Latest news with #PJAce
Mint
25-07-2025
- Mint
YouTube's AI Slop Is a Win for Alphabet. But What About Us?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- There's a prevailing wisdom that AI-generated content, or slop as it's colloquially known, should make our skin crawl. AI models tend to generate uncanny faces, mangled hands and fantastical scenarios. Take this YouTube Short video of a baby that finds itself being shimmied up a baggage loader onto a jumbo jet, before donning an aviation headset and flying the plane. It has racked up more than 103 million views. So too have other AI-generated videos which are starting to dominate the platform in much the same way they've proliferated across Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Several of YouTube's most popular channels now feature AI-generated content heavily. I'd originally thought this would be a problem for YouTube as it grappled with what looked like a new form of spam, but the general lack of complaint from advertisers coupled with the gangbusters growth of AI content, and even appreciative comments from viewers, changed my view. It seems the public is happy to gorge on slop, and that's not a problem for Alphabet Inc.'s most valuable asset after Google Search. Quite the opposite. Earlier this month, YouTube — which could surpass The Walt Disney Co. this year as the world's largest media company by revenue — updated its policies to strike a balance between allowing AI-generated videos to flourish on its platform without spamming it. The new rules cut ad revenue from low-effort, repetitive content. Think channels like this one, this one, this one, this one and many more, often run by the same person uploading dozens of videos a day. Their creators might exploit AI tools like Eleven Labs to create a synthetic voice that reads out a script, scraped from Reddit, over a slideshow of stock images. Some of these videos get hundreds of thousands of views. The video platform's overall approach, however, is that AI-generated content is fine, so long as it's original, provides value to viewers and includes some human input. For now, it seems to be measuring that on a case-by-case basis, which is as good an approach as any with new tech. YouTube is also no stranger to fighting spam. Indeed, the policy update seems have put advertisers at ease, even as 92% of creators on the site use generative AI tools, according to the company. Advertisers have a tacit understanding that more AI on YouTube means more content, and more revenue. It helps that the industry has years of experience trying to monitor icky content — from racism to conspiracy theories — shown next to their brands online. They've learned it's a years-long game of Whac-A-Mole. YouTube clearly wants AI content to thrive. Sister company Google has said that later this summer, it will bring its video-generation tool Veo3 to YouTube Shorts, making it even easier to create lifelike AI videos of Storm-Trooper vloggers or biblical characters as influencers. The company says AI will 'unlock creativity' for its creators. PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) June 2, 2025 But unlocking new forms of profit is more straightforward for Alphabet than it is for creators. Take Ahmet Yiğit, the Istanbul-based creator behind the viral pilot-baby video. Though his channel has racked up hundreds of millions of views, he's only received an estimated $2,600 for his most viral post, with the bulk of his audience coming from countries like India, where ad rates are low. Yiğit says he spends hours on a single scene and juggles a dozen tools, suggesting that even this new generation of AI creators could end up working harder for less, while Alphabet reaps ad revenue from their output. As long as the content machine runs, it doesn't matter whether AI videos are quick and easy or grueling to make — only that they drive views and ads. That's why YouTube is leaning harder into welcoming slop than policing it. While the company does require creators to say if their videos contain AI, the resulting disclaimer is listed in a small-text description that viewers must click through to read, making it tough to spot.(1) That does little to address the growing confusion around what's real and what's synthetic as more YouTubers race to capitalize on AI content. The risk is that as slop floods our feeds and juices YouTube's recommendation algorithms, it'll drown out more thoughtful, human-made work. The earliest big YouTube hits were slices of life like the infamous, 'Charlie Bit My Finger.' What happens when the next wave of viral hits have no bearing on reality, instead offering bizarre, dreamlike sequences of babies dressed as Storm Troopers, or Donald Trump beating up bullies in an alleyway? Perhaps they will both reflect and deepen our sense of disconnection from real life. AI content might turn out to be a boon for YouTube, but it offers an unsettling future for the rest of us. More From Bloomberg Opinion: (1) That probably won't change for some time. Guidelines from the US Federal Trade Commission requires YouTube videos to disclose if they include a paid promotion, but there's no similar legal obligation to disclose content that's AI generated This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of 'Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.' More stories like this are available on
Gizmodo
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
AI Harry Potter Vlogs Are an Unholy Combo of Fanfic and Veo 3 Slop
There are lots of ways to make a generic vlog on YouTube nowadays, but only one way to make a vlog using the likeness of Harry Potter characters—or at least only one way to do that without technically doing it at all. Thanks to Veo 3, Google's newest video generation model, smooth-brain YouTube content is getting a lot smoother. Loads of people have already demonstrated ad nauseam how Veo 3 can generate man-on-the-street-style vlogs or unboxing videos that look fairly close to the real thing. Naturally, people seem to have gotten bored with that genre pretty quickly, though, and they're now taking that idea to the next level. In case you haven't already been subjected to the phenomenon on TikTok, here's what I'm talking about. "Vlogwartz" is going insane on TikTok right now. 2 week old account, 15 million views. Justine thinks this will be more popular than HBO's $900M Harry Potter remake. We're talking with studios right now to do this for new IP. Daily vids are 👑 — PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) June 23, 2025These Harry Potter vlogs aren't a