Curious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
This is much needed. I’ve had family members sending me videos about what looked like news when in fact it was 100% AI. There are photorealistic AI videos pretending to be an old man giving life advice, or business advice, etc. and the disclosures were all the way at the bottom of the video description, very hard to find.
I suggest turning off recommendation if you dislike what they suggest
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Maybe they could hand out lifetime bans to people who upload untagged AI music? Obviously that wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I could see it helping.
> This isn't possible on Youtube right now.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
I suggest stopping any and all interaction w/ the algorithm. Get a library card and be intentional about your media consumption choices.
It's a nice thought but it ignores that there is so much interesting, informative media on youtube that just does not exist anywhere else, at all.
Or just use Channel Surfer.
When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
A nicer way that also works on mobile is turning the watch history off. C
> If you think you can't quit youtube
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
Why don't you have an adblocker for your whole browser?
Their recommendation engine has surfaced awesome obscure content I would have never found otherwise so I value it.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
Same for me. Godsend. It also switches off showing me a follow up "short" after I watch the one I want to watch.
I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"
It's somewhat deceiving practice IMO although it could simply be my insecurity.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
Yeah exactly, they could have made their service useful by showing your subscriptions instead. Yet, they decided to enshittify for people who want choices.
Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)
Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)
This ^
I'm curious where the line is.. several ambiguous but common scenarios:
- Occasional AI b-roll during explainer videos
- AI generated backing track (music)
- AI generated shots sprinkled in a short film
- Showing examples of AI video as an AI capability update or commentary
I'd say that if anything AI generated ends up in the final product then it should be labeled as AI made. So using AI as a prototyping tool would be fine but using it either to generate the end product itself or using it to generate a script would require tagging.
Plenty of big artists like Kanye use AI to experiment with ideas before releasing the full studio recordings. That’s going to become more common. Just like how developers use LLMs to make a POC to test new ideas before putting the hard work into making it real.
People still admit to listening to Kanye since he started talking about his love of Hitler?
People are still buying Teslas?
Deepfakes in VFX is another borderline one.
Other than your last bullet point I don't see anything ambiguous. It's a very clear line. I do not want to see an explainer video with AI generated content, end of story.
I absolutely hate those full-blown AI 'explainers' that just have AI voiceover and a bunch of auto-placed b-roll. I don't want to see them. But I don't think that falls in the same bucket as a creative short film with some AI-generated SFX or someone doing a tutorial with an AI-generated lofi track in the background.
I have a hard time believing that AI can be used to label AI-generated videos without there being a significant number of false positives/negatives. I think back to ZeroGPT and it labeling the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
In theory you're right, in practice you're not.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
This attitude of "individual cases don't matter as long as the average case is somewhat covered" is exactly why the world's going to shit.
The parent post's worry is warranted, IMO.
You're wrong from your very premise. The world isn't going to shit. It's better than it's been at pretty much any time in human history, in almost every facet.
(Individual experiences may vary)
In theory you're right, in practice you're not.
You're arguing the world is at its peak, they're arguing it's directed in a shit direction. You're not disproving them at this point.
Fair enough. The online world is going to shit.
You could say it's trending up, but there is no way you can deny that we are in a regressive period.
>(it's all AI cheating now)
My daughter's English professor is now requiring people to hand write their essays during class. So at least there is that.
People feel strongly about AI generated content; this is a case where false positives can destroy credibility and disrupt careers.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
They don’t seem to care about false positives anywhere else on the platform. Being at the mercy of automated Google systems comes with the territory.
There will also be tiktok challenges to do a video that YouTube flags as AI without actually using AI.
This isn't even at the level of the spam filter on your email account. Are there some false positives and negatives? Yes. Are there some people sending emails who are negatively affected by falsely ending up in the junk mail folder? Yes. Are we going to turn off spam filtering because of this? No. Why should we accept video spam any more than text spam?
We'll I'd think that YouTube would have incentive to get it right. Either there are too many false positives and the content creators go away and YouTube collapses. Or there are too many false negatives and the viewers go away, and YouTube collapses. I mean there is a chance that garbage people will ruin video sharing platforms for everyone.
Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"
This isn't a choice between "perfectly fine how things are now" and "destroying credibility". If it were, you're right - "good enough to be useful" wouldn't be a high enough bar.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
And this philosophy will only lead to Kafkaesque nightmare scenarios for 1-2% of the population, so we're still coming out ahead.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found that one of his YouTube videos had gotten a little less engagement.
This definitely needs substantiation. I've NEVER seen such usable tools EVER. AI flagging in general has always been very sketchy IME.
People make a living off this platform though, this could be really bad for someone that lives off of YouTube to have their videos labeled as AI generated. This would still be OK if there was a person at YouTube you could contact to manually review and reverse the decision, but that doesn’t really exist so there’s no one you can really appeal to in a timely manner.
Wouldn't the human creators be the biggest advocates of labeling, so that their content can be more easily found among the AI dross? And that's not considering the fate of the platform as a whole if it descends into low-effort AI spam swamping out everything else. I guess it will be interesting if it is all bots consuming bot-generated content in a parallel economy.
