RANT - No more AI generated videos please

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 20:52:59 -0000

I'm tired of videos with a generated voice that sounds not quite human rattling off a blog post that was stolen off dev.to (okay I can't confirm or deny that last part).

I personally want a feature on YouTube that will flag and allow me to avoid videos where there is not a human the audio.

Just skip them

Its hard and annoying becuase now we have turned thumbnails into a science so I don't know which videos are going to be AI generated until I click on them. I'm not asking for a ban on AI generated videos, I'm asking for a way to avoid them. It doesn't have to be perfect but maybe a "This video was generated by AI" tag or something.

Bonus points if you affect their monetization as to remove the incentive to make them.

Your voice is more important than your face

I must mention that some of my favorite creators are those that work with illustrators to help explain topics. I'm not asking you to get on camera in your video but at least on your mic.

You lose truse when you are not speaking

I don't know if this is scientifically accurate but I feel like our brains are wired to trust a human voice over a machine. This may be because I'm old and I originally learned things from people and the next generation may not have this problem (like writing instead of typing). I understand that you can crank out 10 videos a day and make a living on YouTube if you let a script generate a voice for you. I hear you and for those that don't ABSOLUTELY NEED Voice assistance, I don't care.

When I'm listening to an obviously generated voice, I immediately assume that someone doesn't care about the content or the person consuming it. For them it is a business of entering prompts into ChatGPT and having other AIs generate art and voice for a video and then it's on to the next one.

I know there are entire accounts where they are letting bots read news articles and reddit posts. I enjoy the content for mindless entertainment but I'm not learning anything from it. I'm immediately not going to trust the information in the video unless I can verify it from another source.

You're abilities on the mic are less important than it being you on the mic

I understand some folks don't love the sound of their own voice. No one really does but you learn to record in spite of that. I've watched folks who were open about being bad on camera or mic care enough about sharing the information that they had that they powered through and explained the topic.

Some of my favorite presentations at conferences are from folks with stammers or stutters or fought through their ADHD and ASD diagnoses to get up and do the damn thang. Don't let a lack of tools or skills be the excuse to cheap out on your audience by reducing your content down to "Just another bot video"