podcast.
Even if you're acquiring b-roll, a cheap subscription or even free content is a lot better in my view. Throwing in AI content is false precision.
I've thought about making explainer videos for math and CS concepts (with animated diagrams etc., you know). But I really don't want my voice and image out there any more than necessary / they already are. Now I'm wondering if this kind of work would be better off silent than with TTS…
I've resorted to lowering the quality of my recordings because of this. People are fantastically bad at discerning AI from properly produced audio. So now I leave in a couple of breaths and a little environmental noise to tap the brakes on the "AI slop" comments. Thing is, it would be trivial to add those to an AI narration.
Let’s use probabilistic models to find the probability of something being the output of another probabilistic model
I don't think this will do much against AI scripts. Which I feel are pretty common. Formulaic scripts read to utmost monotonic voice and boredom. Or simply just so good TTS I don't notice...
That's great news. Hopefully there will be a filter to allow or disallow AI video on your homepage/feed.
I really doubt that google will implement that filter. But I guarantee it'll be added soon to revanced and other patched youtube apps.
They could use the same data to pay AI posters less and push their content more. Which will get you a promotion at Google.
Sounds like a premium feature!
Honestly, that might get me to subscribe.
Yes, like filtering out shorts.
/s
Shorts were what made me install uBlock, even though I was a paid subscriber. uBlock is so handy at removing shorts, already-watched recommendations, etc. They keep making the interface worse.
I dumped my subscription because of it. If I have to use an ad-blocker to make the site useable, and the ad-blocker already blocks the ads which was the reason I subscribed in the first place...no point in paying anymore. Fuck 'em.
How about ones making a stupid video of SO question/answers
Where exactly do you want to draw the line?
If they don't it would be a relatively easy browser plugin to make.
Can't await this checkbox
Create your own browser extension to block them!
Some searches might have 99% videos I want filtered out.
I wish the same thing for the "AI dubbed" videos.
I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.
The individual creator can turn that off in settings — however, it was enabled automatically for everyone, and creators have to know to turn it off...
No joke, I would pay for this more than i do for premium.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
The filter is what is key. If they label all AI videos but still serve me AI slop as the first response, then it doesn't matter if it's labeled at all.
Something, Youtube should have done earlier. But anyway its a good step. But again there are many open models out there on HF that could bypass this just like synthid is not used is every image, similarly not every chinese AI model wants to get their output detected. Time will tell how this goes...
> Under YouTube’s guidelines, creators will still be required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI. But starting this week, it also will roll out a new internal system to help identify AI-generated content. “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
I don't know about SOTA, but Sight Engine (sightengine.com) has AI image detection which seems pretty solid. It can even identify specific image generators.
what makes you think that isnt just synthid? didnt anthropic and openai adopt it?
I'm wondering how they deal with AI-operated channels with non-AIG videos? I ask this because I'm the author of github.com/eat-pray-ai/yutu , which is a CLI/MCP for YouTube
Probably good for about two more years, tops. Like Google's CAPTCHA.
Youtube has also started AI translating other languages written in roman letters to english in chat for live streamers etc. Will be interesting to see what happens when they start doing this with google translate etc. English usually picks up words from other languages but if everything gets translated it will be interesting to see what happens. I am wondering if it will translate the slang that the current generation uses that goes over my head a lot of the time.
Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, YouTube is in a position here to simultaneously iterate on automatic AI video detection while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect.
I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.
Synthid and the like survive compression and decent quality rerecording.
Synthid is a watermark which indicates the video is AI-generated, not a digital signature indicating it's real. Completely different use case and threat model.
I'm not aware of any secure digital signature schemes that don't require the thing they signed to be bit-for-bit identical to pass verification.
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
Perhaps that could work in certain situations, but you don't even necessarily need digital signatures for that. A link to a reputable news site claiming they've verified the footage as real would be good enough in like 95% of cases, people just don't bother to check.
You'd also need close to 100% adoption for this to be effective, otherwise people will just assume the fakes were recorded with one of the cameras that doesn't sign its footage, or didn't bother to pay for the notary service.