Generally things aren't successful unless they work
Lots of people making a living off the platform clearly use LLMs to write their scripts. Its kind of weird hearing a person talk to me about something, and then notice characteristic chatgpt patter in their speech.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
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Please tell me this is a joke, or that you're not building anything important at work. It's a very well known problem that YouTube's algorithmic moderation hurts a lot of honest creators, and their ability to make a living, when there is a false positive or is abused.
> something that mostly works most of the time
Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.
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There's a reason why they led with simply labeling author self-reported AI videos as AI, and then casually mentioned they'll also try to detect AI videos automatically. They're not confident in it working reliably and want people to have low expectations. This is probably realistic. Using AI to detect AI is not reliable. Detecting AI videos is likely to become an arms race and will require an ongoing commitment of resources.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
They make a bunch of money off the videos, same as uploaded copyright material (before eventually taking them down).
I don't know how YouTube's detection will work, but if it were based solely on watermarks, there would be many false negatives, but there shouldn't be false positives.
If it simply costs more time and money to generate videos that pass the filter I'm all for it. The time and money cost of creating videos has tended to zero so there is a lot of low quality stuff now.
It's not just from AI either. Video creation used to require a fancy camera and a above average internet connection. Now the whole world has that so we're seeing a lot of low quality profit seeking content on any platform where there is money to be made. There was a GitHub repo with 100s of low quality PRs because people thought it would boost their job prospects.
videos and images have non-ai methods for detecting if its ai, its easier than text. There are some image artifacts in AI that can be found statistically.
I mean, between SynthID and C2PA don't you already have labels and watermarks that covering a lot of major players like Google, Adobe, ElevenLabs, NIVIDEA? No real concern about false negatives there.
As for false positive, the most straightforward path seems to be to let stuff slide unless you are really sure. Maybe that slightly rewards players like Kling because they keep the invisible watermarks for their own use, and that of the CCP,but not third parties. NBD.
It's not like catching everything is that important. YouTube isn't claiming this is perfect. And I don't know that anyone need this to be perfect. It's not like even the best photorealistic video creation tools don't have plenty of tells anyway.
This doesn't seem like ZeroGPT at all. Having a flag or not having flag on a YouTube short is low stakes. Its not like it's being sold as a solution for something high stakes like academic grading.
All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
> All they need to do is "randomly" label 99,999 of every 100,000 as AI and they'll be right 99.999% of the time.
Unfortunately that could still be true while labeling all human-crafted content as AI-created.
Not sure why you appear to be downvoted. Cryptographic provenance is indeed the only solution to humanities digital woes. But only the government could make that a rule so it's not going to happen - at least not in my lifetime.
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I hope their detector is better than the typical 'AI detection in text' services. False negatives are bad, false positives are worse as some creators could lose their source of income.
Rich Beato can finally take a breath! Musicians truly hate the AI generated stuff, I guess in a way that only artists understand. I think it's completely different from AI generated code, in the sense that code is made by code, instead of code making music. People make music.
You have a point, but as a musician and programmer, I'm far more fond of AI generating things of a "no wrong answers" nature than things that are ostensibly correct.
Music does have certain notions of correctness (e.g., [0]) but with a very forgiving "know the rules, then break the rules" aspect. Code has bugs or it doesn't, and it's probably easier to debug human-written code (certainly easier to grok every line of a human-written PR, IMHO).
The real problem is with the domains that aren't at the far ends of this spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint#Species_counterpo...
There's probably a sizable niche market for an absolutist anti-AI video hosting platform.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just needs one simple policy: Post AI and you're banned for life, no appeals.
No appeals combines very poorly with any detector that sometimes has false positives.
Probably good for about two more years, tops. Like Google's CAPTCHA.
The idea that you can automatically detect AI generated content seems misguided. It will make mistakes. I think I've heard of things being wrongfully tagged as AI generated on other platforms.
I suppose it all depends on the false positive and false negative rates. But better to start now, before AI ruins the platform.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...
_before_? youtube is like the top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities, 5% actual videos, and the rest is slop of various types for me.
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
If you only visit youtube.com logged out in a private window, obviously it's going to show you what's the most popular. What else should it be doing?
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
Agreed. Youtube recommendations are genuinely great for me. Most of the time I'll be recommended so many more good videos than I have time for, that my "watch later" playlist only keeps growing.
Compared with, say, Netflix, where even though I've been rating everything I watch on there for 5+ yrs, the recommendations still barely feel personalized (if anything, it feels like it personalizes which premade "top list" to show me, but not the titles within them...but it does personalize the cover art/thumbnail, lol).
I don't only get to YouTube.com from a Google search and that on a browser that I'm not logged into - so it only shows me things that I searched for.
I'm of the opinion that people who get recommended constant slop are doing something very wrong, likely going out of their way to anonymize themselves as much as possible, then being all Surprised Pikachu when YouTube can't figure out what kind of content they like, so they get recommended the lowest common denominator popular stuff.
My feed is all channels I'm subscribed to or content from other creators that make similar content. I don't get Mr Beast or any other the other crap that people complain about.
