If you see a new youTube channel with a plain sounding name like "NatureView" or "BrightScience" etc. and there is what looks like a tempting video on a specific education topic "Most Active Volcanoes" or "Incredible Carnivorous Plants"
There is a 50/50 chance it will be a generated voice with stock footage and a script written by GPT.
I am now avoiding videos if I don't recognize the creator, or don't see signs it was made by a person.
So much spam!
I could maybe tolerate such content were it not riddled with errors. Give it 30 seconds and it will say something FALSE.
I am a little worried people are watching these and getting their heads filled with plausible, but wrong facts about obscure topics.
"I thought no snakes with horizontal markings were venomous."
"I thought this ant was native to this region so it'd be fine to release..."
This like ... some evil masterminds plan to grind human learning to a halt...
Yes, videos made by people can have mistakes... but there are far fewer mistakes ... and the mistakes ... How do I explain this?
When a person makes a mistake about some fact about science or nature it's normally based on something, it comes from some perspective on the world. And people tend to make the same predictable set of mistakes... not just random mistakes sprinkled all through everything they say.
We aren't accustomed to this kind of misinformation. So it's easier to buy in.
@futurebird The actual human YouTuber Kyle Hill made a video covering this phenomenon a while back, which was both informative and entertaining. I believe he's been trying to get his considerable following to report such videos (since they are inevitably full of copyright infringement), though I'm guessing that's a losing battle.
One funny thing he pointed out was that if it is a fake science or engineering video there is a significant probability that the thumbnail will include either Elon Musk or Michio Kaku.
@internic @futurebird He used to be awesome. That video was very good. At some point he seemed to kind of start supporting LLM nonsense & start pushing it. Then I stopped watching his videos.
@internic @futurebird Ah, you beat me to it with the link to that video. It's a good one!