How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?
Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.
Depends on what kind of compromise occurs. Hardware level key loss isn't easy, if possible at all to fix.
Only if you're paying them
Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.
They can attest pictures of my hairy pendulous ballsack.
Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)
I don't think it needs do be raw output. I'm pretty sure that signatures can exist within image and sound outputs that are reproducible when changing to other formats.
Yeah I’m not sure this makes sense when images are getting their third ifunny watermark.
Leica started doing this a few years ago in response to the first wave of AI images[0]. Other, bigger manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony as well I believe) have also joined, though with less fanfare. Adobe is in the loop.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
Yes, you're correct about private keys getting exposed, but it's better than nothing. I suspect though, even after key exposure there may be a way to make new private keys so that compromised keys have a known point when they are compromised, which makes public how much skepticism we should all have about authenticity.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
Cameras have a very long lifespan. People will still be using those cameras 20 years after the keys for their model get leaked.
And they will also get firmware updates.
I currently use a 2008 Fujifilm camera and a 2018 Sony. The Fujifilm doesn’t even have a firmware update mechanism, and the Sony camera doesn’t get updated anymore. These devices are rarely connected to the internet and never go obsolete so they get used until they break.
There might be a specialised line of cameras for forensics that signs the output and has lidar to detect when the camera is pointed at a screen, but the average person won’t have a camera with this kind of crypto. It would just be too easy for hackers to extract the keys from.
You still ultimately have the analogue hole here - pull the camera apart, splice your own hardware somewhere between the sensor and the thing that adds the signatures (or in front of the sensor).
Or just straight up point the camera at a computer monitor, without even trying to hide it. Most of the security camera footage online is already uploaded this way.
I intentionally didn't say that because I feel like people might dismiss that with "oh but you can tell the difference with sufficient analysis etc" whereas literally sending data directly through the same path as the real sensor would be potentially less detectable (or more, if the sensor itself has some kind of noticeable fingerprint)
Pointing the camera at a screen could potentially evade that.
Right, but my point is that a video of a screen should be less believable than the source video insofar as verifying legitimacy.
I feel it wouldn't be too difficult to get a social-media video to look convincing enough even with just a regular camera and monitor, at least after compression (if end users aren't served raw footage directly, and instead trust the attestation of the site).
Right, my point is that this should default to "untrustworthy." The idea is that a camera would at the very least include a timestamp and camera type in the signature. That signature should usually be reproducible when being filmed by another camera (these signatures can be part of the physical image). This should mean that a cameras filming screens would have multiple ways to show the images are not legitimate (as something as simple of shadows not matching time of day could show the video is illegitimate).
What you're describing is a watermark, not a signature
What I'm describing is a hidden watermark that contains a signature.
A signature over what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature
I'm familiar with the concept. A digital signature signs a message. What message are you signing?
What if you can't tell it's a video of a screen?
wouldn't that just encourage monopolistic behavior and lockdown of these devices?
they're already locked down as-is.
Why do we keep on seeing that elementary misconception? Cryptographic verification != reality of the underlying data fed to it! Plus vouching for hardware that is in consumer hands? There is the gaping analog hole of 'recording' arbitrary data streams. All that system would do is make it easier to deanonmyize speech.
Isn't this literally how GANNs are trained?
"AI generated video that's impossible to detect" is already something many companies are working on; it's hardly Google-specific.
YouTube scale is Google specific
It already is quite impossible. Just generate something decent with lower quality. Then maybe take screen recording of the output. Voila.
Then "low-quality for no reason in year the 2026 and beyond where phones shoot at 8k" become part of the heuristics.
Would be a fairly weak heuristic, with most social media images/videos already being like that.
Being pedantic for no reason is one of the heuristics I use to judge how annoying yn users are
I find it super ironic that we're basically here: https://xkcd.com/1683/ now. The 90s and 00s tech people would be very disappointed :-))
> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
Yeah, like Google doesn't know other hundreds of companies are also generating videos and will without the slightest shred of doubt will use reinforced learning to bypass this detection, meaning directly asking Google's AI if a picture they modified is AI or not to improve their algorithms, they know vouching for video is as useful as vouching for AI generated texts, zero.