totally new phenomenon. Just a couple of weeks ago, the flavor of the week was Stormtrooper vlogs, which take the same YouTube-style content and give it a Star Wars spin. What makes a Harry Potter spin special, though, is the fact that it's really blowing up. As noted by PJ Ace, who just made a primetime, GTA-inspired ad using Veo 3, Harry Potter vlogs have racked up 15 million views in just two weeks. It makes perfect sense. These Veo 3-enabled videos take two things that people, for better or worse, love: Harry Potter and mindless YouTube content. Of course, that's going to blow up. But what's more interesting than the popularity is the fact that it also opens up a new frontier for fanfiction writ large. As recently noted by The Verge, AI is coming for your fanfiction, but it's not just the words, apparently. I guess we need to get ready for a generated video accompaniment, too. Think about it: what's to stop fanfic writers from really visualizing their creations now that tools like Veo 3 are available to the masses for free? My vote for the next victim is the robust, colorful, and furry-coded world of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction. That'll really teach us all a lesson. Though, I guess now that I'm really thinking about it, there is one thing that could stop us from getting washed away in a wave of AI-generated fanfic: copyright. Listen, I'm no legal expert, but I don't think the owners of all of this wildly profitable intellectual property, nor the actors that portray characters in said properties, will be super happy about new videos being conjured from thin air without their approval or the ability to profit off them. Then, there's the added element of TikTok being monetized that makes matters even worse. If 'creators' of these video generations are now making money off the likeness of very copyrighted material, then methinks there could be some legal implications incoming. But the further we go down this rabbit hole, the more we start to see the huge, vacuous, money-shaped pitfall that is video generation in general. At the end of the day, video generation models are copyright infringement machines designed to suck up IP, mash it up, and spit it back out as a borderline legal simulacrum. Sure, there are some models (like this one from Adobe) that are supposedly not trained using copyrighted material and are designed to be more brand-safe, but most training data is still a black box. I'm pretty sure the more we peer into that box, the more we'll recognize some shapes, and—oh look, that one looks a lot like the stuff George Lucas made! So, enjoy your animated fanfiction for now because it may not last. At least we get to reclaim Harry Potter from the transphobic claws of J.K. Rowling just a little bit in the interim.
Gizmodo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Google's Veo 3 AI Slopfest Just Reached New Heights
Just when I thought I met my slop quota for the month, Google had to go ahead and pile on. With Veo 3, AI-generated video has reached a whole new and stupefying level. YouTube slop; video game slop; VR slop; app slop—you name it. All of that slop, however interesting, disheartening, or inane, has been pretty low stakes, but apparently it's all pointed in one direction, and that's straight for prime time. Kalshi hired me to make the most unhinged NBA Finals commercial possible. Network TV actually approved this GTA-style madness 🤣 High-dopamine Veo 3 videos will be the ad trend of 2025. Here's how I made it in just TWO DAYS 👇🏼 (Prompt included) — PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) June 11, 2025 On Thursday night, Veo 3 made its debut as a tool for AI advertising, becoming the engine behind this commercial for the financial services company Kalshi, which aired during the NBA finals. This isn't the first AI-generated ad—those have been happening for a little while now and were a pretty major theme at this past year's Super Bowl—but it's certainly an ascension for Veo 3, which was just unveiled at Google's I/O conference last month. But just because AI ads aren't new doesn't mean the idea of video generation didn't simultaneously reach new heights and new lows. As you can see from the creator of the ad (or I guess prompter in this case), PJ Ace, the whole process was rife with Google AI, from ideation to generation. 'Kalshi asked me to create a spot about people betting on various markets, including the NBA Finals,' wrote Ace on X. 'I said the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand.' After the initial idea—which was apparently a thematic mashup of GTA and Florida—Ace used a mixture of Gemini and ChatGPT to help write and devise the script, and then took those ideas and had Gemini literally write a prompt that he could feed into Veo 3. That's right, folks, he had AI prompt itself, and that's how a prime-time ad was born. The result looks about on par with what we've seen other people generating with Veo 3. The visuals themselves are realistic, but you'll notice that each scene in the ad is very short. That's because Veo 3 still has trouble with continuity. Even in Google's curated demos of its new video generation model last month, including this action schlock AI slopfest, things get weird when you try to stitch coherent scenes together. Though Google's AI filmmaking tool, Flow, is made for creating longer, coherent AI videos, allowing you to describe angles and characters and retain them across scenes, things still get wonky. The aforementioned action-oriented AI slopfest is full of strange scenes of a SWAT team shooting at nothing and jarring camera angle shifts that make the fact it was AI-generated pretty obvious. Created with Google Flow. Visuals, Sound Design, and Voice were prompted using Veo 3 text-to-video. Welcome to a new era of filmmaking. — Dave Clark (@Diesol) May 21, 2025 Ace says his ad took him all of two days to create and '300-400 generations,' so clearly this isn't quite waving a magic wand-type technology yet. Though, as Ace points out, it did effectively kill a lot of jobs on what would have been a much bigger payroll. Ace estimates that the whole thing was about a '95 percent cost reduction' as opposed to 'traditional ads.' There's a lot to unpack here, and based on the limitations I just described above, I don't think we can herald Veo 3 in as the new, preferred method of advertising, but the job-killing potential for this type of technology is undoubtedly high. And if there's a way to cut costs, you can bet your ass that we'll see a lot more of this kind of AI slop in the near future.
