eevBLAB 99 - AI SPAM BOT Youtube Space/Science/Tech Channels? - WTF

WTF are these random mash content spam space/science/tech Youtube channels? Are they auto-generated AI bots?
These channels get over 1M views a day!

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#Youtube #SPAM #AI

[Szlater]

I’ve noticed the exact same thing for military-themed channels. Computer-generated voiceovers, usually sourced direct from Wikipedia articles and they have similar numbers of views to the videos you mention. I think there are content generation farms in China and India putting these videos out based on trends in the media. The computer generated voiceovers are very convincing, but you can find the software they use with a little google search.

[Thunderft]

this stuff drives me crazy too. They all use voice to text and stock video footage to give it the veneer of credibility through production but the content is devoid of value.

Sadly YT is an attention and in this evolutionary war.... this commercially produced goop is successful....

Take a look at the effort some people put into their videos, then look at this almost automatically produced if you were in it for the money. (revenue per time) ...its clear what the winning strategy sad really :-(

[boltvanderhuge]

They're just one aspect of a bigger problem youtube is having recently with spam. Someone somewhere has developed software that can generate a mostly coherent script about random popular topics in the news, pull random images and video clips that loosely match the script, then generate text to speech for the script and upload it. Even youtube ads are being effected. 24/7 nonstop spamming of content that follows no easily detectable pattern

[Dratchev]

we used to use something called dislike count to avoid rubbish like this, but google had to take the dislike away from us cause they had to protect a potato in DC

[stephenw]

I have an older friend and their Youtube feed is full of that sort of rubbish. Makes me cringe every time I see it.

[masterviper]

Starting on July 29, 2022, channels will no longer be able to hide their subscriber count on YouTube

[WizardTim]

While we're on the topic of YouTube spam, there are videos that take stackoverflow questions, use that as the video title and then the actual video is just text to speech of an answer from that stackoverflow question along with random unrelated stuff or often they use unanswered stackoverflow questions and just have an answer from a completely unrelated stackoverflow question. By the time you figure out what's going on you've already given them a good chunk of watch time. I baselessly speculate from my biased opinion that this spam content has had a massive influx since YouTube added the ability to hide sub count and removed dislikes.

[AndTecks]

This needs to be addressed ASAP. Preferably by some extremely popular youtubers. Every time I try to look up something scientific I am flooded with like 90% bot channels. Their ratios are a bit of an obvious sign. Thank you for letting me know I am not just crazy.

[robroysyd]

There was an ad on YT about how to make money from YT without creating any real content. I suspect this how the've been teaching people to do it. Yes, there are text to speech AIs available now with quite a selection of voices. One other thing I find amusing is all the ads on YT for ad blockers.

[Appalling]

I’ve been noticing this trend over the last year or two now. Because I watch so much science content, my feed has become extremely overpopulated with this automated crap. My only solution is to individually select them out using the “Don’t recommend channel” function on the 3-dot elipse. Totally annoying!

[conceptrat]

Finally someone picking on these stupid channels. My gullible old friend just loves the channels because he falls to do any due diligence.
I think the voice overs are using the Google text to speech API. This is the progression from the “jungle building “ channels.

[Smidge]

The same thing happened a few years ago but with Children's content. Really bizarre algorithm-optimized garbage. Seems they've been refining their game since YT cracked down on monetizing children's related content.

[plusmanikantanr]

fickle youtube will ban cucumbers but allow everything else 😂

[sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh]

"It happened", "Insane" or caps lock -> "don't recommend this video/channel".
Works for most of low quality content.
Sometimes I see caps lock on not-so-bad videos, but it is better to click "don't recommend" on them too, to teach both YouTube and creators about good manners.

[DVSProductions]

This seems all ai generated. You can see that the thumbnails are just combinations of certain predefined elements. The voice is also clearly ai. Propably the script too. Pretty advanced stuff. If they are clever enough they may have also trained an ai to select stock images for the video and switch between them

[eudorian]

These channels to me have the same feel as Discovery. The only difference being that no content is crammed into 25 minute video's instead of 25 min content, 25 commercial, 40 mins repeat of the same info the was served before the last commercial. Oh, and announcing what will be announced after the commercial.

[StreuB]

1. These are called subscriber farms.
2. They are completely automated and farm the web for what current topics are, kit bash them together, then farm wikipedia pages for the content based on keywords, then an automated script is created, and an SI voice program is used to convert the script to AI voice.
3. The people behind these are generally in China and Russia.
4. They are generally backed by actual governments.
5. The channels will go hard and heavy until their subscribership tails off, then the channel goes dormant.
6. After the dormancy period, the channels content goes private and it is either sold Or more commonly, it is used for political propaganda purposes.
7. The above happened during the 2016 US elections. Hundreds of YT channels all of a sudden went active with anti-Trump videos. Channels with millions of sub's that seemingly came out of nowhere. I know because I was subbed to several channels that all of a sudden began hitting my daily sub's with content that I would have never subscribed to.
8. I believe this huge surge is in preparation for the next elections and likely also something to do with Russia and Ukraine.

[dilucide]

The voice is most certainly AI generated. When you listen closely it has some of the typical computer generated voice artifacts, though admittedly, it is one of the better artificial voices.

[hempbear]

Thanks to the "Don't recommend channel" function, I crush these s*it channels like bugs.

[eideticex]

Easy way to spot AI generated voices in the current scheme they use. Timings are all over the place. From one word, sometimes even syllable to the next it's changing timing. It almost sounds like they are using a data set for timing that contains data from multiple, incompatible measures without any conversion to massage it into the same unit.