If it’s interesting, bizarre, amazing or unusual, chances now are that it’s fake. 
I get it all the time in my suggestions. I can usually discern them without ever viewing the video (a day or two old with 300 views or less and usually short length…less that five minutes…I have no hard line but that’s an indication to me).
I immediately tell YouTube to never recommend the channel again. But, the people who make them change names and another one is back the next day.
Sucks. YouTube needs to stop recommending such crap till they have some good history behind them.
I’ve seen several videos that appear made up.
What’s very annoying is they click bait with a celebrity interview. But the video is nothing more than a narrated career history. There’s no genuine interview with the celebrity.
A lot of shorts are just clips from movies. Some a-hole is getting clicks by ripping off other people’s work.
I get it in my Facebook reels now for some reason. It’s so god-awfully obviously fake AI that I can’t tell if there’s really people in the comments taking it seriously or if it’s people trolling. Like stunningly, obvoiusly bad. And part of me wants to comment, but I refrain, as I don’t want to give the video more engagement than I already have. It’s almost become a somewhat fascinating genre in and of itself, kind of like how early YouTube had its own vibe and lo-fi look. And some of it is so bizarrely surreal, that, I hate to say it, as much as I hate it, appeals to me in some sort of zeitgeist time capsule sort of way, if that makes any sense. If I had a partner who needed to talk to me up to an hour each night I’m away, it would drive me absolutely insane, but, to be fair, there are people who like that and it takes all kinds.
In the last couple weeks I’ve seen at least six "people on a glass skywalk/viewing platform over a chasm/on the side of a mountain that either collapses or a gigantic boulder crashes down through it killing everyone.
All capture in amazingly well-framed non-shaky high definition vids apparently from drones just somehow hovering there to see it happen.
Wow, I thankfully haven’t seen this outside of really bad ads. There’s one that has Oprah pushing the pink salt thing, and all of the ads pushing the same thing seem to all be AI generated. But I haven’t seen it in my content recommendations.
Youtube is flooded with “content creators” and “makers” and other euphemisms created by silicon valley to sell sht.
Not my words, but I agree:
“I don’t like the term “content creators” as it doesn’t acknowledge any degree of expertise. The easy way out for content producers and media editors is to pick the low hanging fruit and target the segment of the audience that is new to the craft. That lowers the bar and it provides a good excuse for repeating basic information and losing the audience after a short time.”
The above was specific to a woodworking site, but I think it holds true. How many reiterations can someone go through?
More aptly, discontent creators
(Deleted never mind)
If you try to complain to You Tube that a video or photo is fake, usually the most they will do is absolutely nothing to the actual perpetrator…but they will block you from having to see it.
Thankfully, I haven’t seen this (or perhaps just hit Not Interested without processing what it was). The one exception I can think of was a music video that I could tell was AI pretty early in and the description backed that up. Blocked the channel and that was that. I don’t watch any celebrity stuff or random “weird thing that happened” videos though so maybe my algorithm isn’t as susceptible yet.
Ironically, I’d say that a good 20% of my video suggestions are people complaining about AI instead. I must be wrecking the averages for the rest of you.
It is almost guaranteed that it is the latter and not the former.
I’m not positive, but I believe there is a maximum number of channels you’re allowed to block seeing recommendations from. Nothing else explains how blocked channels eventually return weeks or months later, channels who aren’t just returning socks. During that time before a “legit” channel pops up again I’ve blocked a bunch of the sketchier types.
Eh, maybe. I looked now and, out of the first 50 video recs, only one was maybe AI and I’m basing that on the obviously AI thumbnail card. It was promising me Polish shortwave radio broadcasts though[1] which doesn’t seem very AI’ish compared to the “Motorcycle escapes from fire tornado!” stuff I’ve seen people complain about elsewhere. The others were mainly channels I’m familiar with or related long form content.
Not doubting anyone else’s experiences, it just hasn’t caught up to me in any volume yet that I can tell.
I was searching some vintage radio restoration stuff on Google tonight which I assume was connected ↩︎
It’s been years now that the preview still for a vast array of content has been a fake that never appears during the vid.
This is just that turned up to eleventy.
Anyone who wonders what the real world would look like if all business regulation disappeared has only to look carefully at the ungoverned spaces in commerce to see. Such as YT.
Yeah, for me it’s not so much on YouTube. I get close to zero obvious AI videos on YouTube in my channel, and I don’t make too much use of channel blocking or “do not recommend videos like this.” Maybe 1% of my suggestions have an AI video. But, for some reason, I get bombarded on Facebook Reels. I just checked and the second video on reels is a woman throwing a white cat into what looks like is a Siberian tiger pit. The tigers befriend the cat and the final scene is the cat riding on the backs of these tigers off into the sunset as a crowd claps. It’s surreal, is quite obviously fake (has almost a Pixar look to it and some impossible anatomy, along with impeccable lighting.) I get that and a lot of big breasted non-AI women. I don’t know why it’s throwing sexualized content at me either, other than I’m a middle-aged man.
Yeah, it is a bit like calling an author a ‘word arranger’ or something.
There is a policy update happening on YouTube in a week or so:
[July 2025] Updates to YouTube Partner Program (YPP) Monetization policies: In order to monetize as part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), YouTube has always required creators to upload “original” and “authentic” content. On July 15, 2025, YouTube is updating our guidelines to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content. This update better reflects what “inauthentic” content looks like today.
I would dearly love to believe this is the death-knell for content farms, AI slop, non-reacting ‘reaction’ reuploaders and other zero-effort bilgewater that is everywhere on YouTube, but I will believe it when I see it.
Mass-produced content appears to get a lot of views, which means a lot of ads are served, which means YouTube makes a lot of money off it, despite it being contemptible garbage. Is YouTube really going to take a cut in revenue by doing the right thing?
I don’t see this, but it’s probably because I use Youtube primarily to check out and post music. It is kind of like rinse-and-repeat, though. Automatic pitch correction is something that annoys a lot of musicians. As someone who sings and plays guitar, I get it. I can’t hit 100% of the notes 100% of the time, and I’m totally okay with musicians using some third-party software to shore up those occasional loose ends. Call it polish, if you will.
The problem is, there are musicians who rely exclusively on pitch correction, and that does bother me. But those musicians still have to have a semblence of rhythm and beat.
Except now you can simulate that with sofware as well.
Egad, why did I spend all of these thousands of hours on practicing when a software app can do it all for me?
Indeed.
That seems to be the formula for a huge number of the suggested videos on my feed. I never click on celebrity stuff anyway, nor anything that says “you’ll never believe what happened next” in the blurb.