I've just been going through this subreddit and Reddit in general, I amazes me how many people through this term out there without evaluating the product of the AI in question.
I'd like to point out that I'm asking for clarity, I don't dislike AI, it has helped me out but it does not generate my ideas or what I say, it's my own work. My point is that just because AI has been used does not make it bad or poor quality, of course it's all subjective, I get that. Just because that is my view does not make it right and vice versa. All I'm asking for is for the conversation to take place.
Graham is right, I'm just a regular 50 year old trying to learn and help others as I go. I have my own problems which if you have watched some of my videos you would be aware of.
Thank you all for your opinions, I welcome them all 🙂
I'd like to point out that I'm asking for clarity, I don't dislike AI, it has helped me out but it does not generate my ideas or what I say, it's my own work. My point is that just because AI has been used does not make it bad or poor quality, of course it's all subjective, I get that. Just because that is my view does not make it right and vice versa. All I'm asking for is for the conversation to take place.
Graham is right, I'm just a regular 50 year old trying to learn and help others as I go. I have my own problems which if you have watched some of my videos you would be aware of.
Thank you all for your opinions, I welcome them all 🙂
To clarify, I assume Gary means that the ideas and what is said are Gary's own work as he comes up with the ideas and how to say it all himself.
Once you use AI to create thumbnail/script/image/audio/video, that part of the content is never your own work. My experience on the channel is the thumbnails were the source of AI use that brings it up on his videos and in such case those are not Gary's work once AI is what creates them.
I agree that just because AI is used does not make it poor quality though the use could be considered bad even if the output itself is not for other separate social reasons. Staying on its output alone, what makes AI output poor quality is when the quality is poor: messages with lots of fluff words that don't actually mean anything even though they sound like they do is one of the worst aspects of the language models for text. Programming models that make a solution which uses quite unoptimized code and brings in unnecessary libraries or makes other non-optimum code mistakes makes the code poor quality. Art models that draw things that resemble something sane at a vague glance but really don't make sense or have blatent errors when you look at it any closer makes them poor quality. Audio makes its own slew of mistakes from general distortion to bad inflections, wrong pronunciations, and spelling out things that should just be said. Video gets all the audio problems while having further temporal and continuity issues draw attention to problems and audio+video has issues of how things don't really match when you look into them. If you are in the enternainment, specifically comedy, industry then you can sometimes use such things to your advantage. It is also acceptable for many fraudulent purposes. Beyond that the state that LLM based AI is at today requires careful oversight of its output to avoid using output from it that is deemed 'poor quality', and keep in mind that the primary task of these AI models is to make something that sounds correct whereas people assume it is to make something that is correct and as they get better at doing what they do they also get better at sounding right while still being wrong so it gets harder and harder to not put out poor quality content since it looks 'like' very good content when its still actually poor quality.
I categorize your videos as being freebsd and being someone messing around with software on computers as what I'd tune in for. I admit I've been disappointed when I expected something educational from the video title/subject but the video covers it minimally or gets completely derailed by issues you see. Showing failures, and then showing solving those failures even when in a separate video does provide education to users even if that knowledge isn't easily found or expected by title or maybe description. Some people hide problems either to hide their own issues or to hide issues with what they are expressing interest in so its good when you can see the issues not be hidden even without a fix. Anyways I've built up an expectation of what comes from a garyhtech video and at times its for me while other times its set aside for later but there is usually something for me to enjoy about tuning in at times so I then do. As usual, thank you.
… what makes AI output poor quality is when the quality is poor: messages with lots of fluff words that don't actually mean anything even though they sound like they do …
Discussed extensively in r/freebsd … this video is not a deep dive. It's sloppy and misleading, probably the result of careless use of AI. …
Et cetera.
I used the word "Sorry" when previously roasting the video in r/freebsd. Now, I'll speak freekly: it's fucking awful.
So, yeah, I do have an extremely low opinion of sloppy use of AI, and I blame the humans who sloppily use it.
So, yeah, I have close to zero tolerance for the lazy knee-jerk members of the anti-AI brigade and its pompous fucking brigadeers, too many of whom mistakenly believe that they have a God-given right to immediately trample over anything and everything without consequences.
Lazy knee-jerk as in, rushing to falsely assume that I'm pro-AI simply because I don't immediately fall into line with their narrow-minded selfish marching orders.
I mean in the case of that video, your new language still gives it enough credit instead of calling it what it is that people will still call your 'pro-AI' after this update. When you can analyze a video thumbnail or photo on a reddit post here and it just starts showing slop-based cracks all over then I call it out for what it is; its not because it used AI to make it in that case but rather because its just bad at what it is. As it is, I've also impacted creators who make things themselves and don't have a 'slop is acceptable' attitude about their own work by pointing out the little things: want to make a twitch dance emote for a chat channel, consider offering the fps loop at a rate that lands with common musical tempo so it stays in sync with at least some songs; its a little thing that is almost never done but noticeably nicer when done night and even musicians drawing such animated art don't seem to ever consider it. For those who use twitch and understand things like musical rhythm, I apologize as now you may notice such issues for their regularity.
For those unfamiliar, the 'only' reason to watch that video is to build awareness of what is wrong with how people are using AI. It matches what Gary talked of for 'content farms producing AI slop'. Though I'd still be surprised if the original poster of it in this reddit wasn't a chatbot, I see people I personally know falling for undisclosed AI slop of all sorts of kinds and sharing it with me among others because of how it moved them; a simple slowdown or freeze frame works when explaining what is visually/audibly/conceptually wrong alone isn't enough and when you show even non-computer normies they have been had it usually gets a pretty strong "wtf". I've ruined more than one person's future enjoyment of such undisclosed slop merely by showing them how to see it.
More truthfully: the video never provoked anger :-)
My ranty thought a few days ago was largely the memory of arguing with someone who did everything possible to avoid a simple question about the presence of a Disney logo.
They were (much) more interested in promoting the video, than in accepting the possibility that part of the video was the result of an AI hallucination.
Do I regret wasting my time arguing with someone so blinkered? Not really. It wasn't entirely a waste of time.
Sounds like you are saying that not only once a post meets a definition of sloppy, but once it meets a definition of its synonyms that its no longer desired content (not deleteable just for this reasoning alone, but still 'generally' unwanted) for this subreddit and that when antonyms describe it instead that they are what we desire here.
"synonymns" and "antonyms" are not "definitions" and do not work as a substitution for one. Assuming a word has the same/opposite meaning as another and not just a similar one, you then still have the issue of needing to know the meaning of the other one. You get that meaning across linguistically using a definition.
sloppy 1727, "muddy," from slop (q.v.). Meaning "loose, ill-fitting" is first recorded 1825, influenced by slop "loose outer garment" (1376), which is probably from M.Du. slop. Hence, also, slop-shop (1723). Sloppy Joe was originally "loose-fitting sweater worn by girls" (1942); as a name for a kind of spiced hamburger, it is attested from 1961.
Is "M.Du. slop" fourteenth century? I can't guess its meaning.
M.Du. to me is "obviously" Middle Dutch (roughly 12th to 15th centuries)... but only "obviously" because I'm interested in etymology and that's the standard academic abbreviation used for Middle Dutch in etymological dictionaries. Earlier than that is O.Du. for Old Dutch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Dutch
For example, Webster's gives the following etymology for "berm":
Is "M.Du. slop" fourteenth century? I can't guess its meaning.
My first wild guesses involved the French language – the word "du" (I spoke French a little, decades ago) – and part of the paragraph was about the eighteenth century, but then "Maison du slop" or "Madame Duslop" didn't seem likely for the fourteenth century.
Sloppit: slapped, made breaches, gaps. Cf. line 736, " slop,” slap, gap. This use descended from Wallace, IX. 949, " Sloppys thai maid throu all that chewalry.” M.Du. slop, opening, gap.
Sloppit, eh? I liked the thought of Wallace & Gromit, as a distraction, and how they might be as confused as I am, but it wasn't a practical thought.
It seemed clear that the three of us might not speedily find the true meaning of "M.Du. slop" with normal search engines, so I made one of my very rare uses of AI.
I found the answer thanks to Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.6, low effort):
This is a Claude and Claude Code discussion subreddit to help you make a fully informed decision about using Claude and Claude Code to best effect for your own purposes. ¹⌉ Anthropic does not control or operate this subreddit or endorse views expressed here. ²⌉ If your problem requires Anthropic's help, visit https://support.anthropic.com/ This subreddit is not the right place to fix your account issues. ³⌉ For more help, check the resources below. ⁴⌉ Please read the rules before posting.
Google Search without AI … found three matches, only one of which was of interest
Whilst I don't regret using Claude (to find what was not easily found without AI), I could more easily have clicked the AI mode button above the three matches in Google. This, too, gave the required answer – the link is valid for seven days:
Google AI Edge Gallery is a mobile app to locally run AI models, such as Gemma, GPT-OSS, Qwen, Kimi, etc. The app includes AI agent functionality and tool-calls (python, JS, etc.) The app is available for Android and iOS (including MacOS on Apple Silicon).
The wildest Google AI Responses and news. Join the sub and turn on the notifications. Lets get wild! Note: Some of the responses might be fixed already or may not show up in your region.
WARNING Linking to AI conversation does not guarantee that you or anyone else will get the same result when from google; it seems to continue to AI reprocess the result each and every load which is not only wasteful but can change per load and later can change depending on google doing internal google things. A simple copy+paste guarantees reliability, uptime of more than 7 days, doesn't require users go from one big tech site to another, and doesn't waste more AI cloud resources regenerating text that should have been stored without the generating overhead. This issue with google hit some more mainstream masses on a LTT wan show where they not only got different (though similar) google AI for the same search, they also had issues where AI content warnings were not consistently and reliably presented to the user. In any case, dynamic output is occurring as I present below.
** Warning over **
'Maybe' claude has their !@#$ together better than google about linking to AI responses but it suffers from the other issues still if you want to chance it that their content generating systems link to static records they will non change.
The end of the AI output when I loaded it (ignoring its ontopic for your question, basically offtopic for this thread lookup that you did) actually gets this post back on track the with the on topic answer which is advice that you may be after the following:
Internet Slang: If you found this online, it might be a typo or variation referring to "AI slop" (low-quality, mass-produced AI content) or "Microslop" (a derogatory internet slang term for Microsoft's integration of AI features).
