When I search YouTube for videos related to my topic of research that I would consider pretty obscure, 95% of the videos are completely AI-generated, with ChatGPT scripts, AI-generated thumbnails, etc. It makes it really difficult to find video sources, so I have mostly given up on finding good information of YouTube nowadays.

For more general topics (smartphone reviews, food, fashion, and other topics that have a wider audience) the abundance of AI-generated videos makes sense. Pumping out thousands of videos that thousands of people will watch and earn a lot of money. But the videos on more obscure topics rarely get many views and there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for them to exist except to piss on people trying to find non-AI-generated sources.

For reference, I am looking for sources for a Physics research project on observed baryon asymmetry in the universe and the different proposed mechanisms to explain it, such as leptogenesis and ew baryogenesis. I am very surprised that topics like baryon asymmetry, CP violation, neutrinos, etc. are filled with AI slop to such an extent. It’s kind of insane. Who’s doing this, how are they doing this, and why???

  • Hond@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    10 hours ago

    My guess(!): Big topics are already crowded by big channels which get an algorithmic boost because of their past success. Its harder to get your slop prominently shown and establish your content slop farm with these topics. While with niche topics its easier to get your video to the top of the search results.

    There are opensource tools like https://n8n.io/ to automate the creation of slop content. From what i heard its piss easy to setup. Like here is a half an hour tutorial to set you up:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u54cy2nQig

    Then you shit out the slop content and hope your channel picks up. If it fails to drive numbers you abandon it and start with the next channel with the next topic variation. If you get lucky and the algorithm blesses you, you continue to shit out hundreds of videos.

    As seen eg in the video of redlyne about the dead internet theory. Where he looks a bit into the slop channels on youtube and other stuff:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJKOYOkRMk

    • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Then you shit out the slop content and hope your channel picks up. If it fails to drive numbers you abandon it and start with the next channel with the next topic variation. If you get lucky and the algorithm blesses you, you continue to shit out hundreds of videos.

      I’m not even sure that you would have to do the abandoning part. There’s likely toolkits that let you upload to multiple channels at once. You can just start them up and spread them out as you wish.

      Why abandon a channel when it costs nothing to upload to it, and it might go viral one day?

      A lot of older videos can be randomly promoted by the algorithm.