Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless.

AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?

You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.

I dunno; there has always been shit videos on YouTube, obviously, but there used to be a sort of natural filter of videos that had nice transitions and decent narration and dialog that was more or less grammatically correct that made it so that I would mostly watch videos I enjoyed.

Now that AI has cargo-culted these traits I'm getting a lot of recommendations of videos that will initially seem "ok", and then I realize after about a minute that the narration will have some weirdness, and the script will have a lot of the typical ChatGPT "tells", and of course the video comes off as pretty low effort after that.

My YouTube recommendations have become increasingly useless, which honestly might be a good thing because it's made it so that I have less desire to use YouTube.

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chasd00 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The weirdness is creeping in to regular Youtube content too. For example, I like to watch Ryan Hall's stream during extreme weather (tornado season in the US). In his forecast videos he has to start with something weird to prove to the audience they're not watching a fake AI generated channel, like eat a banana or apple while talking and wave the fruit around. It was very strange until i realized what he was doing. He also started wearing a suit which is very out of character for him, that must also confuse AI trained on his previous videos.

	▲	ssl-3 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think there's a couple of things going on here. The first is AI-generated content. This can start with nothing more than an idea. Some of it is uniquely-presented stuff that's actually kind of interesting: I got sucked into a nice Ken Burns-style narrated documentary about the rise and fall of Baldwin Piano a few weeks ago. It was a little wordy, but it worked. It took awhile before a very glaring error in diction made me rewind for a double-take, note that no human would ever make that mistake while narrating, and then burn the channel from my feed. The second problem is very different: Cloning individual people and channels. When a person (or nearly as likely, a bot) elects to use a bot to clone someone else's style, persona, and everything else then that's... that's very unsettling. --- The first problem? It's whatever. I don't like it, but there may come a time when I accept it. At this point it's mostly harmless and really guilty of nothing more than wasting some of my time now and then. The second problem? It can be reprehensible. And it's particularly bad with a channel like Ryan Hall. I don't have any idea of how he is as a person (never meet your heroes), but I like to presume that he's generally a swell guy. And moreover: He's important. When the weather turns iffy, I put his stream on and it's mostly just background noise. I usually give it very little attention. But when he mentions the name of the small city I live in then that means that shit is just about to get very real here -- very soon. That's astoundingly useful to me, and the safety of the people I care about. I also find a lot of value in obvious parody. It's can be fun, and it can make people think. The music of Weird Al or There I Ruined It, the crazy stories in The Onion, the memes. That's all good. But this Ryan Hall business? It's bad. So, there's definitely a line. And I don't know where the line should be drawn. But using bots to deceive and thereby dilute the value of the content of Ryan Hall's channel is definitely on the wrong side of that line.

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Insanity 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I discovered a new band some weeks ago (Hexxenmind) through Spotify. Really liked them, then checked concert dates only to find out it’s AI generated.

Honestly couldn’t tell in the moment but now that I know it’s generated it somehow feels “cheaper” and I dislike listening to them.

	▲	comprev 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been caught out a few times after learning a new artist I liked was AI. The time spent listening to AI music _could_ instead been spent listening to something created by a human. That is what pisses me off the most!

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throwaway27448 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?

From this attitude you might as well get your entertainment from spam or ads.

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fantasizr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

a lot of gen ai is essentially a pollution machine creating digital single use plastics. Whoever can identity and sift it for value will be the after ai heroes.

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UncleMeat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI creation kills cultural sharing.

People who create AI music are largely not sharing it with others for any reason other than to create a revenue stream. They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas. The system builds brick walls where there was once osmosis.

How can art evolve under these conditions?

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1234letshaveatw 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why are some crafts more sacred than others?

	▲	array_key_first 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because some crafts are more sacred than others. Making a painting is more sacred than smearing my shit in the Barns and Nobel bathroom stall, although arguably less fun. Who decides that? We do, collectively. Why do we have that power? Because we define art. Why do only humans have this power? Because art is an innately human thing, so we get to decide.
	▲	UncleMeat 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't know what you mean by this. The same effect can be felt in other forms of art.

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charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas.

If not they most definitely are listening to other music that influences them. If you have proof that such a producer listens to 0 music feel free to share it.

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Forgeties79 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.

Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.

I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.

Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.

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Forgeties79 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a much more concise and effective way of communicating my thoughts ha

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gedy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think a lot of people make an assumption that problems like this are fixed-sized; that by making getting a song easier, that that's the end of the the line.

In my mind the better mindset is to think that the problems are not fixed size, and instead these tools can allow for bigger and cooler projects, and/or projects that wouldn't be possible (or at least would be infeasible) without some kind of technological assistance.

AI tools can be used to create slop that is either "bad" or extremely bland at an effectively-infinite speed. It could also be used to make some really cool and interesting stuff if a person is really willing to spend time and effort to make it cool. Usually this requires more than just "prompting" though.

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Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The difference between this and what we are seeing in this article is you aren't sitting down, grinding out dozens/hundreds of these, then spamming them with little to no regard for anyone else for profit. You do it at small scale, for yourself/friends, and clearly care about the results. You are trying to make something intentionally.

	▲	gedy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, exactly a good way to put it.

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mvdtnz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are describing AI slop.

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gedy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not in my book, I know a lot of low/no effort attempts to spam "content creation" channels, no curation, etc that I'd call slop before this. I'm trying to use AI to generate something that did not/would not exist otherwise. It's admittedly probably better because it's using human-written lyrics for the covers (and memories?), but to be honest, 80s new wave lyrics can be pretty hokey. "Any AI = slop" is probably more a belief system than an objective measure.

	▲	tombert 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think what you're doing, or at least what you described, is inherently slop. If you're actively putting in effort to make something you think is cool and to make something you're actively proud of (or at least something that you genuinely want people to enjoy), I don't think that's "slop", or at least I don't think it's bad. It's certainly different than those low-effort channels that mass upload hundreds of videos a day because they're able to automate the entire video-making process; those are completely soulless, again almost by definition. Those exist to just try and effectively skim revenue from adsense (or subscriber revenue in the case of Deezer), and making something that people will actually "enjoy" isn't the purpose. Of course, this isn't a new problem; I remember a few years ago (before generative AI became viable for this stuff), there were "tutorials" on the best way to upload hours and hours of noise or silent music to Spotify to extract revenue, and of course let's not forget the infamous "Elsagate" stuff that plagued YouTube. AI has maybe accelerated the problem but it certainly wasn't the first thing to create "slop". I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but AI is a tool. Tools can be good or bad; if AI is a tool that you can use to actively help you be more creative then I don't think that's bad. If you're just generating something to pad a resume or extract ad revenue, that's slop.