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???
It’s basic SEO slop logic applied to video.
All the popular topics are already crowded, so you shotgun very specific search terms in the hope of capturing the majority of people searching for that term because nobody else has anything on it.
For instance, if you have a web shop selling fish equipment, “how to keep fish” is probably extremely crowded, so you would target a bunch of specific search terms like “how to teach crabs to read classical Latin”
Now I wanna learn how to teach crabs to read classical Latin.