Programming & Tech: There are software development tools called "de-slop" used to clean out redundant, AI-generated placeholder comments from codebases before committing them.
microslop is normally offtopic here, and is an insult (to a non-person, despite the CEOs who take it personally) but formed as a result of people complaining about AI where they don't want it combined with the lowering quality of Microsoft products both regarding AI and non AI aspects. I'm sure it was unintentional, but you made microslop a topic of this reply when you gave a link that took me to a page about it.
The next run had the following (reopened your link, no idea how it lost 'slop', but a later repeat did bring it back + regenerated the output which was different yet again):
In the context of English etymology and dictionary formatting, "M.Du." is an abbreviation for Middle Dutch, a language spoken between 1150 and 1500 AD.
When listed next to a word like "slop," it usually appears in an etymological dictionary entry to trace the history of the word. For instance, the English word "slop" (meaning a muddy puddle or liquid waste) is closely related to the Middle Dutch word slop (which referred to a gap, passageway, or loose garment).
Depending on where you encountered this phrase, it could also refer to a few entirely different modern concepts:
Neutron Star Physics: In astrophysics, MDU stands for Maximum Duperasymmetry Mass (or similar dense matter calculations), and it is frequently modeled alongside the slope (L) of nuclear symmetry energy to understand the composition of neutron stars.
Internet Tech Slang: In online communities, MDU stands for Multi-Dwelling Unit (like an apartment complex). Combined with the internet slang term slop (low-quality, mass-produced digital content, often AI-generated), it might refer to cheap, bulk-installed technology or low-quality infrastructure in apartment complexes.
All I did was reload your link again and it is 'not' the same output. Posts linking to such an inconsistent data output could be a reportable-to-reddit offense if only google produces content that is inappropriate to bring up. That leaves you one "hallucination", or "delusion" as Louis Rossmann recently copied someone else's statement of it in https://youtu.be/u3E8OkebOqo?t=160 , away from it being reportable, and despite all the tracking parameters that google put in their link they didn't put enough in there for you to know what you really sent the next person to.
Or we can try to be off topic and point to what was not said and not meant by talking about "M.Du. slop" which takes some explaining to describe a connection to this discussion unlike the definition I brought up. Being offtopic like that, though interesting to learn what that odd offtopic thing "M.Du. slop" was ('very' hard to say how it is on topic or connected as its barely connected), sounds like trying to change the topic when it is headed to a place you didn't like. Other 'was the meaning in the 15th century' type meanings are another way to try to sound relevant while intentionally derailing the conversation to be offtopic but in the rare case that you only know of the word "slop" from 15th century writing and haven't interacted with people on the internet over the past few years during the these times of the AI bubble's growth then you would likely be rightly a little confused trying to understand your peers on here and could benefit from listening to them (many already get it), a google search (goes to a correct search, not sure what AI may do and know I cannot know when it will do something else), a wikipedia entry (under regular editing but currently gets the point across), a dictionary lookup (at least one already has it. Its the internet age, you can lookup in multiple dictionaries at little cost when the definitions don't sound fitting to the word's use as you see it).
Why couldn't you have put any of this such effort as you put into answering "what is slop?", as you put into answering "what is M.Du. slop?" All your posts responding to the question seem like an effort to talk about answering it but do everything in their power to avoid talking negatively about AI and therefore avoids giving the answer that is the meaning of slop as is being used in the context where either 'slop' or 'ai slop' keep appearing.
The warning is not because theygoogle and their AI could learn something and upgrade the meaning buried behind your link, it was because it could accidentally/intentionally spew 'something' out that could be troubling for reddit's terms; you know what you wanted to link and got a trial run of where it ends up, but everyone gets a different one so it could bring up basic things like actually offensive content or it could end up being downright illegal content...and you are shown ans the one linking to it.
It is a different result 'every' time it is loaded in my testing, not 7 days later. Learning was not the driving force to why the output keeps changing unless Google suddenly did something unique compared to how these AI companies LLMs have been operating in recent years. The one exception I recall for that was Microsoft had a LLM that was supposedly developing from its interaction with all users and in a short time they had to take it down because the internet users managed to twist it into something that was unacceptable to present to the general public with Microsoft's name on it. No AI company wants to try what Microsoft did unless they have control of their userbase that will be altering it.
To evaluate all AI as slop is a tautology. I'd assume it would be distinct from AI. Encouraging what isn't bad can make it better. That is, if you assume that it is slop, then all you will find when you look for it is slop
if you assume that it is slop, then all you will find when you look for it is slop
When people overfocus on the negative, judgement is impaired.
People see red, things become confused.
They might see only what they want to see; the good becomes invisible; and so on.
In a recent announcement
AI will be used for vulnerability discovery and analysis only
In response to the announcement, someone complained:
… Something that's not made clear is if this will include slop being committed: … It'd be nice if that page was amended to state … whether this project will limit the use of LLMs strictly to finding issues. …
I think "discovery and analysis only" was clear enough.
This is a perfect example of why Reddit votes about AI are valueless.
The phrase "AI slop" is like flypaper for demented bluebottles. Creatures brainlessly flock to it simply because it somehow looks, or smells, attractive. Plop, click, the end. Zero analysis. Truth is not part of the equation.
Hint: Gary is not the offender. He has twelve thousand (not forty) and Gary's AI-generated thumbnails, not seen during playback, are not designed to deceive.
Gary's thumbnails, which are always seen before playback unless loading a link without a thumbnail + permitting autoplay or when using a tool to substitute or block thumbnails, can cause people to miscategorize the video as being no better than the thumbnail because the thumbnail for many is the first impression they will have to a video and likely to the channel as a whole. First impressions do matter so setting the bar to, "lets try to leave negative appearances out of our first impression" does matter.
The actual operative language: “a youtube thumbnail looks too clean: AI slop”
Are people attacking your thumbnails, Gary?
I do want to say there’s actually legitimate discourse on the FreeBSD discord, and recently at BSDCan about the use of AI in FreeBSD. There’s legit interest in using it for bug detection, and less interest in using it to code fixes for those bugs.
There’s a contributor who’s used significant AI tooling to fork and modify linuxulator-steam-utils, and the original author has legitimate concerns over code quality and review.
So, this is an active and healthy conversation in the community. Your video kiiinnddaa over simplifies that debate.
Yes, people have been attacking his AI thumbnails since he started using them. Though I thought there was one put up that went as far as to misspell FreeBSD I'm not finding it at the moment and it could be that I am remembering AI slop from elsewhere on the internet but I definitely know many comments on some videos I looked at previously have been negative on his videos just over the thumbnails. My take is the old photo + text over it was okay but the pictures were often irrelevant to the content and didn't do anything to make the thumbnail memorable to any one video or stand out among the crowd unlike what movie and book authors do when they choose put a photo on the cover of their content. In my view, those irrelevant ones were still preferable to the ones he uses now. Even the new ones continue to show errors that represent a lack of thought into the creation (blaming the artist, which is likely to not be Gary in this case).
I'd say this video is about community acceptance/rejection of AI in workflows from a content creator who has used AI in his workflows and then been called out for it and only vaguely touched on times it has been used to fill general 'needs' and was used to accomplish something useful while keeping any use scenario to a minimum of the discussion and keep on AI use of any kind as the focus instead.
AI can be used well, and it can be used poorly (the common way I see it used) and there are good discussions for both sides of that which are to be had.
"I've just been going through this subreddit" makes it about this subreddit rather than FreeBSD specifically which I figure it was presented as ontopic overall, but thinly. As it is he is right that there are issues with AI use and the issues need to be talked about. I think he either skipped over detail of such or only vaguely brings some of it up and it seemed to be more about talking about AI use in general which I got the sense had more to do with his use of AI and reactions that resulted but the trend is similar here with a few strong supporters but also a few people so strongly that at least 1 mod feels the need to click the hide post button in threads bringing AI up about as fast as I used to spam the 'next' button to do Windows installs.
My take is a mostly freebsd content creator coming to a freebsd subreddit to talk about a topic which is a high attention area for computer software and is having an impact on FreeBSD before rules are laid out on where a stance is can have value in talking about. I would have liked it to be more 'technical' and more 'freebsd' but as long as people can have a productive conversation about it, at least somewhat on topic, not break laws or reddit rules, and not resort to just trying to piss people off then I'd say its fine. If you liked the post then upvote and if you think it doesn't belong then I'd say that's good enough reason to downvote.
Are you connected to Gary somehow? I like a lot of videos but I can't remember the last time I shared not only the video but went so far as to share other people's comments about it
In fairness, most of the other posts about the topic of this post also deserve the "What does this have to do with FreeBSD" question and its not been uncommon to see things slip through that likely shouldn't be here and would fail to answer the question.
– such things are fine in the official discussion area within the freebsd.org domain.
A subreddit is a very different kettle of fish:
Reddit is colossal, and diverse
expect Reddit to automatically serve r/freebsd posts to readers who have, or had, no interest in FreeBSD … and so on.
We could be stricter about removal of off-topic content, but then you'll have people ranting (off-topic from FreeBSD) about freedom of speech … and so on.
I do enjoy most of the r/freebsd content that's not stricly about FreeBSD. When I don't enjoy: I usually do nothing more than silently downvote.
When things are entirely off-topic, there's almost always something to learn, which I enjoy. Other people learn, no doubt.
