AI becoming a menace 

Months ago, I kept hearing this grating voice whenever someone in my vicinity played a social media video. I could not understand why it annoyed me until it hit me.

These people were watching different videos from a wide variety of content creators, and yet, I kept hearing the same raspy, monotone voice of an AI bot. And then, three days ago, I watched a brief interview where Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson made several interesting comments about some of his co-stars. I took those comments at face value.

Guess what I learned from the comments soon after? The entire video was AI-generated. Johnson never spoke those words. Someone combined snippets of a real interview with a fake Dwayne Johnson voice. That frustrated me. AI content has become irritatingly commonplace because it is cheap.

The right AI software will write your script, read that script with an AI-generated voice of your choice, and edit the final video, adding graphs, pictures, sounds, etc. Some AI tools will create brand-new images, eliminating the need for subscribing to websites that provide copyright-free pictures.

Why is that a bad thing? Well, if you earn a living by writing for YouTubers or doing voice-over work, AI just royally screwed you over. What you did in a month, AI can accomplish within hours for a fraction of the price, which is why people are flooding the internet with guides showing beginners how to create YouTube videos with AI.

The objective is to maximize profits (via Adsense money) by running as many YouTube channels as possible. Naturally, these guides tend to exaggerate. They promise users earnings in the thousands of dollars per month. But YouTube is too big. You people upload 3.7 million videos to the platform daily. Audiences cannot watch that much content.

Most of those videos will sink into obscurity. The more common AI becomes, the more videos YouTube will receive, and the harder it will become to stand out  According to The Atlantic, YouTube has a whopping 14 billion videos on its servers. Some experts have suggested that 93 per cent of those videos have less than 1,000 views.

So, if you think flooding the platform with AI-generated content will make you rich, think again. But that matters primarily to content creators. As a consumer, why does AI-generated content frustrate me?

Because it is terrible. The voices alone are unforgivable. Human voices have colour. Those awkward pauses you get from some of the newer content creators are appealing because they are relatable. AI voices are flat. Even when they attempt to mimic natural human voices, they can’t reproduce the imperfections in an organic voice.

Also, the actual content is bad. Because AI creators prioritize quantity over quality, their videos have no meat. They tend to meander aimlessly. More importantly, you can’t trust them.

ChatGPT makes mistakes. A few months ago, The Guardian covered the story of a lawyer who asked ChatGPT to do research for his case, and the software cited historical cases that did not exist. The lawyer was chastised for failing to double-check ChatGPT’s work.

AI creators fall into the same trap. They forget to fact-check their scripts, and unfortunately, most of their viewers take the claims in those videos at face value, which creates a cycle of misinformation.

Many of you don’t care. I know this because I continue to hear that raspy AI voice when I watch your videos in public. I can’t stand them. The moment I hear that stupid AI voice in a video, I close, then ask YouTube to never recommend that channel.

If you won’t do the difficult work of crafting a distinct YouTube video, why should I waste my precious time on your garbage? Low-quality AI content will only disappear if audiences stop watching it.

mbjjnr8@gmail.com