Why is that tinfoil? That's just good business?
Much needed however, the future is definitely a mixture of AI and human in every field going forward. It might be relevant in short term but not for long.
If they could start labelling and allowing me to filter out the shitty AI Voiceover videos, I might even start using youtube shorts again.
They forgot to AI-label that Bender-sounding voiceover in the article…
I really appreciate this. AI content - even if we all use AI - and especially AI videos are a pain in the b*tt. Ai voice over with Ai imagery packed in 10-20 minutes lonog videos.
Who watches those anyways?
Maybe google web search should automatically label ai-generated articles
What google web search? It's gonna be all slop from here on out, according to Google.
That's not that helpful. For example there's thousands of 'psychology' videos with descriptive bait titles like 'the psychology of people who don't click on video recommendations' which are AI-screipted, narrated, and animated. If you look at the channels the same creator will have hundreds of videos that are micro-targeted to absurdity, like 'the psychology of women who spend too much time on youtube' or 'the psychology of people who don't watch big sports games'. Most of these seem to have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. Maybe the views are botted as well, but clop producers have every incentive to spend a few hundred $ in tokens and generate 50 or 100 new videos to just blanket the recommender engine and shut out regular content that takes time and effort to produce.
I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.
Check out the hundreds of slop feynman videos
I wonder if they will try to do this for songs in YouTube Music. I've stopped using their auto-generated playlists/recommendations/whatever because it kept playing AI-generated songs.
AI-generated music should be hard to detect
Harder to detect manually compared to image or video, but not necessarily harder to detect with another model. If it’s AI-generated MIDI (I have no idea if that’s the, or even a, way it’s done) there are probably patterns in the output similar to the way there are in generated text, but if it’s actually generating the audio itself then that should be pretty distinct at the finer-grained level that a model could analyze it at.
I wonder, will this impact those awful shorts that rip out and tack together the highlight seconds of longer videos and add a terrible AI voiceover?
Maybe they could fix their moderation and appeal process before adding a half-baked feature like this which is certain to cause more issues requiring moderation?
Hopefully this will also include human-generated content with AI scripts, which are not that hard to detect but require a certain amount of wasted time listening to the slop before I skip the video.
If they can pull this off correctly it would be amazing as a filter. Only Human videos please!
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI, we want to make the process more seamless and reliable. Starting in May 2026, we’re rolling out new internal signals to help identify AI-generated content.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.
I think most people wouldn't care either way. On HN, maybe 95% ppl care; outside, not so much.
So the PR risk here is I think reasonably low.
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI
Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.
I assume "require" is meant in the terms-of-service sense.
It's likely still a lot better than the current situation of not having any detection.
Anyone remember GAN? With enough iterations with a discriminator, we're gonna see more AI generated videos that are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. What then?
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
Just a heads up that Deezer has been tagging AI music already: https://business.deezer.com/ai-detection/
I see the comments below with the positive and negative aspects of AI, and I think there are very good points made. I've had this discussion before with many friends of mine, and the point I usually make is this: good or bad, there's no going back to the "good old days." I think of those movie trailers where the cast appears to plead with us to watch their upcoming movie in a theater, "the way it's meant to be seen." Do I agree with them? Yes. Do I think that as a society we're going to give up on streaming and go back to the theaters en masse? Not a chance in hell. You can always take a side on whether progress or change is a good thing or not, but what you can't do is turn back the clock. So the real question is: where do we go from here?
Good movies still pack theaters.
They do indeed, but the trend is clear. In the 1940's, people in the US went to the movies about 25 times a year. In 2002, it was just under 5 times a year. Today, it's around 2 times a year.
Gemini already labels images with a watermark even if you are using plain text on an original photo or template.
Basically forces me to use image editing software for something that could be greatly streamlined.
The dangers is videos that slip through the cracks, they get an indirect seal of being non AI.
