Woah woah woah okay I just noticed something about YouTube and idk if it’s old news but I just noticed it, it seems new, and it explains a lot, one sec need a screenshot
So.
Have you been on Facebook recently? Probably not. Because it’s unusable. Dead internet theory has become dead internet reality there, and it’s uncanny. AI generated images are commented on and have interaction generated with AI generated comments on blank bot accounts. If there’s human interaction somewhere in the mix, it’s hard to find. There’s enormous amounts of vapid statements that are all same-y, and all have that distinct AI cadence to them.
I noticed that something similar seemed to be happening with YouTube. In ye olden days, YouTube comments were notorious for being moronic as hell. But it’s different now. Where once home grown stupidity roamed freely, there were now grammatically correct, but extremely valid statements that often repeated similar sentence structures and even seem like mad libs. YouTube comments are filled with “this reminds me of [noun]” “I liked the moment when [thing that happened in video]” “this makes me feel [emotion][emoji]” etc etc etc. Just kind of shallow observations about the videos.
I don’t pay much attention to YouTube comments at all, but based on the glances I saw, I just kinda assumed YouTube was going the way of Facebook, and the bots were taking over. This is a change that’s happened within the past year or so, so I assumed that the recent AI boom just resulted in more bots than YouTube can handle and didn’t pay attention.
Today I noticed something though. I was listening to some music that isn’t easy to find on my usual streaming service, and I briefly noticed the comment box.
It’s prompting me, a human, to write a comment in one of those formats. Idk how long this has been there, but this is the first time I’ve noticed this little prompt, giving me a prewritten sentence structures to work with. So idk how long this has been there, or if this is all old news.
So YouTube is prompting very specific, yet very dumb comments. Interesting. Already has implications for the death of organic human interaction online, but eh, not that big a deal.
But the KINDS of sentences that they’re promoting are definitely of note. Because from what I can tell, they’re prompting users to generate content tags en masse to train AI.
“This reminds me of other media” -> helps decide what ads to provide on these kinds of videos
“This makes me feel emotion” -> genre tag for recommendation algorithms
“I liked the part where things happened” -> engagement analytics, and also providing written descriptions for moments in the video to train video recognition.
And of course, lots of the training done isn’t reducible to direct “this type of comment trains this”, but ends up a lot more black boxy. Google also explicit asks you to tag things sometimes, but that gets FAR less engagement than making people think they’re just leaving their innocent little thoughts around.
Now, Google is no stranger to this. They’ve been doing this with recaptcha for… Probably approaching a decade at this point. But it was interesting to notice what seems like the newest iteration of this. This almost strikes me as a creepier, more insidious iteration of a dead internet- one where humans are still ultimately generating interaction and comments, but at the unknown service of a machine.
youtube also recently unveiled new AI “features” for youtubers, now you can get AI generated video ideas which are partially based on the videos you actually make, and with their own AI generated thumbnails!
and even creepier, they added a feature for youtubers to reply to comments with AI generated replies, being obviously trained on your previous replies
God damn. Mask off dead internet. That’s honestly wild, and is probably a huge reason why they’ve added these types of comment prompts in the first place.
amhrancas 