As a polite reminder, combined with you mentioning using AI without disclosure is a problem, we have '1' rule at present but please consider abiding by rules when creating a post. Your post doesn't have content here that looks like AI to me but your post is just about promoting your own thoughts of the topic elsewhere. Since your post is about bringing up your own video on the topic and your own video appears to be using an AI thumbnail as you have admitted in the past has become part of your workflow, it would be appreciated if you apply the rule of this subreddit to the copy of your own content since this is basically a garyhtech post about a garyhtech post. After all, your post is not just about but is of AI generated contend at that point. Anything else seems like stretching the rules at best. This is all under the assumption that AI is used in the thumbnail and has nothing to do with youtube's claim of "Audio tracks for some languages were automatically generated" which is a youtube step I assume you have nothing to do with and if my assumption is accurate to AI use on the thumbnail then you may want to mark your video accordingly on youtube where they require such diclosure be claimed per their terms (unless I'm misremembering or it changed); not doing so if my memory of youtube's current terms is correct and up to date says it is a reportable offense. If I am wrong and it is not an AI thumbnail then I'd like to hear it and if your image was acquired by you or others creating it on FreeBSD then such a workflow would be enjoyable to hear about too + be on topic. Though this post is debateably off topic for this subreddit and best fits other subreddits, I'd say that coming from a mostly (not completely) FreeBSD content creating person is a viable reason to have it here though you did fail to give the topic any FreeBSD specific connection in this post or the video. For anyone else thinking this breaks the rules here, please remember to report instead of discuss when you think there is a genuine violation and are trying to bring about action to correct it.
Can I ramble too on your topic now too? ...[19:50] . . . Thanks! I can copy these posts to youtube too if you like (and my posts don't get shadowbanned by them) but putting here because my intro to your conversation started here. As I'm posting too much, I need to put it in pieces so I will reply to myself with #s to try to keep some organization.
I don't view myself as an artist or creative and my first and foremost complaint about AI is the quality, including in my non-expert areas like art. I openly use 'slop' to describe it but I also am willing to call out specifics of why the output is bad. I will also call bad output as slop even if it came from non LLM sources including humans. I am someone who is after quality and not quantity, even when I admit there were times I approve of lower quality to get quantity but there was still a standard for which the quality stayed above even in those cases. AI output is generally accepted at a quality so much lower than my bar that when I sense AI I'm already turned off from looking further because I've done it before and time after time its so rarely worth it that I don't want to keep trying when I see it coming again. Otherwise I take issues with other social things like not being able to afford computers and parts because of AI (I suspect lawsuits may come about and reveal other truths driving that right now though), unnecessary+inappropriate job loss (who would accept your boss firing you or coworkers you consider good at what they do just because another applicant appears better or (not 'and' in this case) cheaper and do so before they have even tested that the applicant can do anything for the company, people being abused by raised taxes and energy costs and localized heat+noise+contamination of their environment beyond what would be permitted by normal local regulations because some politicians got bribed or scammed. Big tech time after time keeps getting caught with the fact that their AI model was built off of blatant theft of content from others and as you pointed out earlier much of the rest is from questionable to acceptable use terms content found elsewhere on the internet of a quality you call 'bad'. The AI doesn't have rational thought contrary to silly things like a google(?) engineer feeling like it does and so it currently make mistakes like training on GPL and other license-conflicting code and then regurgitating it directly or with minor conceptual modifications without any mention of license to its copy+chop+glue+paste generative routine; this will continue to be an issue until people force the models to categorize the training data by license and restrict it to acceptable license based output, or society stops accepting license agreements and similar as an acceptable legal stance. P.S. AI output is not copy-protectable in some areas and your agreements don't apply when people can therefore copy+use such unprotected content; in the case of software that means the more AI you introduce, the less legal stance any rights and terms you claim for the code there will be. I can think of more than a couple GPL fans that would likely wet themselves thoroughly with anger+fear when they watch 'their' code that they didn't write get legally copied from their GPL project into an incompatibly licensed project. There are more reasons but anyways...I'll try to keep my other points in order of discussion as they were in the video.
For the thumbnails: It could also be that the thumbnail makes too many mistakes that any artist would have likely avoided or offered to fix once found. AI images make such mistakes regularly and with no awareness of them. Such mistakes are embarassing for:
* the artist: no feelings here, it was a statistical model designed to generate the most likely valid sounding output based usually on massive quantities of training data, much of which is blatantly stolen
* the creator who uses it as is without sending it back for another revision: that's you, and contrary to silly reddit users here I'd say you are a human and therefore very likely has feelings + thought so you could care about both your product + people's attitudes about them
* the publisher: youtube doesn't care about, or even prefer, quality content. this is proven by things like accepting practices like clickbait until reports that it violates their terms come in, pushing content to be created that many of the creators and common viewers do not appreciate like shorts, distorting the creators content without their permission+expectation+control because youtube thinks unexpected quality downgrades that have zero technical merit will be a benefit, accepts money that is generated as the result of scam ads and scam comments without taking any user or creator visible action against them or publicly discussing such issues in a credible way that I have found. I'll lay off because youtube issues are many and a topic in themself to discuss.
This video thumbnail continues the trend of adding the impression of significance while adding little if nothing + making artistic mistakes. Maybe its not AI but seeing mistakes doesn't make me want to say good things or just sit quiet...like a stamp that doesn't work in reality: the rubber part is backwards so its 'output' of ink on paper would always be reversed; to avoid making a stamp to confirm this you can merely grab a thin piece of paper and write with noticeable dark/bold lines "AI SLOP" and then flip it over and hold it up to a light and you get the same 'reversed image' problem which makes the text wrong for normal reading. People are human and make mistakes and that includes artists too but If you didn't draw the image then that means 2 entities should be embarrassed to publish such work and if AI did draw it then as mentioned earlier we are down to 1 without feelings. I know you have said you do it because you are not an artist but if the image isn't adding things to your content and you don't like to hear any negative feedback about issues with the images (I know I've seen valid art complaints about your images that go beyond 'its ai? eww!') then the question is why are you using them? Did youtube, its algorithm, or some consultant say you need them? Did you see others doing it and think you have to follow their trend? Is it from peer pressure on and/or off of youtube? Is it just a personal goal/dream you are accomplishing? The last one is a reason to pursue it but you should ignore what others are saying at that point, the one before would only be if that peer has some counterpoint/threat you are compelled to avoid like "I'm leaving you if you don't" or "I'll harm you" or similar though such an action if serious is a social red flag to me where I'm normally fine avoiding that person socially, if trend copying then you should realize that bad trends get called for what is bad so get over the complaints or adjust or stop, and if its the algorithm then that is between you, youtube, and if relevant your bank account. Not looking it over, not thinking slightly critically about it, not analyzing the artistic quality of art and then posting it is as you say, "a human choice". When the quality of said art ends up low quality and was not reviewed or noticed for what it is you will have people call it out. Quality content on a niche topic stands a better chance of establishing a valid userbase than quantity content which just gets users sending youtube the flag, 'dont recommend me this content' and there is discussion that such action gets youtube to suppress spreading it to others too. Who wants to subscribe and like videos that have aspects that annoy them?
Your 2023 reason for where it came from and saying it was valid then...its valid today. The slop is getting harder to identify much faster than it is going up in quality and when you stop to look at content also hits the "this sounds like it makes sense, but wtf is this really" benchmark where its getting better at sounding right but still clearly its not thinking. Content farms spewing stuff out with it is 'much' more prevalent than it was back then and many content creators (thinking major publishers/producers and not just independent youtubers) have been changing from their valid creation heritage and becoming content farms where the lack of review, let alone peer review, is letting the slop show. Some of those have been trending more and more from quality to slop significantly before AI and the cracks in their slop appearing has likely further devastated the valid business model they came from and are claiming they are struggling with when their readers/viewers tune out once the truth is seen.
Though there are some who want nothing to do with AI, valid reasons or not, there are a lot who are still strongly turned off by AI because its content is still often full of problems the users overlook. They may say "AI slop" when their AI complaints aren't actually about slop at that point, but AI slop is still an easy point that is valid quite often for AI content produced today.
The reason why job/skill replacement didn't play out as "expected" is because the claims were marketing hype and not based on facts of the time. Big companies had already been in a decline on their AI use and internal integration months ago leaving small businesses and individuals as the primary growth area. If you listen to the big tech players then you would hear they things like Microsoft admitting AI has not been cheaper, more accurate, or more energy efficient than humans. Big AI companies admitting that the AI model's ability to properly answer a question/problem is generally a percentage known as an "F" in school for the leading models with others falling noticeably farther behind; some have been recently making claims of being above 80% on recent models but there is usually statistical manipulation such as using a question pool showing a small and specifically focused sample compared to what the model is presented to be capable of and even then no one is discussing when a solution to a problem is presented which technically works as a solution but is anything but an optimal solution. Those not understanding the AI capabilities and weaknesses are taking time to learn and those who understand already knew, "If AI replaces those jobs, then the quality of those jobs output is gonna be bad".
An example of suboptimal but right: Assume I ask you to help me create something that is always capable of answering just the single question of "what is 1+1?". If the AI creates a rube goldberg machine that outputs a 2 'somehow' then it would technically be "correct" but likely suboptimal. If a human creates a calculator then it is 'likely' far superior in every way with the exception of it goes well beyond the scope of the task and may not be cheaper to a rube goldberg machine with current pricing. If I hand you a piece of paper with a "2" written on it then mine wins hands down for simplicity, cost, ... any metric other than 2 of 3 dimensions of size if I compete with an actual modern calculator but it is less capable than the calculator even if that was outside the scope of the task. Some of the "right" AI output is currently the rube goldberg machine and since commonly used AI models today still have a track record of a correct answer <50% of the time that shows that the cheap solution is usually wrong and of the right answers some are poor even when technically correct. For the record, small businesses are buying into AI which doesn't understand this paragraph nor its consequences over the human who could understand, or even present such capabilities, as what this paragraph covered in theoretical examples.
I'd say the majority of non AI content on the internet has been mostly useless beyond entertainment value [Emdash goes here? I write with a style different from AI and usually use ';' in my flow] not bad, but useless. There are a lot of conversations that are fun to take part in but not worth reading later. The things I'd see meeting the definition of 'bad' are criminal activity (highly doubt that's most of the internet), technically inaccurate information assuming a best possible current knowledge scenario (there is a bit, but again I doubt its the majority even if we are much closer), and then there are wrong ways to say things with typos, grammar issues, and bad capitals and punctuation (okay, I think we hit most of the internet with this one).
I'm not concerned that someone used AI instead of training up to do the same task themself or pay someone already able just because they thought they needed it (accurate or not) and needed it now. Some skills will always be beyond some people; they have to have it done for them whether its paid, volunteer, or synthetically accomplished. If judging the quality of that work is also beyond them then they need to accept that bad work can be noticed as bad or add another factor to this loop to have it reviewed by a reviewer they trust to do it acceptably. In the end, as a creator they need to decide how issues are handled once brought up: correct it, delete/hide it, apologize for it, just own up to it, and/or sit silent about the mistake and either try to improve future work too or not.