Would really be nice if they did the same with their ads, but don't see that happening
The ads are labeled, much more so than the AI generated content.
Will a hybrid of AI and man-made content be flagged as an AI-generated video? I wonder what the threshold of the ratio of AI-generated content has to be to be classified as one.
I hope they're able to reliably detect it. I think theres some hope for images and videos, but ai generated text detectors are already throwing false positives at an absurdly high rate.
If they have a large preexisting AI-ERA subscriber base, which many do, it must be tempting preserve the time by reading AI text for segments of their content.
Submitted some pretty harsh feedback about this back in Jan after my old school technical father in law sent me a few AI generated “news” videos in a row about Trump and Venezuela. The AI label was technically on all of the videos but 3 taps away hidden in the video description, and not visible from the search results at all. So thankful YouTube is doing something about this.
I'm willing to bet this is just an easily bypassable SynthID check
AI versus AI, the final faceoff. Who's gonna win? Probably not us.
Whoever wins, we lose.
This is what YouTube needs to start doing:
1. Allow us to filter any and all content based on category or tag, this would include AI tagged videos 2. Demonetize any and all videos that incentivize antagonizing people (Looking at you prank videos) 3. Allow the reporting of video for "Criminal Activities" 4. Bring back the number of dislikes 5. Put the "not interested" option on video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail) 6. Put the "do no recommend this channel" option on the video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)
5 and 6 are enough of a pain point that I habitually open ALL videos in a new tab now, just so that I have the original feed view to nuke the channel from if it's shit.
Hmmm. I have a game on steam that has almost entirely AI-generated graphics (and AI-generated animations/code that move them), but we pay someone to do our promotional videos. Wonder if something like this would tag the video as AI-generated or not.
One field I was wondering about. There are a lot of channels/videos where they take movie summaries, feed it into an AI to generate TTS, graphics... I hate these videos but I'm also like damn good job trying to capitalize on that, why don't I do it kind of thing. I don't have that money making drive/hustle. I need to.
Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz
I wonder why they're really doing this. It's definitely not for users' benefit.
It could be. They seem to be getting enormous amount of politics or crypto related AI fake reels that real people fall for. They probably do need means to control spams.
I can already imagine this won’t be perfect (false negatives / false positives, for one thing) but this seems like a huge step in the right direction. Even just giving the “AI” label a more prominent spot than the description is a big deal, particularly for those who are less tech-savvy than your average HN user. My mom, for instance, can watch your one video that’s entirely AI-generated and not bat an eye, but then watch another video that’s clearly real and say it looks “off.” Say what you will about whether AI-generated content is valid or whether it should be allowed on the platform at all, but more transparency is only a good thing.
is this gonna affect the monetization of those videos too? Well i think even if not directly, people will somehow loose interest in ai generated videos, people would not want a low effort content grabbing there attention.
One of those HN titles I didn't even click before I upvoted, I'm ashamed/not ashamed to admit.
With AI.
Good start, but it seems you still need to click on the video though.
Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI content". Work together with the hardware and software layer with an open approach, building on top of contend id. I appreciate the privacy implications here are complex, and Google is dubious on using any tracking/fingerprinting technology for its self-serving and privacy-invading motivations, but an open cross-industry foundation owning and operating it may be a first step?
That's basically C2PA: https://c2pa.org.
I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.
If only they could automatically label all the videos made by real people with obviously heavily AI-involved scripts. Those "give me the ick" as the kiddos say these days.
I want to filter out ai generated videos
youtube really needs to go. like myspace. Ruined
if they would offer youtube plus, i would pay: - no ads. none. nothing - videos with sponsored content tagged, and option to auto skip - Option to HIDE ALL AI-videos. ALL. And channels. from search also - Option to HIDE ALL slideshow-videos (generated) all. From search also. - Community driven filter list that would auto-update. To hide all the shit content.
Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk
Good. The flood of AI slop has basically meant, when searching for videos of a given topic, having to ignore videos created in the last couple of years because a high percentage of them are garbage - a situation that must be devastating for creators of new quality content.
