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'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…

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 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.

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.