You and I must be watching a very different YouTube. I don't see a lot of AI generated stuff in my recommendations or search.
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
Fair enough
I know they can identify them because if I click on one by mistake that's all I get until I go to about:blank, close YT tab, clear cache, close browser, run bleachbit and start browser. I never log into their site.
So far all it does to the video is add a small tag in the corner. It doesn't affect rankings or monetization. A false positive might annoy some subscribers at worst.
No one will click a video that has the ai tag though.
I mean this with all sincerity: so what?
If people don’t want to watch AI content, they should be able to avoid it. Just as a vegan should be able to know if a dish is appropriate for them. Besides: if you have to blatantly deceive people into watching your videos when they otherwise would choose not to, what are you even doing? And yes I understand people already do that. But we should not go out of our way to enable that. Plus the moment you are perceived as not disclosing that, you risk getting burned by someone online and facing much harsher, longer term consequences. Reputation still matters to a degree.
Ultimately I’m not sure we should be advocating for opacity in consumer products.
Oh you’re talking about specifically if it’s mistakenly applied, my bad I missed that
I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.
I think that is significantly harder to solve for without false positives ruining UX.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.
I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.
Twitter has community notes which fills the role pretty well. If an AI gen tweet goes viral it will get noted pretty fast
It must be a tricky problem to balance. On the one hand, you as Google want people to create 30 seconds of video per month with your cool Omni, Flow, Gemini, etc. tools.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
Maybe they're just going for "disclosure" as in people understanding it's AI, and hopefully mitigating fake news. Don't know if it impacts monetization?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
Also they're probably trying to prevent lawmakers from coming up with stricter limits. "We're already marking AI videos as AI, no need to change!"
Is it really any different than Google wants advertisers on YT, but still labels ads as ads?
They don't really want to label ads as ads (no advertiser really does...); they're forced by regulations from multiple countries.
Maybe I'm weird, but I believe in the theory that (all else equal) it's good for business to minimize how much your users hate your product/service.
In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.
Google is not a monolith. For all intents and purposes YouTube might as well be a totally different company than Deepmind. Everyone in there own respective google fiefdom is trying to maximize their own metrics.
Why are they saying to not distribute on YouTube they just want to give an indicator. Same with labeling if a video is an AD. I find some of the obvious AI content to be funny or informative .
I mean, here's what I don't get: why does YouTube care? We're already uploading an entire human lifespan worth of videos to YouTube every day, do they really benefit from more content? Or is this content somehow inherently more monetizable than what people are already uploading?
AI has completely ruined animal short videos on Youtube. Videos of pets behaving like humans are everywhere. At first they warm your heart, then you realize that you've been tricked.
The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.
I really want Spotify to follow. I feel cheated and deceived when I'm enjoying some music, then I realize that there's no bio for the artist and they released 7 albums in 2025. Users should be empowered to filter out AI content if they choose.
> I feel cheated and deceived
Why? Not trying to argue against AI labeling, but if you are enjoying the music, why does it matter?
People care a lot about the story and the human artists behind their music, probably somewhat more than the music itself. When I discover some great metal songs, I'll look up their info, the band, the artists, their bio, everything related to the creation process and their history.
Connecting to the creator of a work of art provides meaning, which makes the experience of art better and more interesting. It allows you to experience worlds other than your own. I don't go into deep dives of all music I listen to, but I do want the option for music I like.
If there's no one on the other side, then it's just stimulation. Which is fine if that's what you want. It's something like the difference between watching an OnlyFans model versus an erotic video your significant other made for you.
Based on measured studies, people are not able to discern AI generated music from real ones on average and to your point, I agree, if you enjoy the output then it doesn't make sense to suddenly change your initial opinion.
I do find that AI music tends to be too perfect and overtime using Suno also gets old and I'm just listening to older releases
For art, I would rather support humans over AI
I can see not wanting to participate in the road to creating individualized heaven-banned digital silos for ourselves.
Are you being obtuse or can you really not understand this. Your girlfriend writes you a letter once a week while she’s away for the summer. Misses you, loves you, can’t stand being apart. You find out later she paid a service to write the letters. Who cares, the letters were nice right?
I want to share a post from the Red Hand Files blog written by musician Nick Cave, because I think he explains it more eloquently than I could.
---
From: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Spotify has every incentive to cut out the middleman (the musician). This will never happen.
I heard rumours they're the ones quietly funding some of the AI music. Spotify probably see the most popular musicians flying around in jets and want to redirect all that listening to their own slop.
One advantage is that if it's labelled as AI, we don't need to have a conversation in the comments about whether it's AI or not.
Only if you view the label as accurate, which you really, really should not.
If an account claims to be a bot, I don't see much downside in assuming it's true?
I wish HN would do the same for submissions.
That's great news. Hopefully there will be a filter to allow or disallow AI video on your homepage/feed.
I really doubt that google will implement that filter. But I guarantee it'll be added soon to revanced and other patched youtube apps.
They could use the same data to pay AI posters less and push their content more. Which will get you a promotion at Google.
Sounds like a premium feature!
Honestly, that might get me to subscribe.
Yes, like filtering out shorts.