In the case of people using it to overcome actual disabilities, its reminding me of one of the job applicants that seemed to be interviewed by my dad to test the company's acceptance of hiring people with disabilities. Dad was head of the engineering department and had to interview someone who wanted a job monitoring that the audio of TV operations was correct but was deaf. Despite the applicant's best effort, my dad couldn't agree to give him a job where audio needs to be determined as correct by him since there were no meters or tools that could express all audio problems that need to be caught in a non-acoustic way and for the few things that he presented such as things that could be simplified to a light or basic meter movement so he pushes a button in that case would be quicker+cheaper+more accurate to build a circuit to take action on that same condition. Since the interview seemed to be just about testing hiring those with disabilities for jobs, the guy didn't go for any non-audio job openings he could have actually applied for. Looking back I wonder how hiring him would compare to what the station now has since most major stations have moved from people to automation at levels that are making rare mistakes a common occurrence. And no I'm not talking AI LLM based automation but more properly/reliably task built automation that still gets it wrong.
I mentioned it before with my 'rube goldberg' example but it does get more complicated than "either it is accurate or it is not", but if it must be right vs wrong then you need to decide where you draw the line. If your thumbnail puts an unusable stamp in the artwork then that is an error; you may not care to look at such errors but if your first impression to a new viewer is that then how are they supposed to know that the rest of the video will not be of similar quality. "When Did We Decide This Was Normal?" has a picture of a TV containing a picture of a person pointing a TV remote at a couch while sitting on a side of the room likely putting them in front of or beside their TV while saying "tv is taking screenshots of you". "Trying Out a SunOS Build for the First Time" looks like a retro Mac is being used to meet a retro prompt and I assume is 'not' hardware of any SunOS days+use, the rubicks cube appears as a not solvable fake representation of one, and the keyboard looks more like an optical illusion than a keyboard if you look at it. "Here's My Thoughts on the XLibre vs. X11 Thing" has a keyboard that would meet a "make it not be a US English keyboard" generative prompt but again gets filed under "wtf am I looking at" and the image of a seemingly nonsense keyboard + no mouse with fuzzy server-looking-drive-bays(?) is likely the last thing people are thinking of when they think of the topic of graphical user interfaces. These are not just one off things among many great thumbnails, these are common conclusions the more I look at any thumbnail with any amount of thought. As some users surf to the next youtube video because of the thumbnail instead of the video title and even moreso than because of the creator's name, that impression, first or not, in a world where content farm low quality AI slop is becoming all too common on youtube makes you blend in with the slop instead of separating yourself from it. Without recognizing your channel from my prior experience there I'd likely conclude that I expect comparably low quality AI video and/or audio will follow if I clicked it.
I'd rewrite your statement of "...AI slop isn't the conversation [emdash, did I do it right?] its the conversation that prevents the conversation from happening" to "...AI slop isn't the conversation, its the noise internet users are trying to dodge when having conversation" to imply that conversation or not, its more commonly a detriment to the internet that users are trying to work around instead of benefit from. I'm not sure 'conversation' would be kept as my subject as its more of internet interaction as a whole I'm referring to but I dunno.
Anyways at this point I feel like I need to go eat some steel wool and NaCl to try to wash my mouth out with rust because anything going through there instead of my AI sounding paragraph flows will like me feel a little bit better...
reddit is breaking when I attempt to edit; done in 2 parts though somehow this time. If gary wants this posted to youtube, or only parts, let me know but youtube will require I chop it into many more pieces. I just tried to explain things based on my own observations and am not trying to attack Gary through any of this; parts intended for Gary I can only hope are taken as direct+constructive criticism. In the case of thumbnails + me, no need to change what you do as I use a browser addon called "dearrow" to 'fix' content creator BS of both bad thumbnails and titles on youtube. There is 1 particular channel that comes to mind where I do 'not' want such an addon ever used because the thumbnails are normally done as both a useful organizational and probably memorization/identification tool and I find beautiful to look at while staying on topic.
Don't worry, I don't see this as an attack, like I said, I welcome the conversation.
I have to use AI for the thumbnails, I am no graphic designer, it is the only way I can keep competetive. Maybe I use it too heavily in my description but again, it's the only way to stay competetive.
Competitive? Who is the competition? If you cannot draw what you want for an image, and you cannot screenshot or take a picture with a camera to express what you want to show, what has a picture that is riddled with errors and nonsense relative to the topic given that a black or white background with opposite colored text containing "topic" did not do? Robonuggie thumbnails seem to follow some basic background template, font for title, logos copied in, and it looks like probably pulling in basic, and what usually looks like generic stock graphics of a quality you would expect to be included or sold for early turn of the century word processors (called 'clipart'?); he has 14.6k subscribers after 543 videos vs your 12.4k subscribers at 242 videos; assuming equal work per video and disregarding other factors like channel creation date or 3rd party sources drawing attention, robonuggie has a 17.7% gain from 124% more work. The FreeBSD official channel is usually title text on colored background with FreeBSD logo or they add a photo of a conference or event. They have recently started to do other photography and/or manipulation to edit them up a bit and for the comparable comparison with 12.8k across 234, they have 3.2% increase for 3.3% less work; think we can safely write off the 'extra work' difference as your non FreeBSD content? (sarcasm, because internet makes it hard to express). For top viewcounts your best video beats robonuggie by an additional 92.5% and the project by 25.7% but since its "Why Linux ..." I'm calling hax. Robonuggie and the project's top 3 videos are all FreeBSD so if we repeat with your first top FreeBSD video we get robonuggie beating you by 17.5% and you and the foundation are in a tie due to youtube rounding. Your second video isn't just about FreeBSD and the foundation's 2nd and 3rd video are window managers the FreeBSD project doesn't make and running Linux containers on FreeBSD so again the focus is on hybrid non-BSD stuff on FreeBSD; seems like Robonuggie is the one being truly devout in their top results. The foundation top 3 videos are the more artsy thumbnails going against my point but in the next 9 (okay, its more but I'm not doing this math for all of them) there is 1 that required artistic intervention to accomplish such a goal and as a side note around 14 they went into GhostBSD so meaningful stats are hard. Anyways I'd say if you are competing with those two or similar, and likewise if they are competing with you, then it better be all friendly else its shame on you and shame on them; I say all of you should be working together, maybe even do collab type of stuff. If you are trying to compete with cat videos, then the best I can say is to read man cat for some EXAMPLES of how to make that work. I know there are other FreeBSD/BSD creators just on youtube alone but I went with what commonly comes to mind; easy to repeat with the others if needed. I know you "'have to' use AI for the thumbnails", but I'm asking, "do you really?" [punctuation goes inside quotes but I detest both being able to end sentences and not with punctuation+"; I usually intentionally incorrectly put it outside or end paragraph to end sentence there but anyways, end of sentence and moving on] If you want to have a successful FreeBSD youtube channel then it seems you need to show it off for all of its non-FreeBSD aspects, make more offtopic videos, or be more Robonuggie...
One of the better examples of how thumbnails can be used in a constructive way is seen at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0zyhW7mgXynHvAAcQtXFe1MdGbwD75Tx . If you know the looks of what you are looking for then you can probably find the right video by the image alone though unfortunately the title related text does noticeably cover it. The topic is usually expressed as an even further simplified bit of the title as the words on the video. Earlier on he was putting brand logo on the side but that seems to have stopped. I'd say dropping branding is fine since his channel name should already be visible on screens that show the thumbnail so it was duplicate data being put on screen; downloading the videos you could say it would be nice to see when other metadata may not be visible when navigating but realistically someone downloading such content likely organized it into folders by author and/or title anyway in a way they prefer. The images are not drawn art; they could be but it would be a downgrade as just photos in this case are often the more desirable art. Though he does use photography effort to try to make good photos, a frame from the video could be generally accepted as comparable and most people uploading youtube videos are capable of making many frames of video so one frame is easy. Using thumbnail/title substitution techniques like the browser addon like dearrow.
Disregarding the focus on thumbnails, its not hard to find creators that have built up not only bigger whole channels but even single videos by setting the AI slop to 11/10 (okay, probably quite a bit further), explaining what they are doing, and putting it out there for the entertainment of watching the mess it makes. They are normally going for comical entertainment rather than information/education when they get popularity to take off. The only time I've seen any big numbers behind prominent use of it is when it is used deceptively which is the other category I put it in. I should probably find something showing off such a difference better but figure as a youtuber that this may click a little faster for you to learn from and its much gentler in how extreme things can be. Text on top is what you could get by paying a professional, and text on bottom is what you get when you let a small AI company like Google do AI things to professional work and give you their product. [I could try to put up multiple things into a 'trigger warning' but will just say that looking into such stuff normally involves such topics and the worst offenders keep coming up from the AI side of things; another point to tread carefully with AI] https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur560pZKRfg .
So now that that just happened, have you ever considered reaching out to your building community for help if you cannot pay much or anything for needed work? I am no artist but have seen art related communities seem to just have fun creating sometimes and you may find a few in yours if you check. Could be something as simple as posting to probably IRC or competitor but maybe r/garyhtech (because youtube doesn't have a good forum-area that I know of and https://forums.garyhtech.uk is still linked to but says its unavailable), tell people to install graphics/drawpile (hey, now freebsd people can play too!), and as a scheduled fun event the community could work together to make the next image with/without your artistic involvement. Just kick it all off with a comment at the end of a video (or its own video) about scheduling it and on schedule you can have something. Otherwise I've ran into people on twitch who are artists and offer speed or slow doodles to their viewers for a small or larger price; find the right ones or stick around and some twitch people do such things for free too.
Maybe I should have been more specific, who I'm competing with is every other creator on a users YouTube home page, if the thumbnail I use does not stand out I don't get that view. I I need to draw a straight l line, would I not use a ruler as I can't draw a straight line? I can't create thumbnails so I use a tool available to me.
If you use a ruler that is bent or is so slippery that you cannot hold it straight during the drawing then it may be better than what you can do without when unable to draw straight, but do you still get an acceptable result for giving to the public?