I am really sick of AI generated videos. I don't have anything against AI videos per se but the fact that it's so easy to generate videos that people are churning out really really bad quality videos out there.
There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.
> There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I find this awful, but it's not a remotely new thing.
I want to believe it (and filter all that crap), but YT recently removing the sort by new/date option because 99% of results being useless AI slop doesn't inspire much trust.
this is a welcome change but if the creator doesn't disclose the use of AI, how do they detect what is AI and what is not?
Watermarking and machine learning.
s/machine learning/AI :)
I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
Sure .. but I still can't blacklist creators based on keywords. It's impossible to avoid certain creators which are like cancer.
https://m.youtube.com/VaniaManiaKids
This shit pops up everywhere and is impossible to filter, as it is translated into many languages.
the ability to simply exclude such content from recommendations & search results would be welcome.
Now label AI ads and let us filter them out.
Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.
This is awesome. I am building something similar for writing - https://trulytyped.com
do they detect ai-generated ads?
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
Welcome to the future and the brave new world I guess.
"detect". God help us all.
about time
Now can LinkedIn please label posts
This is fine, good, whatever... but my thing is can creators remove it successfully for 'false flags'.
> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,
YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.
I really wish there was a button to voluntarily say / tag your own content as AI assisted.
The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.
Your wish has been granted - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491
Too bad they are not including the script writing, some people pass on the visual but you can tell in 10 seconds or less it was written by AI - or an AI voice that is reading AI written slop.
I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!
This could backfire.. im thinking of "real" videos with elements of AI in them. Those elements might not get the video flairs as an AI video and people will get fooled
Let the cat and mouse begin, since this will be a moving line.
hot take: terrible idea
this just applies high quality selection pressure to have ai videos be more realistic
Hell yea!
They need to have a way to report AI videos not labeled as such, AND a checkbox to filter out AI videos on the home page and in search results. Not holding my breath for either.
There are two things needed for this to be successful,
1. Detection of AI voiceover. The article makes several references to photo realistic AI content but it's the voiceovers that are killing me.
2. Filtering options for viewers. It's not enough to be able to know if a video is generated. I don't want to see them, ever.
Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
There's no way to switch back to the original audio track? I agree you shouldn't have to but I'm wondering if it's possible.
You can change the audio track back to the original.
Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.
It doesn't remember my preference. Or rather, it seems to remember me picking a specific language, and then loads the dub in that language next time I click a video. It doesn't remember "don't duh videos".
It does remember it. At least on Firefox/Linux.
Not if you Airplay to your TV. I get random foreign languages when I watch English speaking YouTubers. No way to enable subtitles or change the language. It's a known bug according to the internet.
There are several Chrome extensions for turning that off automatically, but I agree: you should not have to need extensions to use YouTube.
You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there
The problem is that it doesn't even respect this choice. My native language is not English and most of the videos in this languages will be auto transcript to English. Even the last time I changed both the language and country and YouTube still managed to auto transcript to English.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
That just tells it which languages to serve if the video has multiple tracks, including Ai-generated ones. "Keep original language" should be the default, or at least an opt-in.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
I don’t know that Settings -> languages is obscure
try this. https://gist.github.com/Buildstarted/c6b156ec95dc012c5f3dc5e...
Even worse, sometimes it dubs ads, where there's no way to switch the audio track and no way to see if it's being dubbed. This also makes it look like the dubbed audio is the original audio from the ad, which makes the advertiser look terrible.
It's an option that individual channels can disable. Granted, it's opt-out, but YouTube emailed creators several times about it well before:
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
Settings -> languages and then add German as one of the languages you know and it’ll never do this again
I don't know German. That's why I'm looking up German language tests.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just label AI-free videos?
good first step.
better next step: allow us to block them
even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.
By the way, also this:
> As this technology continues to improve, creators remain in control.
Well, some folks disagree that they are in control. See the rise of FairTube - granted, FairTube has infrastructure issues, but the problem is Google controlling videos via youtube. This has to change in the long run.
