All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

(Please forgive the typos - I'm on my phone and didn't want to put this comment through AI...)

This feels like a very strongly opinionated anti-AI echo chamber; while I absolutely recognize the destructive potential of AI video, I think the author is far off to the extreme end of completely ignoring every useful use case, and also, being somewhat naive.

For example, trying to explain to people in your group chat why an AI video is fake, when they are not attentive to this message or never showed any sign they might care, and then being disappointed when nobody listens. Imagine crashing into a party and explaining to everybody why the music sucks and the food is bad; you might be right, but did you consider they just want to have a good time, and they just don't care?

Since I've been to this rabbit hole myself, as I assume have many other readers with elderly parents, let me share my own experience. I've taken the time to show the older people in my family how AI works and how easy it is to create anything fake - including using their own appearance and voice! - and in the end of the day, they don't care. When forwarding a fake video, they say they know it's fake, but they still agree with the message, or liked the cute animals, so they forwarded it.

This is old people for you.

Now, I feel that during the post, the author has progressed from stating their own opinion on AI videos, to subtly claiming everybody hates AI videos and feel a physical sickness when seeing one, to the point that YouTube is scaring off viewers. This - while at the same time detailing how some people forward these videos like crazy. So which one is it?

Well, I for one don't hate AI video as much as I hate bad, sloppy videos, but to be honest these have been around for a long time, there's a massive surge of misinformation and just aweful - and completely organic - videos out there. AI videos do open the door for very creative and awesome creations, and I've seen plenty of those, and enjoyed them quite a bit.

This is just another tool. It's all up to you how you use it and what you create. Blaming the tool is just not going to work, just like blaming an instrument for the music being bad. The blame is with the composition, not the instrument.

There will be a time, very soon, where you will not be able to tell it's AI. In fact, this time is now, and I assure you that some AI content in the right hands is just not distinguishable from the real thing anymore. You may have even seen, or - God help us - even enjoyed an AI generated video, without realizing it, and this will happen more often as these tools mature.

This is just my 2 cents. I hope you will be able to finish you AI movie one day.

Animating is a ton of work. Animation decisions can give a great deal of "feel" to a cartoon. Studio Ghibli works are distinct from Disney's old animation and each conveys a distinct feeling. Those decisions are often made by the production team. Its why One Punch Man season 3 is so derided this year after Season 1 was heralded as the greatest season of Anime in a very long time. You'd think following the literal story boards provided by the already published Manga would be simple! but somehow it lost all of its charm.

Animation, or shooting video is the result of many, many pieces. If you're not putting a ton of work into the decisions that result in the final "shot" the video camera makes then the video that is shot isn't magically going to show an enormous amount of care in its construction.

Imho this is as if you were a music producer and instead of synthesizing the sound you want you were exploring random presets till you found one that matched.

I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.

She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.

Actually we have a way to filter out that crap, that's what Google, Meta, TikTok, etc... have perfected over decades. The internet is huge and full of crap, and we get to see very little of it. Suggestions from, say, YouTube are generally high quality, few AI slop, vacation videos from random people, or penises. I don't mean good as in moral values, but I mean a production value beyond what you can do by writing a few lines in an AI prompt: decent picture and sound, a well written script, etc...

As more and more AI slop floods the internet, people will start to notice more and more and downvote it down to oblivion and really good content will surface. It may or may not be made with the help of AI, but it won't be sloppy. We are already seeing that, active communities don't have much AI slop, dead communities have plenty, kind if like these abandoned forums that are full of spam no one reads.

People are getting tired of AI slop, it is becoming as recognizable as a photoedit made in 5 minutes in MS-Paint, and it has about the same value. Good for over the top memes where being ugly is part of the charm, but not for anything serious.