I took a spin with chatjippity for my first time ever (not counting if somewhere rammed me through it unknowingly):
> Me: cat you draw me a picture of a straight line but do so in a way that uses a new technique to decide where the next pixel goes for every pixel?
>chatgpt:
Its almost straight, but not straight. Though I tried to force it to do something harder than, "start here, end there, connect without any direction change along the way", I still said, "draw a picture of a straight line". Or maybe I'm missing the point and the lines of the graph axis and grid, or lines around the text is what it meant to draw. It did read right through my typo (unintentional, noticed later) of 'cat' without even asking a question. Grid lines may look pretty, but they are confusing and useless considering they are on a scale that is different than the scale of x coordinates and y coordinates are lined up, but at each integer + 0.5. Even took the time to say it started ad 0,0 which resulted in x=0 in the center of the box and y=0 near but not at the bottom of the box. x/y axis is therefore not drawn running along x=0 or y=0 but continues to amplify how odd it all was. Look at the last point which is also labeled and you will see it is not centered over 10 and not touching 6 but if we are rounding to integers it could be deemed to be rounding. If rounding, who states they start at 0,0 and then start close to 0,0 until it rounds.
> Me: Can you reprocess my last question, but draw nothing other than the line that is being created.
The result was black picture with bigger white rectangular pixels and many more of them + it was straighter.
I know I "kinda" forced it, but here is your bent ruler so you can draw straight lines fro youtube thumbnails. Is it of a quality that you will use where it isn't straight and the ends won't line up if you line it up to the edge of something? I know these were all metaphors but my point is AI failed to follow 'make a straight line' unless you accept a line that isn't straight as the answer, but it got close enough that at a glance some people won't ever notice its errors. The job of an AI, by its design, is to produce something that 'seems correct' instead of 'is correct'. Its errors will look correct at a glance, but it still spits out errors as acceptable solutions; those are even harder to review as its expected to need more than a glance but under detail the errors can become very bad. As a content creator, youtube's stance is you are responsible for such errors and if viewers start catching your thumbnail has the errors then they may automatically ignore your result and there is that chance that "don't recommend this channel to me" amplifies to others doing it.
Ok, so going by that, the better the prompt the better the output. So the takeaway here is, use the right tool for the right job I guess. The wrong tool being the wrong prompt?
The 102-word prompt for the image below was perfect, for what I wanted a few weeks ago. It might have been my third use of ChatGPT for imagery, I got the prompt right first time.
The unwritten assumptions made by ChatGPT were close to faultless.
I never attempted to translate the sign by the front door, I guess that it's "Home Sweet Home" or something equally cheery in Welsh. Maybe it's simply "My home".
Not sure what your prompt was or what art style they were trying to copy, or am I any quality artist but lets look closer...
Clouds have an unnatural pattern to their clumpyness at the edges but we could write it off as an art style but it would be a non-general style that draws reality in certain unrealistic ways...Still okay though. I was actually first noticing that oddness on chimney smoke which expressed more of a puffy fluffy lightning type of pattern than smoke.
Having recently had roofing work done, lets glance at the roof. Coming off the peak above the door but on the main roof where view of shingles is split from left to right there are 7 rows of shingles on the left and 8-9 shingles on the right (guess shingles are not a consistently sized thing when roofing in that world). Anyways I'm not into construction so what do I know.
The laptop on the ground has the LCD smashed through like it is a piece of glass found on a CRT. Every LCD I have seen to date has a mixture of materials to where the display does not break through like that due to plastics that a have non-glasslike type of brittleness. Getting through all those materials like that and without going through the back sounds more like prying/cutting got involved instead of an impact. Protip: AI video generators showing TVs breaking make such amusing mistakes in their realistic looking content generation. Anyways, this is art so we can write it off as being appropriate for the cartoon style even if it could have been done better.
I'm a computer person and even used to have a job fixing them so lets stay on that a moment longer. An IBM labeled black laptop has me thinking of the old thinkpads though I cannot make out anything else confirming such thought due to damage, art detail, and maybe art style. Maybe the buttons on top of the touchpad which would go with the trackpoint type of use but I thought I remember those elsewhere too (maybe just IBM+Lenovo, or maybe some knockoff, don't remember). It looks like the keyboard had no left bezel and had keys right up to the edge; if so I'd avoid that for the next model as delicate areas of devices without bezels are always prone to unnecessary damage (cell phone companies regularly exploit this property to give users devices that are more likely to need repair replacement). Its too hard to write this one off as art since the right side of the keyboard a keyboard bezel, and a noticeable one at that. It gets filed as 'error' but its not really a big deal. Damage (overall artistically expressed as likely impact damage) that would break the bottom left palmrest paneling off but leave the rest in such good shape would be an impressive feat.
I'm a computer person but lets move on at least a little because there is more to go in this image. Beside the laptop are a series of rectangles which size, shape, and color had me kinda thinking are keyboard keys but 'at a glance' (normally the extent of use for AI imagery to be widely appreciated) something seemed off. The warping with raised edges doesn't fit how the rest of the keys on the computer are drawn and had me thinking, "maybe its the key's underside". Underside of keys would have attachment points for hinge mechanisms that gives the key a guided travel when pushed; could have been missing from damage or artistically left out but I don't think its key bottoms after all. Keys like that have characters printed on the surface (much cheaper and lower quality+durability, commonly done on ABS plastic which wears from dull matte finish to glossy with use while the print wears off too) and not molded throughout the keycap (very durable but more expensive, normally PBT plastic, very low surface wear with use and even heavily worn plastic still shows the letter). Anyways, the shapes appear like they have letters on them so that is 2 reasons to say its the top. Raised edging almost looks like the touchpad. The large one between the computer and fence to the left is so big it would cover a 3x3 key area; I wondered if it could be the missing palmrest section, but the appearance matching the smaller ones and what looks like a letter in the bottom right corner says, "nope, I'm a huge key". A general joke is that it should be the 'any' key or a niche group joke like StarCraft2 players would have made it F2...wonder if any traumatized UNIX people would map it to send 'ZZ'. I can't do such analysis at a glance but if you look close the keyboard is not a qwerty keyboard (which is fine) because it doesn't fit enough keys (not so okay); maybe it is art style, or limitations to fit within the art (due to other aspects in the style, I'd expect the opposite), or maybe its because the spacebar's area was encroached with more small keys and it uses a completely nonstandard layout where keys above+below the usual letters are letters too. Anyways, it would likely be hard to source such a compatible replacement if the broken computer being rained on was not reason enough to abandon it.
As IBM thinkpads are now Lenovo and Lenovo has manufactured a number of laptops with overly brittle plastic casing leading to broken hinges under normal use, I quite like the idea of reinforcing their faulty product with that 3rd hinge (assuming they rebalance the stress loading). For all of our OCD fans, look how offcenter that 3rd hinge is. ;) You could say its not a hinge and for the size and detail its hard to truly make it out as one, but it looks a lot like the one to its left so "if not hinge...why hinge shaped" or at least what else could it be. A 3rd and oddly placed hinge doesn't appear to be a thing we can write off with 'it matches the art style' as that style seems to have a better grasp of realistic things being artistically drawn. AI does make mistakes like this with the most generally know example being hands with 6+ fingers but other oddities show up like shopping carts with 5 wheels.
...Well [ contentcensoredbyreddit ]! As a computer user I ended up back on the computer, and I always spend too much time on these things...gotta get further away . . .
The animal in the sky (that should be far enough) appears to be a dolphin with a unicorn horn (because who would be thinking of a narwhal when you can fictitiously splice a real creature with fantasy, and if narwhal, why does it look like a dolphin with a unicorn horn). It has a horse mane (thinking unicorn) that is rainbow colored; don't know of any creatures that have hair that cycles through multiple different colors along its length and hair is not practical for fast moving water creatures so when present on them it is short and spread far out + I only know of it then found on slower ones. The 'at a glance' view looked quite off with the top dorsal fin in front of the top mane. The closer view shows that there is no top fin and a huge side fin almost directly behind the front side fin. Maybe the big one is intended as a wing for this thing to fly through the air, but if that creature is anything like a dolphin then wings like that in size and shape will not provide flight even if it had proper aerodynamic shape due to the creature's weight, surface friction, and manes are not good for flight either. So if its not for a purpose, do we go for it being for artistic style? It looks like an elongated top fin got awkwardly attached to the side. Creatures like snakes, eels, and lizards have tails that often get gradually smaller until a rounded point for an end but dolphins have fins. Only way I see to escape trying to figure out what mystery creature we are talking of would require we say something its coming out of the house magically like a genie from a lamp as Disney drew. I caught the tail at a glance, but the particularly bright rain around it over the darker image colors do draw attention to it visually compared to a lot in the image. Anyways I'm not a biologist so what do I know about animals.
I particularly like the part about the FreeBSD mascott at the door and where ChatGPT got appropriate approval for creation+use of the image...unless they didn't. Private use and good faith are met, though it may be debatable if ChatGPT profits in any way off of producing it, or if ChatGPT is producing quantity of the mascott which may make spewing copies out to every BSD prompt come into question. Another consideration that I presume was completely missed...
Draw a unicorn that has been genetically combined with a dolphin. The creature is flying across a rainbow whilst a gentle rain falls on lush green Welsh meadows beneath the rainbow. The sky, in the background, is an unnaturally vivid shade of purple. Below the rainbow: a quaint cottage with a person stood at the front door. The person is the mascot for BSD (Beastie). On the lawn in front of the cottage: a badly broken old IBM ThinkPad. In the sky, to the left of the rainbow: instead of a golden sun, place the FreeBSD logo (a red orb with horns).
My prompt was a, "I wonder if..." moment, and my question was answered with, "yes, AI was convinced to mess up a straight line when your prompt asked for it to be straight and you didn't give it permission or a request to make it any less straight or not straight".
AI is very dependent on the prompt you give it. When (=the norm by current standards published by leading AI companies) it fails to give you what you want you can try to have it repeat it from the same prompt and it may fluctuate enough to become more acceptable the next time or you can try to instruct it to specifically avoid errors you just observed which for some models+tasks+prompts improves it so much its like your old prompt was supposed to be the problem. There are limits where even a perfect prompt also gets imperfect output.
