AI-generated videos are becoming more and more convincing by the month. Where just a year ago they looked absolutely ridiculous, at the moment of writing this blog post they are already reaching that critical point where you can barely distinguish that it's AI-generated. In most videos there are still some telltale signs that you can see if you know what to look for, but it's becoming harder and harder.
It's without the shadow of a doubt that within the year AI-generated slop will be completely indistinguishable from actual videos.
The scary thing is that YouTube is actually encouraging this. They want AI to become a tool for people to use to create videos. Their rationale is that it allows people to easily express their ideas, so that video creation becomes available to everybody, not just the microscopic minority of people who have the talent, knowledge, experience, resources, tools and time to put their ideas in video form.
This view, although it might sound good at first glance, is extraordinarily naive.
The AI revolution will not make the amount of great ideas and awesome videos explode. What it will cause is to make the amount of absolute low-effort garbage content to explode, burying the actual good content under it.
It's a bit like Steam: I believe that as of writing this Steam has about 100 thousand games. 99% of them is absolute garbage that can barely even be called "games". The only way you can find the actual games is if you know them already from some other source. If you were to just browse the list of games, the actually good ones would be buried under the mountains of completely unplayable trash.
There is, however, a huge difference to YouTube videos, though: The garbage games in Steam do not, in general, undermine the credibility of the actual real good games. The good games might be buried under mountains of garbage, but they are still gems, not marred nor stained by the garbage.
When it comes to YouTube videos, however, that's not the case: The more AI slop invades YouTube, the higher the percentage of videos on YouTube is AI slop (and I'm certain that the 50% mark will be reached very soon, and the 90% mark soon after that), the more that the genuine videos will start falling under the same level of disgust by the general audience. Or, at least, be often wrongly dismissed as AI slop.
This is because, perhaps somewhat ironically, AI-generated videos becoming indistinguishable from real videos will not be an positive outcome for those videos. Instead, it will be a negative outcome for the real videos: Now every video will start looking like AI-generated, and fall under suspicion by the general public. All new funny cat videos will be dismissed as AI slop. All emotional sob stories? Will be suspected of being AI slop. All videos where the author or authors do funny or extraordinary stunts? Suspicious.
People will just start dismissing everything as AI slop.
And this might actually cause interest in YouTube to diminish. After all, why would anybody want to watch AI-generated garbage, no matter how convincing it might look? If it's fake, it's fake. I don't want to watch fake cat videos. I don't want to watch fake challenge videos. I don't want to watch fake physics experiment videos. I don't want to watch fake people showing fake compassion in fake completely made-up AI-generated situations.
And that, especially, if the video pretends to be real (rather than outright just declaring itself to be a piece of fiction, ie. a short movie.) And that might in fact be the biggest problem of all: The deception, the false claims (actual or implied) of being real footage when in fact it is completely computer-generated and fictitious.
And that's the big difference. After all, one could ask: "Why are you so upset about fake videos? You watch movies all the time, and they don't depict real events, they are completely fictitious, and more over in this day and age many of them have so much CGI as to almost be completely digitally produced."
But the difference is: Movies don't pretend to depict real footage. They don't pretend to be documentaries filmed by someone on the spot.
With YouTube this will not be the case: The vast, vast majority of AI slop pretends to be real footage, to deceive people for views. This is almost never disclosed pretty much anywhere.
Yes, at some point YouTube will start demanding all AI-generated videos to clearly disclose that fact. That's pretty much certain to happen. However, even then, it won't help much because of the inevitable overdominance of such videos. YouTube will stop being "broadcast yourself" and become a publishing platform for AI-generated videos, when over 99% of them will be such.
If anything, the "this video has been generated by AI" disclosures will, perhaps ironically, only make the situation worse because it will just help highlighting how much the AI slop has replaced actual genuine content. When almost everything you see is AI-generated, the interest in even watching will go away.
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