/s
How about ones making a stupid video of SO question/answers
If they don't it would be a relatively easy browser plugin to make.
Can't await this checkbox
Create your own browser extension to block them!
Some searches might have 99% videos I want filtered out.
I wish the same thing for the "AI dubbed" videos.
I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.
The individual creator can turn that off in settings — however, it was enabled automatically for everyone, and creators have to know to turn it off...
No joke, I would pay for this more than i do for premium.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
The filter is what is key. If they label all AI videos but still serve me AI slop as the first response, then it doesn't matter if it's labeled at all.
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 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.
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'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…
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.
Let’s use probabilistic models to find the probability of something being the output of another probabilistic model
Everywhere (reddit, YouTube, Spotify) need to have a button to flag and then flag as ai. Reddit really has it buried in multiple levels of menus.
People are pretty darn good now at spotting ai.
An alternative is just use ai to look at the comments. Almost anything with AI has comments complaining about it.
All of these sites need to deal with it because it does drive away users.
And, as always, flagging will be abused to downrank content that people/bots/spammers/scummy-businesses/etc. would prefer you not to see.
Just penalize people for false flagging, and penalize false copyright claims while we're at it.
Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, YouTube is in a position here to simultaneously iterate on automatic AI video detection while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect.
I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.
Synthid and the like survive compression and decent quality rerecording.
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
Proving that you were able to upload something that is not real would go viral so it's very attractive to people to share such findings, meaning it would not last long, then they fix it and that's it, specially because they can require you to upgrade your camera's firmware if you want to keep using their attestation service.
Attention is valuable these days, so making people go to their websites for people to check if something is real is good for them, its people they can try to sell more cameras (or phones) and all that.
Joking and all but sexting would benefit from this technology, if it can vouch about the time, GPS location and email address of the owner then the receiver can have some certainty about the pic (if the sender decides to share such attestation link/info, of course)
I don't think it needs do be raw output. I'm pretty sure that signatures can exist within image and sound outputs that are reproducible when changing to other formats.
Yeah I’m not sure this makes sense when images are getting their third ifunny watermark.
Leica started doing this a few years ago in response to the first wave of AI images[0]. Other, bigger manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony as well I believe) have also joined, though with less fanfare. Adobe is in the loop.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
[0] https://leica-camera.com/en-int/news/partnership-greater-trust-digital-photography-leica-and-content-authenticity-initiativeYes, you're correct about private keys getting exposed, but it's better than nothing. I suspect though, even after key exposure there may be a way to make new private keys so that compromised keys have a known point when they are compromised, which makes public how much skepticism we should all have about authenticity.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
And they will also get firmware updates.
You still ultimately have the analogue hole here - pull the camera apart, splice your own hardware somewhere between the sensor and the thing that adds the signatures (or in front of the sensor).
Or just straight up point the camera at a computer monitor, without even trying to hide it. Most of the security camera footage online is already uploaded this way.
I intentionally didn't say that because I feel like people might dismiss that with "oh but you can tell the difference with sufficient analysis etc" whereas literally sending data directly through the same path as the real sensor would be potentially less detectable (or more, if the sensor itself has some kind of noticeable fingerprint)
Pointing the camera at a screen could potentially evade that.
Right, but my point is that a video of a screen should be less believable than the source video insofar as verifying legitimacy.
Right, my point is that this should default to "untrustworthy." The idea is that a camera would at the very least include a timestamp and camera type in the signature. That signature should usually be reproducible when being filmed by another camera (these signatures can be part of the physical image). This should mean that a cameras filming screens would have multiple ways to show the images are not legitimate (as something as simple of shadows not matching time of day could show the video is illegitimate).
What if you can't tell it's a video of a screen?
wouldn't that just encourage monopolistic behavior and lockdown of these devices?
they're already locked down as-is.
Isn't this literally how GANNs are trained?
"AI generated video that's impossible to detect" is already something many companies are working on; it's hardly Google-specific.
YouTube scale is Google specific
It already is quite impossible. Just generate something decent with lower quality. Then maybe take screen recording of the output. Voila.
Then "low-quality for no reason in year the 2026 and beyond where phones shoot at 8k" become part of the heuristics.
Being pedantic for no reason is one of the heuristics I use to judge how annoying yn users are
I find it super ironic that we're basically here: https://xkcd.com/1683/ now. The 90s and 00s tech people would be very disappointed :-))
> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
Yeah, like Google doesn't know other hundreds of companies are also generating videos and will without the slightest shred of doubt will use reinforced learning to bypass this detection, meaning directly asking Google's AI if a picture they modified is AI or not to improve their algorithms, they know vouching for video is as useful as vouching for AI generated texts, zero.
Why is that tinfoil? That's just good business?
Maybe google web search should automatically label ai-generated articles
Gemini already labels images with a watermark even if you are using plain text on an original photo or template.
Basically forces me to use image editing software for something that could be greatly streamlined.
Just a heads up that Deezer has been tagging AI music already: https://business.deezer.com/ai-detection/
If they can pull this off correctly it would be amazing as a filter. Only Human videos please!