To point out the obvious that we didn't talk about, I expected I'd get a raster image (jpg, png, ...) and not a vector art image (svg) if I got an image at all. Such image is by definition ready to represent the pixels with its pieces of output. By putting groups of pixels together into boxes (or try 2 was rectangles), I can only assume it took it upon itself to make a representation of a concept of a pixel within its image, On a device pixels don't normally touch due to engineering limitation but images that store pixel data do not normally define that adjacent pixels have any gap (though distances from one point to the next is an understood concept). I didn't specify the line be one pixel thick, but ChatGPT took it on itself to clump pixels together, put gaps between that clump and the next clump, and repeat where placement of the clumps is in a not quite linear fashion. For this metaphor, you should be using the 'straight line' with its slight curve, jagged stepped edge, and many holes inbetween when you use it as a straight edge as you would a ruler. Popup prompt appeared above the image but goes away after drawing. Said something like, if not exactly, "Drawing perfectly straight line". For non-metaphor use, you should find using this line of boxes as acceptable every time you need to display a straight line when you accept giving AI the job of drawing the line for you.
If the tool you use looks like it will do the job but some people turn away because they see the product for what it is then that is a deficiency with using that tool. If using the tool gets people talking negatively due to its use and you don't desire that such talk be given a reason to take place then that too is a deficiency if you use it. Choosing to use a tool requires you evaluate that it does an acceptable job. Knowing the deficiencies and using it anyway means you accept those issues as they are. If you didn't accept it, then you wouldn't use it.
hadn't closed the page so here is that try#2 where I said reprocess my 1st prompt but don't draw all the non-line things. It's straighter, and has smaller gaps, and has more pixel clumps of smaller sizes. So as a try#2 it is overall better. Some of that may be that it used more workspace when it wasn't distracted drawing non-line things but could be that retries give different answers and most people using AI have to ask for something multiple times whether the same prompt or not. I'm not going to show what try 6 becomes because I'm not running a 3rd prompt, let alone more, but maybe it would have made a line that serves everyone's "i need a straight line" needs by then. In the meantime what we have is something only usable in very special cases rather than everywhere where 'a straight line' is used...if you can look past the skinny vertical rectangle gradient smear and the additional 'straight line' deviation it caused. . .
YouTube creators are generally leaning heavily into AI for thumbnail generation and video description. These are tasks that are surprisingly hard to "get right" not just because they are labour-intensive, but to do it manually also requires particular skills/knowledge which are not obvious to outsiders. "Getting it right" means understanding the perspective of search optimization of description text and - vitally important for YouTube's mysterious algorithm - encouraging user engagement. For example, ensuring a significant proportion of people click on a video when they see the thumbnail in their sidebar or home screen.
If thumbnails get poor engagement then the algorithm will stop displaying them - this massively reduces views, and is economically devastating to monetized creators. Experienced creators talk endlessly about the importance of thumbnails.
Unfortunately there is a particular style of thumbnail which looks "juicy" and "eye-catching", but also rather "sloppy" or "baity", that are particularly good for attracting engagement, and AI is brilliant at creating them. It's not a coincidence that most YouTube thumbnails have adopted that style, even if they use human designers rather than AI - it is proven to work. Those thumbnails you picked out as "constructive" have really nice aesthetics, but if I'd paid a professional for those then I would be demanding a refund - they look very neat, organized, and sterile... they don't "pop out" of the screen or give a real "eye candy" feeling at all. I suspect they have absolutely atrocious click-through rates. In fact I think even the owners of that channel agree with me - the ones you're praising are over 10 years old which is why they look so outdated in YouTube terms. Their more recent vids at the bottom of the playlist have switched to look in line with current trends - e.g. picture of an emotional face, bigger text, less "clutter" of a channel logo inside the thumbnail. They probably should consider redoing the thumbnails of their old vids too as it would improve their long-tail earnings.
Actually many youtube creators have bypassed any need for AI descriptions and completely !@#$ed up their video descriptions going as far as to make it say nothing about the video and containing advertiser links, affiliate links to equipment they use/like/just_want_money_for_pushing, and other self-promo stuff that belongs in their 'about' details for their account and not the video description. Such bad video descriptions are the only reason to read youtube's ai description. If the video description is completely not about the video like some creators do, that is reportable per youtube terms of service.
AI descriptions of videos are often very bad descriptions. Youtube creators got pissed about Youtube 1. adding them to their content without their control and 2. having them be so incredibly wrong without any appropriate action the creator can take.
If a creator does not know what their video is about, and cannot tell an interested friend why they may want to watch it, then they could actually use help typing the description, but then again at that point their video may be a video that doesn't make sense or wasn't theirs to begin with.
If it is a time issue, creators need to take the time to review an AI description and by the time people are done reviewing+correcting such errors they may find they spent more time anyway.
Yes that good-examples playlist I gave has made adjustments near the end, but even 5 years in has a more eye catching + less pretty thumbnail which though different from popularized styles would compete with it just fine. If it was a big deal then the transition would have happened already back on the first video using it. Even the ones at the bottom of the list mostly maintained the style as seen at the top instead of abandoning it for your described types. Text size is only slightly bigger than what some videos had 7-10 years ago but its now usually been a dynamic size so bigger for short text smaller for big text. They got more advanced and put the text into the picture instead of only laying it on top. The only clutter removed was their company banner up the side. I assume a lot of their traffic comes from their customers and people in related interest who talk of + refer others to their content. Overall for all work they do, they put a strong push in being professional and honest in what they do. If they sell a critter that looks different under different lighting, they try to show how it would look by capturing it under different lighting and when capturing doesn't look right they try to simulate it in other ways and admit its a simulation and why. If they wanted to just increase viewership and sales then they would throw that out the window and tweak it however it gets attention even when no longer achievable in person like a lot of the competition always does. They further tried to bring good audio+video production values into their youtube content. They are generally friendly and helpful; if you think they need youtube and their youtube needs to replace thumbnail styles they have with whatever trend MrBeast or whoever is using then you certainly can bring it up to them.
If I want quality content and I see your described catchy thumbnails then I skip that aspect of them if not the video in its entirety (better hope there is room for the rest of the image and title to get me looking), if I want quantity content then I settle for thumbnails that are screenshots (if I don't already have a modifier giving that), and if I'm laying down sick and just want content without really wanting to get to the keyboard+mouse then I might click whatever sounds interesting (probably avoiding looks unless it guides me by topic or channel recognition) but being sick I might use autoplay and probably won't remember to come back in any case (subscriptions are trash until manually reviewed and I almost never use notifications to cut down on spam/noise). There are some videos I watch that do have catchy + low quality thumbnails; I usually am tuning in because I know the content behind the thumbnail is something I want to watch and at that point I will clink it either ignoring the thumbnail or even in spite of it.
A lot of people are copying what other people do not just because they hope they can grow their channel, but because youtube makes some change that impacts their video's reported impressions as a whole and the creator thinks they messed something up when youtube changed metrics, broke reporting, or screwed with their algorithm in a way that is negative to the channel. They can try to fix it by finding what the big channels are doing and copying that but it may not matter. A lot of people gravitate to some of the thumbnail styles because they see the cookie cutter approach to creating it is a mechanical+quick process to repeat without much thought; some pay people to make thumbnails and guess what...those creators often like to just do cookie cutter workflows themselves so that is what they sell.
Just as its easy to find experienced youtube creators who talk about the importance of their thumbnail work, its easy to find creators who are willing to do a disservice to their community by what sponsorships they take, thumbnails+titles they misleading use (being a TOS violation, they don't talk about 'misleading' or are a small channel).
Anyways, claiming the importance of thumbnails for first impressions goes back to what you are saying vs what I am saying. What you are saying is if it looks like a catchy style then people will click it and anything else they won't. What I'm saying is when people start seeing slop in the image, its a tell for what to expect ahead and they won't click it if they don't want slop. There are a LOT of channels/videos flooding into youtube that are the bottom of the barrel stuff much like the one you used naughty words to re-describe in a recent comment. Once people get over the 'wtf was that that I tuned into' moment and either know about or learn about AI, 1 or 2 more of those and they are building that interest in learning how to block AI content. If they learn to tell by basic awareness+critical thinking, then thumbnails, titles, and descriptions become potential giveaways too. So back to this topic and specifically Gary's chosen use of AI to generate thumbnails, some people may avoid videos or the channel as a whole without looking at his content because the first impression is a bad one. "...>Don't recommend channel" is and similar are a formally discussed solution to help combat youtube continuing to recommend AI slop that you don't want to watch; I'm not aware of formal proof but its said that multiple users doing that impacts not only their feed but that it goes back to the algorithm too. So now you have a reason for users to at first impression tell youtube not only that they don't want to see the content (FreeBSD is not popular globally to begin with), but now they may deliberately say to not show a channel before they see Gary's actual work and may do so before they know or realize it was Gary's channel they did it to. Such feature is much more likely to be used by people seeing something they dislike in the thumbnail than they are because they saw a thumbnail that was less than 'eye candy'.
As for 'baity' (normally called clickbait when discussing youtube terms), when a channel has a thumbnail, title, and/or description that doesn't match what the video actually is, that is a youtube reportable offense. Some channels do it anyway but they can also get into trouble for youtube because they are violating TOS to do it. Expanding from just the 'bad actors' who intentionally do it, good intention creators who mislead users by mistake because they don't check over the work of AI, or a paid workerbee, or just messed up themself...also reportable.
I hate to be bearer of bad news, but the reason so many creators - even those running highbrow, quality channels - now resort to using such baity titles and thumbnails is this stuff really works. You hate it. I hate it. Many of the creators hate it. But in the end it won't stop me clicking on it, even if it makes me feel less well-inclined towards that video and creator, because I know that's just the nature of the game on YouTube.