Also:
> Our commitment to responsibility
^^^ pointless self-promo by an AI slop adCompany. They censor at will. I know that because so many videos I had bookmarked, suddenly were taken down at a later time - and not by the original author. Often you can find the same (!!!) video again on youtube.
Honestly, I'm a bit concerned here. YouTube's automated tools aren't the greatest at flagging content, and quite a few videos have been mistakenly marked as for kids/infringing copyright/being in the shorts format.
The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.
But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:
A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.
Also the amount of scammy crap quality on YouTube has exploded since developing countries have more access. The cost of publishing is tending to zero.
It would also help if there was a public way for viewers to indicate slop, regardless of AI. Maybe a dislike button?
Hopefully it will allow you to filter out AI slop. TikTok currently does not do this, and it’s infuriating.
GOOD!
I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.
with views
I got Netflix recently because I wanted my 4 year old son to have a bit of screen time. He is very active, loves to play outside, draw, paint and does a lot of different activities so I thought there's no harm in a bit of screen time... But YouTube was awful because he would end up watching creepy AI slop videos of extremely colorful 3D cars or airplanes or whatever... Very repetitive. Or sometimes there would be videos of colorful painted toys being washed with a monotonous voice repeating the same thing over and over and saying stuff like "Wow, it's big" in the most monotonous voice possible (and no, the toy was not even big)... There's something very creepy about hearing emotionally charged sentences being expressed with such dull apathetic tone and saying things that aren't even factually correct. Complete trash. I could feel myself getting brainwashed in realtime. No more YouTube. Definitely this AI slop should not be promoted.
Thank fuck. There is SO much garbage on YT lately which amounts to a powerpoint deck with ai audio overlaid.
Unfortunately I'm not sure this will affect those at all...it's specifically for "realistic" AI use according to all the quotes. I'm not sure narration or illustration/slides generated by AI would be covered at all in that case.
Anything more competent than Microsoft Sam counts as realistic in my book. If their definition excludes narration that would be weird.
Their detection might not look at audio right now though.
I suppose, but I guess the quality of voice narration I've heard is still closer to "realistic robot" than anything.
The flaws can be pretty subtle sometimes. I don't want any subtlety. If I'm not hit in the face with a brick over how mechanical it is, put a disclaimer.
When a segment is about a place or thing with a particular name and the pronunciation completely shifts from one to the next it’s a big annoyance.
Using AI to detect AI is just another step in an endless arms race to insanity.
This is great. We don't want to drown in AI slop, and (perhaps more importantly) we don't want people to think that real videos are AI generated. Any signal which helps distinguishing the two is helpful, even if it isn't perfect. This is also why I think it's good that OpenAI is adopting Google's Synth ID watermark for images.
"We've heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content."
As if Google really cares about the opinion of people. They just realised that AI is killing youtube - if you come to that conclusion, then "labeling" the AI slop isn't going to solve the problem really. Personally I already classify ALL AI-videos as slop-spam. I've also noticed the "suggested" videos in the last few weeks, on youtube, to really go down in quality a LOT. Google does not seem to understand how severe this problem is.
Can we add the AI voice over videos as well please?
"Please prove your content was created by a flawed biological organism."
Seems better than the alternative: "This content was created by a machine, but being pushed/promoted by a flawed money-grubbing biological organism".
Finally a decent change by Youtube! Great job Youtube but overall unsure about the situation at Google itself and what Google itself is doing.
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
Original article: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-vie...
This should be the original link since its the official announcement and has more concrete info, hope mod(s) can update.
Ok, updated above with the other link in the toptext.
Isn’t YouTube applying weird AI processing to shorts?
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
I think the "weird AI processing" might have been someone misunderstanding a compression codec. When laypeople see anything advanced, it's always called AI no matter what it actually is, and that's the word that spreads around.
I’m not going to dox my YT channels, but I do know the difference between the two and a year ago YT admitted to automatic AI “enhancements”.
I’ve also seen the trend of TV clip slop using AI filters to I assume get by automatic copyright flagging/removal/de-monetization.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
I agree , AI got so good that you can hardly distinguish real video from AI generated , especially cartoons