With the proliferation of free AI tools that can be used to generate video material (something that, quite sadly, YouTube is still outright supporting and promoting) YouTube has been flooded by such videos.
And the thing is, AI tools have become so astonishingly good that they can give the outwards illusion of a high-quality high-production-values video, at least judging from the thumbnail, description and the first few seconds of the video.
For the longest time it used to be that that "professional look" required actual work, actual effort, actual talent. Good thumbnail pictures (that are not just a random frame from the video proper) required work and knowledge to produce. The contents of the video itself, if it wasn't just someone talking to the camera, required at least some production values, relatively good camera and filming equipment or, if it was some kind of animation or presentation using eg. vector graphics, clip-art or outright hand-drawn animation, it required an experienced talented artist and a lot of time.
Thus, only the truly high-quality videos had that certain "look&feel" to them, which you often could surmise just from the thumbnail, and particularly from the first few seconds of the video.
Nowadays, however, AI tools can be used by anybody to generate that same "professional" look&feel, and it's fooling more and more people. Even those who detest so-called AI-slop often get fooled to click on videos that look interesting and didactic, only to find out that it's just that: Low-effort AI-slop.
There is, however, perhaps a bit serendipitously, one way to at least suspect that a video is AI-slop: And that's checking how long ago the video was published and its view count.
While some AI-slop videos unfortunately get millions of views, the vast, vast majority of them usually only have a few hundreds, sometimes even less than a hundred, even after having been on YouTube for days and even weeks.
I have noticed this phenomenon, and it has started to immediately raise suspicion when I notice it, and I have learned to always check the view count and how long ago it was published (which, thankfully, YouTube is still showing alongside the thumbnail.)
In other words, if a video thumbnail looks interesting, the title of the video looks interesting, but it has 120 views while having been published 2 days ago, it's an almost certain sign of being AI-slop.
Do some genuine good-quality hand-crafted videos also suffer from this (ie. very low view counts)? Sure. But they are a microscopic minority among the AI-slop.
Hopefully YouTube won't start hiding that information from the thumbnails (which I suspect they might start doing at some point.)
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