I recently came across a video by gaming YouTuber Noctapus titled ‘The Era of Fake Video Essays is Here‘, highlighting the uprising of synthetic content on the platform in the past few months. The voices, the thumbnails, the script, the description: none of these elements had been created by a person.
This is not anything new or groundbreaking; the rise of Artificial intelligence technology in the arts has been omnipresent in discussions of tech and the creative industries, though this recent surge on YouTube feels incredibly disrespectful to what the platform stands for. It is integral to the name that ‘You’, the creator, are the helmsman of every upload.
From Smosh skits to ‘Me at the zoo‘, this development feels less like an evolution of the site’s creative potential, but rather a complete left-field turn to the ChatGPT and Gemini tabs, which destroy the personal touch the platform was designed to nurture. The original purpose of YouTube as a vessel for the creator-consumer has been lost as focus has shifted to favour ultimate, yet artificial, efficiency over any individual’s sway and creative passion.
Adding further insult to the logic and justification of YouTube as a platform is the site’s own facilitation and encouragement of the use of these gen-AI technologies. As mentioned in Noctapus‘ video, YouTube Studio itself provides AI descriptions, title recommendations, and thumbnail options to you, suggesting they would be an improvement over your own work or the work of a hired artist.
Much of the discussion surrounding AI’s interception of the arts has taken something of a ‘hate the player and the game’ outlook. The generative tools and apps are vindicated for their marring and flooding of the artistic landscape, and the prominent users, the ‘AI artists’, are likewise spoken of negatively for laziness, misunderstanding of art, or a general lack of creative integrity.
The difference here is that these services, such as ChatGPT or Midjourney, were born for the sole purpose of morphing a prompt into a piece, whether it be verbal or visual. The transmogrification of YouTube from a creative outlet to a service asking you to not be creative for the sake of profit and views seems entirely misaligned with their own design philosophy: the uploading of “original content” (per YouTube’s website excerpt) and the flourishing of consumer creativity.
It is not just about souring YouTube’s image as a platform, but also the experience. I made a new account and watched one video— the classic ‘history of the entire world, i guess‘, a prime example of celebrated individual creativity— and my refreshed homepage was littered with AI history videos, ‘Sleepy Historian‘ channels which artificially narrate events, and YouTube Shorts plastered centre-stage with the Sora AI logo.
Thousands of comments on this content seem to wholeheartedly believe they are witnessing the personal touch: a hand-crafted video delivered right to them. If this kind of work continues to not only be rampant, but also be rampantly consumed and enjoyed, the era of the creative mind on YouTube (or even the channels that genuinely like making videos) may be sparse and overtaken sooner than we would hope.
YouTube has not taken any action against this either. Their terms of service only prohibit the synthetic recreation of real people or places, such as AI deepfake content, leaving all other forms of AI content on the table. While this seems like a good preventative measure, it can be easily manipulated: so long as it looks a little cartoony, what is stopping history channels from spouting lies like how the Annunaki rebuilt our world after a cataclysm?
This approach, allowing anything but the ostensibly realistic, seems like a way of leaning into all the benefits of AI content. More uploads, more views, more ads, more money: without the consequences and controversies spouted by deepfakes and other technology. There is still plenty of great, real stuff being made for every niche and in every corner, though the shifting landscape of YouTube as a platform is scarcely including the ‘You’ part along with it— an inevitable collateral damage from AI’s adoption into the media as a whole.