I wonder if they will try to do this for songs in YouTube Music. I've stopped using their auto-generated playlists/recommendations/whatever because it kept playing AI-generated songs.
AI-generated music should be hard to detect
> “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
> YouTube creators who believe their content was incorrectly flagged as AI-generated can modify the disclosure status using the YouTube Studio tool.
That's not that helpful. For example there's thousands of 'psychology' videos with descriptive bait titles like 'the psychology of people who don't click on video recommendations' which are AI-screipted, narrated, and animated. If you look at the channels the same creator will have hundreds of videos that are micro-targeted to absurdity, like 'the psychology of women who spend too much time on youtube' or 'the psychology of people who don't watch big sports games'. Most of these seem to have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. Maybe the views are botted as well, but clop producers have every incentive to spend a few hundred $ in tokens and generate 50 or 100 new videos to just blanket the recommender engine and shut out regular content that takes time and effort to produce.
I've drastically cut my use of YouTube (even though there are creators I like and wish to support) because I am so tired of wading through all the junk.
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI, we want to make the process more seamless and reliable. Starting in May 2026, we’re rolling out new internal signals to help identify AI-generated content.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.
I think most people wouldn't care either way. On HN, maybe 95% ppl care; outside, not so much.
So the PR risk here is I think reasonably low.
> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI
Require? Your barely expected to do anything to upload a video to YouTube and I’m pretty sure any AI disclosures are hidden in an optional accordion dialog.
I assume "require" is meant in the terms-of-service sense.
It's likely still a lot better than the current situation of not having any detection.
> Under YouTube’s guidelines, creators will still be required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI. But starting this week, it also will roll out a new internal system to help identify AI-generated content. “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
I don't know about SOTA, but Sight Engine (sightengine.com) has AI image detection which seems pretty solid. It can even identify specific image generators.
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Maybe they could fix their moderation and appeal process before adding a half-baked feature like this which is certain to cause more issues requiring moderation?
Will a hybrid of AI and man-made content be flagged as an AI-generated video? I wonder what the threshold of the ratio of AI-generated content has to be to be classified as one.
Anyone remember GAN? With enough iterations with a discriminator, we're gonna see more AI generated videos that are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. What then?
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
I want to filter out ai generated videos
The dangers is videos that slip through the cracks, they get an indirect seal of being non AI.
If they have a large preexisting AI-ERA subscriber base, which many do, it must be tempting preserve the time by reading AI text for segments of their content.
Would really be nice if they did the same with their ads, but don't see that happening
The ads are labeled, much more so than the AI generated content.
Hmmm. I have a game on steam that has almost entirely AI-generated graphics (and AI-generated animations/code that move them), but we pay someone to do our promotional videos. Wonder if something like this would tag the video as AI-generated or not.
I want to believe it (and filter all that crap), but YT recently removing the sort by new/date option because 99% of results being useless AI slop doesn't inspire much trust.
I'm willing to bet this is just an easily bypassable SynthID check
AI versus AI, the final faceoff. Who's gonna win? Probably not us.
Whoever wins, we lose.
I am really sick of AI generated videos. I don't have anything against AI videos per se but the fact that it's so easy to generate videos that people are churning out really really bad quality videos out there.
There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.
I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.
Good. The flood of AI slop has basically meant, when searching for videos of a given topic, having to ignore videos created in the last couple of years because a high percentage of them are garbage - a situation that must be devastating for creators of new quality content.
I wonder why they're really doing this. It's definitely not for users' benefit.
It could be. They seem to be getting enormous amount of politics or crypto related AI fake reels that real people fall for. They probably do need means to control spams.
One field I was wondering about. There are a lot of channels/videos where they take movie summaries, feed it into an AI to generate TTS, graphics... I hate these videos but I'm also like damn good job trying to capitalize on that, why don't I do it kind of thing. I don't have that money making drive/hustle. I need to.
Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz
is this gonna affect the monetization of those videos too? Well i think even if not directly, people will somehow loose interest in ai generated videos, people would not want a low effort content grabbing there attention.
I can already imagine this won’t be perfect (false negatives / false positives, for one thing) but this seems like a huge step in the right direction. Even just giving the “AI” label a more prominent spot than the description is a big deal, particularly for those who are less tech-savvy than your average HN user. My mom, for instance, can watch your one video that’s entirely AI-generated and not bat an eye, but then watch another video that’s clearly real and say it looks “off.” Say what you will about whether AI-generated content is valid or whether it should be allowed on the platform at all, but more transparency is only a good thing.
Good start, but it seems you still need to click on the video though.
Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI content". Work together with the hardware and software layer with an open approach, building on top of contend id. I appreciate the privacy implications here are complex, and Google is dubious on using any tracking/fingerprinting technology for its self-serving and privacy-invading motivations, but an open cross-industry foundation owning and operating it may be a first step?
That's basically C2PA: https://c2pa.org.
I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.
Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk
the ability to simply exclude such content from recommendations & search results would be welcome.
I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
this is a welcome change but if the creator doesn't disclose the use of AI, how do they detect what is AI and what is not?
Watermarking and machine learning.
do they detect ai-generated ads?
