alt Hacker NewsChildren and seniors are victimized by AI content on a huge scale. Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds.
I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated.
It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content.
I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence (animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points), a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content.
Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person.
Currently, AI videos are a gold mine for black hats.
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The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
And unfortunately the other way around could be about as bad:
“Don’t believe what you just saw — That’s just AI propaganda!”
I've found a curious variety of AI videos: releases of motorbikes that don't exist, brought by Youtube algorithm. I guess the point is just clicks or ads money. Some comments, by bots or gullible users.
No longer seen recently, not sure it's because YT's crackdown or me repeteadly clicking "not recommend me this channel" (there're a handful)
tbh those brain rot videos pre-date AI generation, i know because my little BIL used to watch those kind of random non-stop action and movement vids in like 2020
> Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds
I know my story is just an anecdote but it really makes me question if this is even true. I search for things that I want to learn about on YouTube, often about wildlife or the environment, and get served a TON of AI slop. My feed is now full of it. It's extremely frustrating and has actually led to me using YouTube in this way a lot less over the last few months. I have been hoping that I'd be able to filter by this one day.
What's even worse is that these videos are being used for shady purposes as well. I start to fear a lot for our future elections. I have heard parents/grand-parents mention videos they have seen from politicians that are simply fake. They totally believed claims they said these politicians made, but when you look it up you discover these things were never said and that they fell for AI deep-fake style videos. So far most of these videos have been made to promote scams. I'm sure many of us have seen these videos. Like the classic Elon Musk promoting some crypto scam videos.
This makes me worried for future elections as old people often are making up a large percentage of the voter base, and they are also easily fooled by these kinds of videos. When you combine this with the algorithmic feeds, it is a recipe for disaster. They are going to see videos making politicians they already don't like as being horrible monsters because of fake AI videos, and then see videos making their preferred person look better with other AI videos.
And as AI and deep-fake technology continues to get better and better, this is only going to trick more and more people. Iran has already been caught many times using AI videos to fake war footage to try and make America look worse in the recent war.
Scammers are also using live deep-fake video to scam people in real-time via voice and video calls. Romance scams are going to get more and more effective.
My girlfriend mindlessly watches those sometimes. I think they are from China maybe.
I heard one in the background last night and it went something like this:
"A girl becomes pregnant in college and it turns out to be triplets. But she doesn't know who the father is. She raises the children and they grow up very successful. One becomes a surgeon. The children's father is actually a famous <something> and one day he is giving a speech. While he giving the speech one of the children dashes out of the audience and hugs his leg!"
Total logistical nonsense. Doesn't even have a story line that fits. I asked her why she watches that but it's mostly just background noise why she is doing something. It's awful.
I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.
kids simply shouldn't be looking at a screen, AI-generated or not.
Screen time for kids (and adults for that matter!) should be way way scaled back. That falls on the parents.
Bad parents give their kids phones and tablets and that's a hill I will die on.
My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.