Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
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Title: AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube, Drowning
Out Real History

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/2028...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler:
As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the
other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was
autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History
for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It
is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into
the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a
kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible
impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British
accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left
too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I
hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out,
didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The
next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube
homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-
sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The
Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally
check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all
of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't
know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common
Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like
to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval
Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7
for weeks. In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly
became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they
are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is
flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real
anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-
checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite
literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the
YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or
otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether
that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos
on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have
noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs
the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview.
"It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing,
narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone
can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking
six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are
completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere." "I
absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate,"
Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being
regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for
humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of
knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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