Now label AI ads and let us filter them out.
Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.
This is awesome. I am building something similar for writing - https://trulytyped.com
Too bad they are not including the script writing, some people pass on the visual but you can tell in 10 seconds or less it was written by AI - or an AI voice that is reading AI written slop.
I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!
Let the cat and mouse begin, since this will be a moving line.
This is fine, good, whatever... but my thing is can creators remove it successfully for 'false flags'.
> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,
YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.
I really wish there was a button to voluntarily say / tag your own content as AI assisted.
The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.
Your wish has been granted - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491
Hell yea!
Honestly, I'm a bit concerned here. YouTube's automated tools aren't the greatest at flagging content, and quite a few videos have been mistakenly marked as for kids/infringing copyright/being in the shorts format.
The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.
But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:
A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.
There are two things needed for this to be successful,
1. Detection of AI voiceover. The article makes several references to photo realistic AI content but it's the voiceovers that are killing me.
2. Filtering options for viewers. It's not enough to be able to know if a video is generated. I don't want to see them, ever.
They need to have a way to report AI videos not labeled as such, AND a checkbox to filter out AI videos on the home page and in search results. Not holding my breath for either.
Hopefully it will allow you to filter out AI slop. TikTok currently does not do this, and it’s infuriating.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just label AI-free videos?
good first step.
better next step: allow us to block them
even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.
Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
There's no way to switch back to the original audio track? I agree you shouldn't have to but I'm wondering if it's possible.
You can change the audio track back to the original.
Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.
It doesn't remember my preference. Or rather, it seems to remember me picking a specific language, and then loads the dub in that language next time I click a video. It doesn't remember "don't duh videos".
It does remember it. At least on Firefox/Linux.
Not if you Airplay to your TV. I get random foreign languages when I watch English speaking YouTubers. No way to enable subtitles or change the language. It's a known bug according to the internet.
There are several Chrome extensions for turning that off automatically, but I agree: you should not have to need extensions to use YouTube.
You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there
The problem is that it doesn't even respect this choice. My native language is not English and most of the videos in this languages will be auto transcript to English. Even the last time I changed both the language and country and YouTube still managed to auto transcript to English.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
That just tells it which languages to serve if the video has multiple tracks, including Ai-generated ones. "Keep original language" should be the default, or at least an opt-in.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
I don’t know that Settings -> languages is obscure
Even worse, sometimes it dubs ads, where there's no way to switch the audio track and no way to see if it's being dubbed. This also makes it look like the dubbed audio is the original audio from the ad, which makes the advertiser look terrible.
It's an option that individual channels can disable. Granted, it's opt-out, but YouTube emailed creators several times about it well before:
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
Settings -> languages and then add German as one of the languages you know and it’ll never do this again
I don't know German. That's why I'm looking up German language tests.
Also the amount of scammy crap quality on YouTube has exploded since developing countries have more access. The cost of publishing is tending to zero.
GOOD!
I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.
with views
Thank fuck. There is SO much garbage on YT lately which amounts to a powerpoint deck with ai audio overlaid.
Unfortunately I'm not sure this will affect those at all...it's specifically for "realistic" AI use according to all the quotes. I'm not sure narration or illustration/slides generated by AI would be covered at all in that case.
Anything more competent than Microsoft Sam counts as realistic in my book. If their definition excludes narration that would be weird.
Their detection might not look at audio right now though.
I suppose, but I guess the quality of voice narration I've heard is still closer to "realistic robot" than anything.
When a segment is about a place or thing with a particular name and the pronunciation completely shifts from one to the next it’s a big annoyance.
It would also help if there was a public way for viewers to indicate slop, regardless of AI. Maybe a dislike button?
This is great. We don't want to drown in AI slop, and (perhaps more importantly) we don't want people to think that real videos are AI generated. Any signal which helps distinguishing the two is helpful, even if it isn't perfect. This is also why I think it's good that OpenAI is adopting Google's Synth ID watermark for images.
Using AI to detect AI is just another step in an endless arms race to insanity.
Can we add the AI voice over videos as well please?
"Please prove your content was created by a flawed biological organism."
Seems better than the alternative: "This content was created by a machine, but being pushed/promoted by a flawed money-grubbing biological organism".
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Finally a decent change by Youtube! Great job Youtube but overall unsure about the situation at Google itself and what Google itself is doing.
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
Original article: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-vie...
This should be the original link since its the official announcement and has more concrete info, hope mod(s) can update.
Ok, updated above with the other link in the toptext.
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Cool!
But isn't this unfair? After all, AI was supposed to be "democratizing" video production and this effectively punishes the use of it.
Who are we to impede all of the incredible journeys of AI bros?
/s
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Many people myself included are very tired of most of the AI videos. Once you click on one by mistake the feed is just flooded with that crap. Fake movie releases. Fake news. Fake celebrity drama. Endless fake crap.
People are sick of AI video...
Isn’t YouTube applying weird AI processing to shorts?
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
I think the "weird AI processing" might have been someone misunderstanding a compression codec. When laypeople see anything advanced, it's always called AI no matter what it actually is, and that's the word that spreads around.
