YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#491

Post by codeflo » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

injidup wrote: post #474

Last weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key. Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Partici…

> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.

An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.

What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#492

Post by listenallyall » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

pattle wrote: post #448

spullara wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.

This is interesting. I think AI music will be massive in a few years. It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you

I think its the exact opposite. One of the best features of art, in any form, is that it offers different perspectives, viewpoints, ideas. Think of how many people changed something major in their life due to a song, a movie, a photograph. Now think of how little would happen if AI just repeated back what "it knows" you already like. Your entire life would just be a derivative of things you liked as a 6-year old. Nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing fresh.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#493

Post by verst » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

ellrob88 wrote: post #139

Curious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).

I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.

So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#494

Post by jens__jensen » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #265

bauble wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with. Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some rem…

> This isn't possible on Youtube right now. Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues. Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll ru…

There is https://aisloplist.com/ that works pretty much like you have described.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#495

Post by footydude » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

injidup wrote: post #474

Last weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key. Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Partici…

> But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.

In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.

That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#496

Post by codeflo » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #107

jameson wrote: post #74

I suggest turning off recommendation if you dislike what they suggest My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see

This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations. What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.

It's clear that YouTube doesn't want you to have much influence over your feed. You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you, which would be the simplest thing to implement, and other knobs that previously existed were silently removed.

Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#497

Post by galkk » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #482

galkk wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys? Plenty of artists plain suck and discovery is a problem that requires time and effort. If somebody makes decision to like what they like (and made, to some extent) that’s their choice.

Yeah people seem to forget that before AI music, there was already a huge amount of "slop" music out there - background music, muzak, mood music. Hell, Spotify was put in the spotlight not that long ago for commissioning music to mix into their own most popular mixes (the casual background listening ones), so that they own the rights themselves and don't need to pay artists as much. A lot of music is for mass consump…

Also the almost industrial score music machines: trailer music, like two steps from hell, even Zimmer. Those are also can be considered as slop, even worse - highly formulaic, almost standard (YouTube “heroic music chord progression”). And those were written by humans

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#498

Post by CrzyLngPwd » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:34 AM UTC

I wonder, will this impact those awful shorts that rip out and tack together the highlight seconds of longer videos and add a terrible AI voiceover?

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#499

Post by pona-a » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

reddalo wrote: post #154

parliament32 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really any different than Google wants advertisers on YT, but still labels ads as ads?

They don't really want to label ads as ads (no advertiser really does...); they're forced by regulations from multiple countries.

There's also the matter of brand reputation. You don't want to make your ads seem like your own or your user's public communications.

Re: YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

#500

Post by comboy » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:36 AM UTC

I wonder how are they going to implement it. Many creators with even decent content use AI-generated visuals. In fact, everything could be AI-generated visual and whether that would be like Kurzgezagt, Asianometry or Sabine Hossenfelder content value wouldn't drop significantly. How do you draw the line?