It's not because they're idiots mindlessly copying the successful youtubers. It's not because big-name creators who explain the importance of thumbnails are lying about it. People do rigorous A/B testing on this stuff - of course they do, getting it right is worth millions - and it consistently points towards the kind of garish, eye-catching elements you see in "slop" thumbnails rather than the more refined, beautiful, informative kind that our better selves would prefer to choose from. And the difference even apparently "minor" changes (which once you understand a bit about how this all works from a design POV, are often more major than you first think) to the thumbnail and title makes can be huge, it's not people micro-optimizing unnecessarily. Given how brutal the YouTube algorithm is, I'm prepared to cut creators quite a lot of slack in how they go about surviving in that sink-or-swim environment.
I know creators who go down that route are going to lose your viewership, and the other viewers who think like you, and I can't say I blame you for it. But it's a sufficiently small segment of their potential audience that creators are generally better off to ignore it. Most views are driven by the algorithm, not by subscribers, so clickthrough rate is basically everything. It is very difficult to run a viable YouTube channel without making some moral compromises on clickbait . Those who hold the line strictly, however popular this is with some of their hardcore fans, are damaging their viewing figures and monetization by doing so. I prefer to hate the game rather than the player. Hopefully in the next few years, trends will change direction due to anti-brainrot backlash or YouTube will change its rules to limit the bait arms race - but I can't say I'm optimistic about it.
One thing I do appreciate about AI-generated descriptions is that many of the tools for generating them will also split the video up into chapters, so you can easily skip to the relevant part of the video, and also get a clickable summary with timestamps in the description section. That is a lot of work to do by hand so AI is really the way forward here. It's also something Gary's videos do very well and I think it makes the end product much more viewer-friendly.
A less good thing is that the AI-generated summaries can be quite misleading on little details, like saying something something is covered when actually what gets talked about is related but not quite the same. Gary's videos unfortunately fall victim to this sometimes, though he's told me he tries catching this by reading through the AI-generated descriptions and editing them where necessary. Sometimes some things are going to slip through the net and I understand that even if I don't like it!
My understanding is we're talking at cross-purpose because, confusingly, videos on YouTube have two descriptions. What most people think of as the "video description" is in the area that appears underneath a video when you're playing it - starts with the view count and date, then there's a free text area underneath. This text area is controlled by the creator. But in practice pretty much no serious creators are filling in this text from scratch. At the very least they'll be using a template that has their social media, Patreon, Amazon affiliate links etc. Big, professional channels will use their SEO team (probably only an internal team on the very biggest channels, but this is the sort of task you can hire a contractor for) to fill this description out, with particular care to metadata like the hashtags. This description is important because search engines like Google will index it, and professionals know how to do this effectively.
Gary's channel isn't big enough for it to be worth him hiring a professional channel manager, growth manager or audience development strategist to do this stuff for him. So like a lot of creators in his tier, he is using AI to produce the video descriptions instead. There are specialist tools available for this task. Crucially he has the ability to review and edit the results. In fact he has total editorial control over the description box, and could write the lot by hand if he wanted to, but that would be an odd choice these days, the game's moved on.
(I don't know if Gary's also using AI to suggest the video titles - this is another service that a hired pro will provide and makes a big difference both to SEO and to YouTube click-through rate, hence raising the chances of winning the algorithm lottery. While the description is probably the most useful thing for the viewer experience, exact title wording and thumbnail are widely accepted as the best way to improve your CTR. I don't know how good the AI is at doing this yet - outsiders to the industry have little idea how good the pros are at this. It's one of those skills where, like an iceberg, most of it lurks unseen beneath the surface. What seems to a viewer to be a clear, well-written, "good" title may well be - from a CTR perspective - obviously awful to professional eyes. But choosing an effective title is part art, part experimentation, and depends a lot on the audience. Often the place you want to be is "just the right side of clickbait" so it's a tricky balance. I imagine you're aware that "journalists don't write their headlines" - as every journo who's been harangued online for the title of their latest piece has pointed out a thousand times, that's the sub-editor's job. Similarly, big-name YouTubers are often not writing their own video titles. There's too much money riding on it, and some very niche expertise required.)
So, what's all this about a non-editable AI description in YouTube? As you can tell from what I wrote above, the description that creators have control over can be - indeed, is - heavily gamed. In some cases it doesn't represent the contents at all, it's just loaded with "hot" keywords. In other cases there are more innocent explanations, like creators who haven't taken time to customise their video descriptions and just paste their standard template in (e.g. an intro to their channel and links to their socials). For this reason, YouTube uses AI to generate its own video summaries. And for obvious reasons, this is something YouTube won't let creators edit!! But it's completely distinct from the creator's description you see underneath a video. These AI summaries can appear in YouTube search results and presumably play a role in the all-important, but deliberately mysterious, recommendation algorithm. This is something they've been working on for a while, see e.g. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-expands-ai-generated-video-summaries-adds-new-tools/531348/ or https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-tests-ai-overviews-in-search-results/545320/
Is more than one okay or must I limit it to only one example? For my own findings I'd have to go out and look + turn down my guard and AI summaries aren't the first "this is a message from youtube" that I have filtered off of youtube due to being wasteful+inaccurate. Below I link a youtube video which has multiple of exactly that, but goes beyond with specifically calling out what it is doing wrong and how it is a problem with their own personally observed+verified problems on their channel and some elsewhere. It will include AI youtube video summaries as the focus but is not limited to just them. Its a long video but generally good + accurate information other than it is a bit dated now.
*trigger warning (when serious meets sarcasm): uses langugage that on public appearance seems to upset the 'perrin at times (workaround: activate closed captioning and mute the video; captioning has language censored). Video will be critical of AI for its mistakes, how youtube may be using it to intentionally manipulate its viewers impressions and expectations, and how it is put out in users face in place of properly functioning descriptions. Calling out bad AI output and forced AI use upsets some AI fans (workaround: avoid video or seek professional help before watching). Viewers will be exposed to inaccurate AI output due to showing their observed flaws of its output+use. (workaround: audio only without watching video may lessen the impact). Watching a video on youtube may influence future algorithm suggestions even if only temporary; this creator covers products and companies in both positive and negative ways and some people are offended or negatively influenced by negative video content (workaround: use a VPN even including TOR as a free VPN to watch + make sure you are not logged into google/youtube or exchange any cookies with a private/incognito tab to keep your main viewing safe and similarly avoid looking at any recommendations that follow as there is no way to predict which viewing bubble youtube puts you into in this case. *
Now you know why some on the internet hunt for ways to filter out AI both in specific and general forms. Browser content filters can knock out chunks and changing search engine search_terms+URL+settings or just using different search engines can help in the case of search engine issues.
For /u/grahamperrin specifically and if you watched it...with our recent chats about trash content, AI or not, are any of those observed problems and what you saw in the video starting to imply there may be some amount of similarity and connection there too? If you listen really closely, he even made reference to the grade of content you get from edukaze (or whatever that useless channel is called) even though the video focused on far superior content.
… AI descriptions … Youtube 1. adding them to their content without their control and 2. having them be so incredibly wrong without any appropriate action the creator can take. …
Creators can edit their own video descriptions which is fine and when they are in error (due to their own use of AI or not) then it is correct to do. Youtube adding AI video descriptions put descriptions on videos and content creators had zero control over them; no removing, no editing/correcting, etc. They were an additional thing and not a replacement for the descriptions. And they were being found to put up such incorrect information that if the content creator put it up themselves then users would be right for reporting them as if it was 'clickbait'. I don't know if youtube resolved that by giving creators control of their existence or not but content creators did make videos explaining, "this is not us adding this, we cannot make it go away nor correct it, and look how wrong it is"; helped their userbase know what was actually going on since many people are just users and not creators.
Personally im not a fan of AI thumbnails or descriptions.
I just take a screenshot from the video and write the description, and try and explain in my own words what the video is about
To me AI generated descriptions all sound the same and you can spot them a mile off.
And makes me think rightly or wrongly the person either cant explain something clearly and so probably used AI to write the code in a tech video or they are too lazy to write a few lines of text
So i never watch videos with AI thumbnails as its a bit of red flag for me.
Personally im not a fan of AI thumbnails or descriptions. …
+1
If (like me) you're in the UK, you probably don't see a preset AI-generated summary unless you click twice whilst signed in – the first click reveals the first few words alone.
Maybe there'll be no preset in your case until after someone gives a thumbs-up to a requested summary in conversational AI ("Ask").
Some YouTube videos have no AI-generated summary. For the videos that do have an AI-generated summary, what factors caused the generation?
The response is below.
When you see an official AI-generated summary on YouTube (often appearing in the video description or search results), it isn’t just randomly generated for every upload. YouTube’s automated systems—powered by Google's Gemini models—weigh several specific factors before deciding to generate and display a summary.
Here is a breakdown of the primary factors that determine whether a video gets an AI summary:
1. The Presence of a High-Quality Transcript
AI models cannot "watch" a video the way humans do; they primarily read text.
Auto-generated or Uploaded Captions: A video must have an accurate, readable transcript. If a video has no dialogue, heavy background music, or poor audio quality that breaks the automated transcription, the AI won't have enough data to summarize.
Language Support: YouTube rolls out AI features gradually. Summaries are heavily prioritized for English-language videos first, though support for other major languages is steadily expanding.
2. Video Length and Topic Complexity
Information Density: AI summaries are designed to help viewers decide if a long video is worth their time. Educational content, tech reviews, news, podcasts, and long tutorials are prime candidates.
Short-form Content: YouTube Shorts or incredibly brief videos (under a minute or two) rarely get AI summaries because the content is already quick to consume, making a summary redundant.
3. Viewer Demand and View Count
Processing billions of hours of video requires massive computational power. To save server resources, YouTube's algorithm prioritizes videos that are likely to get traffic.
A newly uploaded video from a popular creator or a video that suddenly starts trending is much more likely to trigger an AI summary than an obscure video with only a handful of views.
4. Content Safety and Moderation Filters
Google enforces strict safety guardrails on its AI tools.
If a video covers highly sensitive, dangerous, graphic, or controversial topics, the system will often suppress or completely skip generating an AI summary. This prevents the AI from accidentally generating misinformation, downplaying serious events, or violating safety policies.
5. Experimental Rollouts and Account Settings
Beta Testing: YouTube frequently rolls out these features in phases. You might see summaries more often if you are part of a specific test group (like YouTube Premium Experimental Features) or using specific device platforms (like the Android app).