I’m not going to dox my YT channels, but I do know the difference between the two and a year ago YT admitted to automatic AI “enhancements”.
I’ve also seen the trend of TV clip slop using AI filters to I assume get by automatic copyright flagging/removal/de-monetization.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
This could backfire.. im thinking of "real" videos with elements of AI in them. Those elements might not get the video flairs as an AI video and people will get fooled
A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.
There is plenty of artists making music analogous to 80's and 90's classics. Not to mention millions of 80's and 90's songs she's never heard.
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
I did the same too. I listen exclusively to my own songs made with the help of AI.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
I find super HARD to believe that we ran out of musicians doing music in the styles of the 80s/90s maybe your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy, not a crime; but saying nobody is making such music is a sad excuse.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
That might be OK if Suno had compensated everybody they needed to.
I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.
As someone with very specific tastes in music across several genres, yes, it's hard to find new bands making what I like. Every so often I'll find one, but it's pretty rare because- surprise!- the market for people with my tastes is really small so quality production targeting me is a bad career decision.
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
I also want to state that I think this is the perfect use-case for generative AI. You have a desire, and you use the AI to scratch your particular itch. Where it goes wrong is the people who want to make a quick buck by shoveling out heaps of random crap in the hopes that there will be some clicks to generate revenue. I mean someone is going to accidentally discover the prompt for the next "Baby Shark", get a billion views, and then the real onslaught will begin.
> Who else is going to make new songs for her?
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?
Edit: slop not slob
It's not just look around a little. It's look around a lot. It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Have the ick for AI-gen, fine. But dismissing the things it solves puts you in a position where you'll never understand other people.
> It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.
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I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.
I've also seen people using the term "slop" for low quality human-generated content (lowbrow movies etc)
Yeah this is how I feel. People who like AI music seem to be a same people who would just throw on random "deep work" or "lofi" youtube playlists and let them run all day. That has never appealed to me. I like to learn about the artists and history.
> There is personal expression in the lyrics.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I love music and I frequently go to live shows, so the bar for me has kind of become "Can I go see this artist live, OR is it so good that I don't care that I can't?" If it passes that, I'll listen. I've found one AI generated song that has made it onto my top 100 favorite songs I've ever heard.
The thing that really shits me with AI music is when it outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics. There's certain tells and boy do they give me the ick.
> just look around a little instead?
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
Where would you look around?
Previously web search, YouTube, and Reddit would have been my go to but they have all been enshittified.
YouTube is excellent. Aside from my main account I have one that I mainly just use to listen to music, and I just surf the algorithm listening to whatever is in the recommend list, which is usually a handful of songs I've got on heavy rotation, but YouTube also tends to cycle back some old favorites, and some new gems. I just keep surfing it day in day out letting it take me where it will as one of two main ways I listen to music. I regularly find new gems pretty reliably. All the gems then go to my playlist in Spotify, which I listen to during my commute.
I’ve had good luck with gnoosic. Or taking artists I like as a starting point and finding out who influenced them, and who they influenced.
> The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd.
The idea that only humans can make music is absurd.
> I guess she can listen to slob but maybe just look around a little instead?
The idea that AI generated = slop is absurd.
Humans create just as much, if not more slop. Look at 99% of "professional" output in creative fields. It's awful.
A human with taste steering AI tools can be better than a "classical" human with hard skills but no taste.
The old world is going to be run over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4
Completely. Run. Over.
Was that video supposed to convince us that AI music is good?
I did not expect that one to show up here on HN, but it's definitely a human artist using AI. He has a few others which are just as entertaining.
Huh, I wonder what happens when people stop making real music for AIs to train on, then.
Until AI companies pay for all the content that they stole, I think that is a reasonable response.
As they should. AI can't create art, because AI doesn't have a sense of expression.
I might be an outlier, but I grew up listening to some genres that have fallen out of fashion, and I don't feel like I need more songs from them--we've explored enough of what they can do. What I miss from the 90's isn't third-wave ska as people trying things and bizarre songs becoming hits.
Not entirely comparable, but it's easier to find in Korea. "I do" by I-dle [formerly (G)I-dle] for example, has a wonderful 80s sound.
She's in luck:
https://youtu.be/6JCLY0Rlx6Q?si=xZvid6TWR66LTqhE
I'm still discovering music from "my era". Music doesn't have to be new to be new to you.
The large number of actual bands from that era still around?
Consider yourself lucky if they still make music in their vintage style
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
Indeed. I've heard a few compositions that I knew were AI-generated and still thought were pretty good.
Look up Xania Monet. AI artist “signed” to Warner Bros with a multimillion contract after “she” charted on Billboard.
There’s an appetite for this.
I don't think it's people deliberately seeking this stuff out. For whatever reason, the algorithms love recommending AI content, and I'm sure the numbers are juiced to some degree with bot farms.
Not that it still isn't depressing.
Even if the courts won't uphold the copyright, that doesn't prevent people from claiming your videos and initiating YouTube's copyright process against you. This is a recurring problem for people who upload their own original performances of public-domain compositions, particularly solo piano.
