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Apparently YouTube has deleted oodles of AI-slop channels but to be honest, it's like a drop in the ocean.

I'm just totally over the endless stream of AI-created "slopumentaries" that now fill the pages of YouTube and which consist of nothing more than an AI-created script which is narrated by an AI voice and presents little more than a slideshow of still images and fragments of video footage all scraped from the Net or from stock footage purveyors.

Utter dross -- but you probably won't realise that until *after* you've sat through the two 15-second unskippable ads on your desktop or the 30+ seconds of unskippable advertising if you're watching on the livingroom TV set.

When I queried AI it said that not all AI slop videos would be deleted because those which performed well were left up so as to generate revenues for the creator and YouTube itself.

Yeah, that claim by YT that it was dealing to AI-slop... as disingenuous as ever.

So I have a plan...

YT's CE Neal Mohan has claimed that the platform wants to promote authentic, genuine original content so that's what I'm going to give them.

Well that's what I've always considered my own YouTube videos to be. There are no other channels on YouTube quite like mine, that's perhaps a good thing for everyone.

Now YouTube has announced that it's going to be promoting "Shows", a new format on the platform that tries to emulate the broadcast TV experience. Sigh!

I think I've already written about how this is a stupid move by YouTube (IMHO) but since it's easier to go with the flow than against it, I'm willing to try this out.

To that end, I've started re-editing 15 years worth of previous video content into a new show format that will, I hope, attract a wider audience and get pushed by YouTube as it tries to cement "shows" as "a thing" on the platform.

Here's the trailer I produced this week:

We'll see how it goes but my fingers are crossed because, like all creators of genuine, authentic, original content, my views are down due to dilution by those AI slopumentaries and other dross that is now increasingly the backbone of YouTube's offerings.

While on the subject, I see that one of the longest-running animation channels on the platform, Kurzgesagt with over 25 million subscribers was hit with a severe shadowban by YouTube. They publicly complained that their viewcounts had crashed, for no apparent reason.

After making inquiries to YouTube (a 25 million sub channel gets to actually talk to a real person at YouTube) it turns out that YT's anti-slop AI system had flagged their channels as being, "AI slop". How did that happen - after all, the channel was started back in 2013, long before AI was a thing and has been creating the same sort of animated content ever since?

Well the answer is ludicrously simple...

As a very popular YouTube channel, many of the AI systems that people have been using to create animations were trained on the content of this channel. It's only natural therefore, that the slop subsiquently produced, bears a striking resemblance to the videos on the Kurzgesagt channel. Spotting this similarity, YT's AI-slop system simply flagged it as also being AI slop.

This is just another example of how AI systems can create huge collateral damage. What's worse is that even though this channel had the clout to get the problem identified and sorted, there are many smaller channels who'd just end up being destroyed because their objections and appeals would be dealt with by the same AI that had falsely condemned them in the first place.

Now can you see why I'm inclined to try "going with the flow" as an option?

Carpe Diem folks!

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