It boggles my mind that, in a day and age where we have such inexpensive technology for recording audio, there are so many YouTube creators falling to the ease of using AI for their videos.
It's no secret that when I'm gaming, I like to have some background noise, which is usually a YouTube video covering a topic that I at least find somewhat interesting. The longer the video, the better, because it means less pausing my game to select another one. Maybe that's the reason I'm running into more and more content being narrated exclusively by artificial intelligence.
Perhaps I'm actually going a little too far with that description. The audio narration itself isn't necessarily AI. It's generally just a text-to-speech system. That said, it gets considerably worse when you can clearly tell that the script being fed into the text-to-speech narrator was also written by an AI system, such as ChatGPT.
How can I tell, you might ask?
Well, there obviously isn't some magical phrase that proves a script was written by AI. The creators of AI train their systems based on writing techniques that humans created long before AI ever existed.
The problem is that AI systems tend to fall into familiar writing patterns, especially when someone simply types in something like, "Write me a script on 150 motorcycle safety tips" and takes whatever the AI gives them.
One pattern I've started noticing is when a narrated video is constantly spouting some variation of:
"That's not just {something}. It's {something else}."
Once you've noticed that trope of AI writing, you start hearing it everywhere and it becomes like nails on a chalkboard. Honestly, I can't watch videos once I've realized their script has been written by AI. The content becomes bland and uninteresting, regardless how interesting the actual topic is.
Then there are the constant dramatic transitions and lack of human contractions:
- "But here is the thing..."
- "And that is where things get interesting."
- "Honda Three Zero Zero R"
- "Let that sink in."
- "The reality is..."
- "There is not only one"
- "So what does that actually mean?"
Again, people say these things. I might even use them somewhere in this very blog post. That said, the giveaway isn't one phrase. It's when the same video keeps falling back on the same handful of writing tricks over and over again.
Another AI trope that I'm constantly running into, which it likely learned from our internet full of advertising, is when it feels the compulsive need to turn absolutely everything into something profound;
A company doesn't simply make a decision. "It changes everything."
A product isn't merely successful. "It redefines the industry."
Then you get the perfectly organized lists, usually groups of three, where everything is conveniently packaged into a neat little rhythm. The technology changed the industry, challenged expectations and reshaped the future.
No human talks like that for three hours. Humans are messy. We repeat ourselves. We go off script. We pause and stutter on occasion. Sometimes we choose the wrong word, but we keep going because everyone will understand what we meant.
AI-generated writing, particularly when nobody bothers to rewrite it, can be almost too clean. It can use complex words that people just don't normally use. It splits paragraphs like you'd slice bread. It always has grammar in the proper location, yet not specifically where a human would naturally put it.
Getting back to YouTube, I'm not going to sugarcoat what I think is behind a lot of this... It's laziness.
Artificial Intelligence has made video curation far too easy, which has led to a lot more people getting into it. It can write your scripts, be used to voice the narration, and even build the entire video by stealing bits of content from thousands of other online videos. Whereas you used to have one or two actual professionals you'd go to for a specific topic, now there are hundreds.
That's really the part that gets me worked up.
Don't get me wrong, using AI as a tool to help write something doesn't particularly bother me. In fact, the entire "history" section of my website was proof read by ChatGPT. It helped me with things like;
- Not repeating things I'd already said
- Breaking up my huge script into chapters
- Preventing too much text, not enough images
- Organizing my memories into a coherent timeline
- Correcting fragmented memories based on real data
If you're using AI to simply fact-check and smooth out data, I see nothing wrong with that. If you're using the AI to completely write your entire content for you, that's where I feel you've crossed a line. A line which, technically, I would even consider a form of plagiarism.
That said, people seem to flock to these channels.
Some of these videos actually have good information in them, but the narration, at least to me, sounds like nails on a chalkboard. The channels that pushed me into writing this, specifically the one quoted above, have more than 15 thousand subscribers.
From a quick look at their videos, it seems every single one of them is this same form of completely AI created content. This has allowed them to put out several videos a week, which would push the "algorithm" into giving them top posing over actual real curators. In fact some of their videos, posted just months apart, even use the same video clips!
But, apparently, I'm in the minority regarding this content.
More and more videos on YouTube seem to be following this new method of producing what I can only describe as no-effort content. They have AI write the script. They feed the script into text-to-speech software. Then they use stock footage, generated video, recycled clips or short pieces of footage pulled from elsewhere to give the viewer something to stare at while the narration plays. Upload it. Do it again.
That's the new slop hiding in plain sight.
At first glance, it looks like somebody put a tremendous amount of work into a long-form video. Then you actually listen to it and there's no personality. There's no actual sense that the person speaking has any particular experience with what they're talking about.
Take that and compare it to somebody like fellow Canadian Ryan F9 from FortNine.
Whether you agree with everything he says or not, you know you're watching Ryan. There's a personality behind the information. There's humour, opinion, experience and an actual point of view. His wording isn't always perfect. His speech isn't always clear and concise. There's no guessing that humans put in all the effort for the making of his videos. That's getting harder to say about a growing amount of YouTube content.
...And, you know, I think that's the part people overlook when they shrug and say, "Who cares if it's AI as long as the information is good?"
Eventually, the people actually putting days or weeks into researching, writing, filming and editing something have to ask whether it's worth competing against somebody who can manufacture hours of content in a fraction of the time.
Maybe that's part of what makes other platforms start to appeal more to real content creators. Take a site like Nebula, for example. Yes, it might require a subscription, but they've got a much higher standard for content than YouTube and creators are actually respected for the time and effort they put into creating their content. This kind of AI slop isn't allowed there.
So what does that mean for YouTube?
Well, it'll continue to be a media powerhouse. There's no doubt about that. But I can absolutely see its future becoming increasingly filled with videos that all sound the same, all use the same writing patterns and all provide information that eventually blends into every other video. In short, finding content that doesn't feel bland and boring will become harder and harder to find.
Sure, there'll be more content than we've ever had before. I'm just not convinced It'll be worth watching.
