this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Yeah, it’s bad.
Non-watermarked slop is going to be impossible to detect going forward, and the false detections are going to get worse.
The fundamental issue is the monetization scheme. It’s just too lucrative for spammers. YouTube’s economics are broken, and getting worse.
…Hence, no matter what YouTube says, YouTube is going to double down on “detectors,” because Alphabet leadership couldn’t care less about destroying longstanding creators. Their only objective is to suppress just enough spam to keep ad buyers unconcerned next quarter, no matter the long term damage; that’s someone else’s problem.
The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.
But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.
For every ten users who decry AI voices and animation, a thousand more will blindly click "Like" and "Subscribe". The people have spoken, and they want to eat straight from the fertilizer pile.
People only click like and subscribe because their other options were taken from them. They got tired of the people speaking up so removed the options to do so.
I've run my own anecdotal and admittedly small blind trials on friends and family. Most people unfortunately preferred the A.I. slop to real human content. My theory is because it tends to be brought and shiny. The only actual study I could find online, told participants which is which, kind of defeating the purpose in my opinion.
It's engagement optimized, that's why.
That's the whole point of the spam; being engagement bait.
Same thing applies to any human made clickbait, and people have demonstrated they simply cannot help themselves, and click it.
There was recently a study using human short stories and LLM generated short stories prompted to write a similar story. The participants where told which stories were AI generated, but sometimes they were lied to, and told a human-written story was AI generated.
The study showed that people liked the AI stories more. It also showed that if someone has a negative bias against AI generated content, they'd claim the AI story was worse, even if it were actually the human story and they were just told it was AI.
Also, another test was performed where they provided a story and asked them if it was AI generated or human generated. The participants could only tell the AI written story 45% to 50% of the time. Essentially, they were guessing.
More info: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/ai-generated-stories-rated-better-quality-than-human-written-ones-study-finds
I think many people have taken a mental snapshot of the quality of AI generated content from a couple years ago and just assumed it hasn't improved since then.
Yeah that mirrors my findings too… my hypothesis was that everyone would clearly prefer the human equivalent art, but I was disappointed to be proven wrong. That's the nature of science though, sometimes you get your presumptions smacked down.
nah, they are doing that because they are good taught consumers who know well how to follow orders obediently. It's just so convenient to not think, just do what they tell them. aah have you seen that animation, and the sound effect?!
We need a law that requires AI-generated videos to be watermarked and huge fines for the streaming companies that allow unmarked videos.
That won't work for long. Generation can be hosted in a country outside the jurisdiction.
Current services do need such a law anyway, and many already are watermarked. But I'm just saying it wouldn't even slow down spammers once they figure it out.
that's why the law shouldn't apply to just generation. as long as something is delivered (even if over the internet) to EU places, then the EU law mandating AI labels applies.
Well that would mean holding social media liable.
That would be fantastic. But it seems unlikely, sadly.
To be clear, it's the streaming companies should be fined. If YouTube shows an unmarked video in the US then they get fined for doing so.
The content generation is another matter that's more difficult to enforce.
Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top. Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don't appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators. On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they're spamming or a bot, when it's just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It's like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren't suitable for doing the same job at X.
There's no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn't know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren't good enough either.