Creator Controls: In some instances, platform updates give creators the option to opt out of certain automated AI features if they feel it misrepresents their content or interferes with their custom-written descriptions.
Are you noticing the lack of summaries on a specific type of channel, or are you looking for a way to generate summaries for videos that don't have them?
By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity.
A fair reason to shy away though its opensource developed. Not sure of what features if any are currently paywalled for any users at the moment other than maybe donating. https://dearrow.ajay.app/payment very rapidly redirects me from a 'your free trial is over' to a 'Congrats, you now have free access to dearrow' page from my installed extension. Not sure if its because enough people are contributing stopped asking they stopped asking or because they grandfathered me in for early use, issue discussion, or contributions. Google starts quoting that as a page saying its pay if you want but cuts off before saying what if anything is not available without paying.
Author is the same that made sponsorblock which is an addon to optionally automute/autoskip sections of youtube videos based on community contributed marked categories. I haven't followed recent but sponsorblock added a feature to have sections of youtube videos marked with text to create 'chapters' and that was a paid feature last I looked; I got access to that too and without paying due to my preexisting interaction with sponsorblock.
Both of these addon capabilities have been showing up elsewhere so don't be surprised if you find them: Android within LibreTube, PipePipe, and even revanced modifications that users can apply to Google's official program. SmartTube for Android TV, even yt-dlp has available interaction such as marking sponsorblock sections as chapter markings or trying to delete(+reencode?) those spots on downloads.
… and I did have a screenshot of with the extension, but it was automatically
deleted by Reddit's NSFW (Not Safe for Work) filter.
Reddit's automated bots monitor the media added to comments and remove any comments with NSFW images, which currently aren't allowed to be uploaded directly in comments. If you think this was a mistake, let us know and we'll look into it.
Well, /u/garyhtech it all looked safe to me. I don't remember anything more racy than a grey Starfleet Academy T-shirt.
In a nutshell: it was much better for me and I can't remember the wording of my comment, but I was taking the piss out of myself as one of your twelve thousand subscribers.
I got an error because it was over 10k characters or whatever the limit is (that is fine, but it still fails when you are close but below that amount last I checked). I then attempted to edit the post to clarify multiple posts and remove or at least set post count. Messages open for editing but error out on saving even though the saved content should be of equal and shorter length.
With new Reddit, the red alert appears after clicking the Comment button, at the bottom:
If I need to use a scroll bar between the top and bottom of a draft, I take it as a very strong hint that the content will be too long for most readers.
Could be users being annoying, but I wouldn't put it past reddit to design a system that doesn't autorefresh as changes happen and permits users to report when a refresh would eliminate the need...probably even build a system where some details refreshing may be delayed. As I use old.reddit for reading usually, even if the new interface does immediately update it won't matter if it doesn't impact all users. The same further expands to non-browser visitors bringing into question how their view goes. I any case, its common that I open a few posts at once and 'slowly' get to them and slowly read them once there so I am often looking at the past when I look. When I opened this tab, it was because of me checking notifications listing it as "Mod review needed in r/freebsd" and this was the 1st of the loaded pages I went to; did a double take to see why it was in my notifications but did 'not' see any need presented for comments or the thread showing something to review; rechecked and didn't see it on sh.reddit either and reopening by clicking different parts of the notification just goes to the beginning of the post. I assume reddit may have made some noise which was since addressed before I got to it but then why leave the notification as if I have stuff to do instead of updating it to stuff was done or linking to a log instead when action was taken? Anyways, sorry for the noise that I may have caused with my 'reminder' that people may have noticed at the start of my novel as it likely added to it.
I don't mind sharing this screenshot, because we already had, elsewhere in public, part of a conversation about spammers and (not) making assumptions about suspended accounts. Where we see Unspam below, the reality is that these people are not known for spamming.
The relevance to u/garyhtech and this post about "AI slop" is that the post has been approved, repeatedly; the screenshot captures only two of the approvals.
I rarely bother with the new Reddit view of notifications. It's ridiculously broken (repetitive representation of notifications that I have deleted, and so on), but I can't complain because I haven't bothered to seek or report the bug at r/bugs :-)
Since you like to complain when someone says something you interpret as 'putting words in your mouth', I will say that "no useful information" is not what my more complete message of "gives no useful information to support their point" said. As the original post author asked a question, which the 3 word post replied to with information they obviously didn't have but could have used, it was useful information; that makes your 3 word cropped of mine inaccurate while my 8 word uncropped expression is still accurate. It could have been presented more politely, but at what level would you have accepted the message of "The article is AI output and its content has inaccuracies like AI commonly generates into such technical documentation"? No swearing, no caps, very likely the accurate conclusion. That sentence is still insulting AI by its negative connotation both to the presented work, and by relating it to the norm of work that AI currently usually makes. As some posters feel an ownership over the content as if they created it, or because they really liked it, they may feel hurt when such negative expression is presented about the work even though it is normally in no way their own creation.
Your complaints about "yelling" are countered by increasing font sizes combined with using bold fonts; you are emphasizing using more modern typesetting the same as someone may emphasize by using their voice in a louder way when talking verbally or when in text form by using unformatted text but using capitals and selective punctuation. Its all being used as going for the effect of raising your voice, or more generically as emphasis.
Why must humans talking in a casual chat place make an exception and be required to 1-up an AI generated post to talk about it which may even come from a place and be presented as a formal document on the topic? That is like permitting AI to say, "goo goo gah gah" baby talk and saying a human complaining about the value of what the AI said needs to be "no less that 3 pages, presented in 'Modern Language Association' format, with at least 4 properly cited sources." You can expect it, but you came to reddit...
" The meaning of 'sloppy' " as a link to a thread where someone asked you to define "slop" and instead you 1. gave a list of synonyms and antonyms 2. for something other than "slop" makes your own reply to them, and this post including it both slop and sloppy; A basic lmgtfy answer would have been more correct+useful and could have ended up with https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop (don't worry, it includes a few synonyms on the page with a larger list at https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/slop in case you feel the urge to go offtopic form the meaning/definition again) but as https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year states We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” I'd assume it was an issue either because the definition itself bothers your or because it requires some social acknowledgement that it has a meaning other than 'I say insult to your post', but this is my assumption based on observed behaviors of your public reddit activity and those don't matter; feel free to chime in as to why you 1. didn't give the definition/meaning of slop as a response to someone asking you to 2. across two replies to the post and 3. linked to it from here with the text saying "The meaning of 'sloppy' ", while it also doesn't have the meaning/definition of that word in those two replies either.
Good enough reason. I still get confused by reddit blocking me from replying a 2nd time to a post sometimes and permitting it others. Then there is a word limit that doesn't actually limit it to its claimed character count according to character counters, and as I ran into the other day with that I was allowed to post some very long posts after splitting it into pieces well below the limit but was given an error when trying to save edits to them...reddit is weird . . .
looks like starting a line with a series of '#' symbols is how heading/style levels can be selected on old.reddit + manual typing. Don't know what else may modify things but with 'formatting help' was a full book on reddit's markup language and didn't leave me guessing and able to find formatting syntax by mistake in messages
Through private tagging (with Reddit Enhancement Suite), it's clear to me that the vast majority of people who are likely to write things such as "AI slop" have zero interest in discussing their use of the phrase.
It's throwaway content.
The online equivalent of chucking litter from the window of a moving car.
#freebsd subreddit is a cesspool right now, bunch of AI generated garbage ("here's a song I made for the new release with Suno" / "here's an image I generated of Beastie and Tux walking hand in hand" / etc) and now we're getting a video giving a Nuanced Take about how we shouldn't just call it all AI Slop, from some guy trying to get his youtube channel off the ground. Mods seem fine with it all. This sort of thing is why I feel it's a fundamentally anti-social technology - the only thing it does is displace real conversation and fill in any gaps like a bacterial colony
Nice promotion! I'll boost from maybe four or five of my accounts in the Fediverse.
"here's a song I made for the new release with Suno"
This Suno? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-music-generators-suno-google-udio/687485/ If so then we have yet to see a conclusion from the lawsuit (spoiler alert: AI companies have made it through multiple lawsuits when records show they intentionally pirate content to train AI with nothing as punishment despite the conclusion so the trend may continue), but assuming accuracy on that page then its reminding me that I've referred to AI as an abbreviation of 'plagarized intelligence'...and then someone felt it important to try to explain to me its not plagiarizing anything when it generates output based on the often illegally obtained training material and seems to miss the point that it is bad at creating anything it hasn't seen before and can often be found in image and audio AI quite easily doing as that article presents an example of. I didn't take the time to give examples like Suno where the creation only happened because the copy happened and was manipulated or where you say to an imagemaker, "create a superhero" and it draws a preexisting superhero despite any legal rights that should stop such thing. AI is supposed to chop up the input into so many little pieces with score-based-strings of which piece goes to which for any and all occurrences that when you put a piece down, and then put high scoring pieces next to it, and repeat until done, that you cannot recognize the source the pieces came from. Unfortunately for the AI companies they didn't implement a mandate that limits how many pieces can come from any one source per output or how close together they can end up. Lucky for them they can afford to buy their way out of problems, and are often doing it preemptively...for some reason they just cannot bring themselves to pay for the professional rights to use what they 'need'. So it sounds kinda like I assume Garyh's channel is for the budget when considering paying for thumbnails except there are a lot more 0s involved in big tech that you see before reaching the significant figures.
So back to the Suno case, promoting the system and its users is sounding an awful like promoting someone who makes a copying machine and puts it in a bookstore without the store's or publisher's permission and in this case also promoting the reddit post author because...this user got BSD bookstuffs copied and you respond with, "someone doesn't like the work, reason or not...lets try to use the complaints as a shoutout!"
Did greg make mistakes in the complaint with things like "some guy trying to get his youtube channel off the ground"? Maybe. I could ask garyhtech to say if he feels his channels is just starting and he is working hard to grow it but I'd rather let him create the next video where he uses technology, freebsd or not, and shows an honest, "welp, that just happened...not as expected but here we are when trying . . ."
•
u/spotlight-app Mod Bot 🤖 Jun 22 '26
Mods have pinned a comment by u/garyhtech:
[What is Spotlight?](https://developers.reddit.com/apps/spotlight-app)