An often repeated talking point that's broadly false without further context. Mechanical output on its own can't be copyrighted, that hasn't changed. However it can be if sufficient (as determined by the courts) human creativity went into causing it to be output.
I think the op mean people writing stuff like: "Amazing what a human soul can create", "This is such a beautiful song. I'm so happy it's not another AI slop" type of comments. I have a fairly popular youtube channel with AI generated music, I make it very obvious that it's AI, yet I still get hundreds of those comments a month.
I make it very obvious that it's AI, yet I still get hundreds of those comments a month.
That suggests you've done a good job of directing the AI to generate what people like.
That's actually how I fell down the rabbithole --- found these long mixes and started listening, enjoyed what I heard, then tried to find out more about the author and realised it was AI-generated.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
Yeah, I had the same experience, and it makes sense for companies like Spotify. I do hope that this doesn’t hinder “innovation” in music (eg people being creative and introducing new types of music), because as usual with AI, it’s just really good at imitation, not necessarily creating new things.
To be honest, as long as the music is to my liking, I don’t really care all that much.
It also seems that there is a big percentage of people who are completely against AI music for a multitude of reasons. Even if they liked the sound they would still hate it if it was AI generated.
But to me this seems silly. Yes I want real artists to make music and be able to make a living not some faceless company spitting out endless music until something works. However at the end of the day if something sounds good then one should enjoy it not refuse to accept it simply because it is AI.
Because how far does their stance against AI go? They won't accept music. What about if AI created a cure that could save their child? Or what if AI could could sort through a massive backlog of evidence in unsolved murders and other violent crimes giving new leads previously missed? I am just curious if some people will simply be against it no matter what the use is. As for myself I think it has it's uses but also think it comes at a heavy price as in massive power and water consumption and other issues it comes with. Anyways
It's not created any cure or solved crime though. The times it's been applied to those problems, it's either regurgitated stuff that's already in the data or led to the arrest of innocent people.
Also, re: music, if I was fine with listening to AI music, why would I listen to the output of someone else's prompt instead of creating my own?
I wonder about false-positives too, or just disagreements with what is stated vs. "detected". In what I guess is a reaction to the huge amount of AI music, I notice a lot of other music gets posted with titles or tags saying in extent "made without AI". Yet when I listen to it, at least half the time I suspect AI was used, and they are just lying to get increased reach from the AI-hater crowd...
There are completely fake bands, who are 'on tour', 'giving interviews', cranking out albums. Like "Shunned at a Funeral" [0] for instance, an AI Christian rock band. Mentioning nowhere that it is all fake.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@ShunnedataFuneral
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKOtpdDzwyA
YouTube music doesn’t seem to care much about where the music comes from. They do have formal album libraries but not everything is carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify. That’s what makes it good, because you can find tons of lost mixes, old unreleased track and vinyl rips, leaks of new stuff from current artists
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
> carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify
I wish I had your Spotify.
Over the last few months they have served me multiple slop tracks in the discover weekly playlist. Probably more I didn't notice when just listening without focus, but several had generic artist name without bio and dozens of nearly identical tracks.
Yeah this is why I'm sceptical of just about any video game covers or remixes posted in the last year or two. There's just a flood of blatantly AI generated content in this niche, with many of the channels involved pumping out dozens of videos a day.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
You can tell when a song is not AI generated these days because people put "no AI" in the title.
There is a third option. We don’t care how the music was made.
There's certainly a bit of that. Years ago, I had various generative musicish on my phone that I'd listen to (e.g. https://endel.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_(app) ). There are also some soundtracks that are ok to listen to on repeat (though once you start recognizing what's next, then they become less useful because you can start listening to them - sim city https://youtu.be/j6mQc-9vCuE and eve online - looking now I see people have remixed that to 8h long tracks). I've also supported My Noise ( https://mynoise.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075 ) and have some 1h long tracks that I can put on repeat (love the white noise rain, but gotta give a callout to 88 keys with some slider adjustments to get it "right" for what I want - https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/acousticPianoSoundscapeGen... most often equal parts brown, red, orange and light purple).
Music for Airports is ok ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports https://youtu.be/vNwYtllyt3Q ... but there are parts in there that I recognize in the loop that bring me out of it being background and into something I'm listening to).
But yea... I want a soundscape and it doesn't bother me if it was something that was generative in 2018, or in 2026... or loops of recorded sound... I want something that isn't silence and that I can not listen to for four to eight hours... bonus if its enough "noise" that it doesn't even get picked up after noise suppression in a Teams call.
Space Banjo is great ( https://spacebanjo.com be it https://youtu.be/CLnHStt4mbs or https://youtu.be/ygYfJSTc_qQ ) ... but I like to listen to that when I can listen to it more.
There's also things like https://youtu.be/_egA9RZrD5k (and in this realm, I get picky https://www.youtube.com/@resomat6474 is pretty good, but some of it hits higher notes ... https://www.youtube.com/@TheJapaneseTown-jt6fy is pretty good too).
Again, this is more about wanting sound rather than music.
Yeah I listen to random ambient music, probably all AI, as background noise when I’m working or reading