I watch a lot of STEAM videos on YouTube. In the past I loved supporting new creators but some time last year I stopped trying new channels that don’t have human presenter, there’s just so much slop. Now I’ve noticed that there are channels where even the presenter is AI. I can spot a few tells (presenter is never on screen for very long, voice pacing doesn’t vary, no ums and ahs, etc) but it’s getting harder and I wish I knew more clues.
One thing that seems to help is checking the channel history (does the presenter age, have they only started making content very recently etc)
Can someone recommend a good, recent guide to spotting AI videos?
I think we’re at the point where trying to identify things as specifically AI-generated is becoming too difficult to be worth it, i’d say just start generally filtering out things that aren’t made in good faith.
I’ve been judiciously telling youtube to not recommend me channels that post sensationalized/inflammatory/etc content whenever they show up in my recommendations, and the algorithm has mostly given up on trying to brainwash me at this point.My rule of thumb is that anything that isn’t borderline fucking boring is probably trying to manipulate me, if a dry wikipedia-style description isn’t interesting then i see no reason to bother with it.
I check not only if the channel is recent but also how often they release a video.AI channels churn them out at quantity real creators don’t. Still not perfect,need more ways to spot them.
There’s a channel I recently got into where every episode was “I watched every episode of [LONG-RUNNING TV SERIES] and here’s what I found.”
They were posting 2 episodes a week.
I find that I can’t catch AI more easily if I’ve seen what it can output.
For example, the older videos used to use generative AI on the images and videos themselves, which made it easier to spot those.
Some newer videos are made with the “agentic” tools that have access to various scripts and animation libraries, which come out looking very polished and visually identical to human produced ones. For those, I find that the AI will put unnecessary “work”, into the irrelevant parts of the visualizations. Some of the libraries and fonts are more popular than others, so you might notice a pattern that way too.
For an example to the second category, check out the recent videos from this channel, which has AI generated “music videos”: https://m.youtube.com/@degenerativepixels
Thanks for the advice and the link. I almost don’t mind AI used for traditional animation, I know its awful and plagiaristic so I avoid it but it doesn’t creep me out in the same way that photoreal deepfake stuff does. Do you know if there are limits to movement, expression etc that are tells for the realistic video?
Do you know if there are limits to movement, expression etc that are tells for the realistic video?
With how many different models there are, I don’t think there is any standard to look for
The audio is often a tell. Listen to a few that you know are AI and pay close attention to the “human” voices. They often make sounds that can’t come from human anatomy. They also often sound “over produced” or “over compressed” (like poor quality audio).
AI generated anything has been easy for me to identify so far.
Primarily there is nothing “organic” in the generations. Nothing in the texts, nothing in the images, nothing in the videos.
Unfortunately, I can’t summarize it in a lemmy post, or a Wikipedia article, or maybe even a textbook.
Essentially, every generation yields something that is not real that triggers in my mind “wait, this isn’t real.”
Take the voice synthesis LLMs like Gemini. The voice is constantly changing throughout the response. In images, something is usually shaped off, or the lighting is incorrect, or something that should be comepletely parellel isn’t. There’s too much to describe what I’ve noticed but there’s always something.
Video is even easier - just like how the voice changes throughout the response, the videos “morph” throughout the frames. Sometimes its very obvious, sometimes its more subtle.
Sometimes I wonder if its because my autistic brain is so bad at filtering sensory input that I just catch ALL that stuff.
I have never seen more slop than on YouTube. If you continue to use it, but don’t want to see slop, you’re going to become increasingly disappointed. It’s already so bad that most things you search for turn up 50%+ slop. I see no reason that won’t get much, much worse.
