I Was Tricked by A.I. (And It's Big Tech's Fault)

[Music] why do you cling to such a pathetic existence I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that Humanity's been dreaming of an artificial future for Generations now as the 20th century produced ever more destructive Technologies ever more e capable machines stories and images of a robotic tomorrow found their way into almost every medium and almost every mind sometimes these imagined machine intelligences are friends the far future helpers of John W Campbell's Twilight spring to mind sometimes they're all powerful foes evil maniacal apocalypse mad things skynets savy machines AMS some day the dream went the presence of some sort of artificial intelligence would be a fact of life and would change the world or destroy it reality has been less glamorous and more well stupid and [Music] exhausting recently I dropped my first video in a little while slop economics and the response was generally pretty good so thanks for that glad you mostly liked it you know except for the 500 very clever original guys who all decided to let me in on the the irony of a video discussing slop itself being slop because the video was long I guess I don't know but because I do try to keep an eye on my comments I soon noticed another Trend pop up in the background unfortunately this essay is also slop my friend now if you want to make an essay with no Ai and get the same amount of information out in half of the amount AI stock footage on the video about this video has way too much AI slot footage and it was super distracting the idea that I'd put AI in the slop video caught me off guard to start with I thought maybe they were spotting the lowquality spoof shots from the community recycled film making episode i' included to refer to generic science fiction but then I got one that was nice enough to include a Tim stamp and if you jump to this Tim stamp and you look you'll see the background image I used to introduce the perverse incentive idea is kind of freaky coins have bizarre illegible symbols on look melty some coins are even fused together this does look to be an AI generated video clip and I say it looks to be AI because at least one person under the Community post I subsequently made was convinced it isn't and I'm not an AI Art Expert so I don't know but yeah I think it is I'd [ __ ] up oh and I misspelled perverse thank you for all letting me know that also like I said when I realized this I made a community post apologizing clarifying that I'll try to do better in the future and that it wasn't intentional because obviously it wasn't and before we get to the rest of this video I want to take a minute here to talk about how I think this slipped through when I need to get a bit of stock footage to communicate an idea or fill a visual Gap in a video I head over to story blogs this video is not sponsored by them by the way and that'll probably soon become clear they're just the provider I use and pay for my license costs 350 quid a year that's like 440 bucks for you Yanks but yeah story blocks it's true that there are some free stock providers out there but the reason I and many others in this General line of work pay for a service like story blocks is partly that paid stuff tends to be a little higher quality and partly the idea that you don't have to worry about copyright issues down the line it's a business and not a super cheap one either they're not going to accept stuff that they don't have the right to license you'd think anyway and when I get to story blocks this is the interface I type in coins I see a wall of videos I pick the one that best suits my purposes and then I drag the file into my video editor and as the editors among you know the main way you preview a work in progress video is through a screen like this it's a dinky little thing generally up in the corner generally small enough that if you want to see details you better off checking the source footage somehow but that's only half of it because I did check the video afterwards I sit through the whole thing multiple times across the course of filling out additional subtitles checking where info cards and AD spots are best to go that sort of thing and on this occasion I did end up rendering the video a few times to correct minor slip-ups I do try to be thorough so how didn't I spot the molten nonsense coins so obvious to the viewer well brains are funny eyes too what we see depends a great deal on what we expect to see the first time I saw this footage in miniature I was expecting to see real footage of a pile of coins that's what I'd searched for and so that's how my brain translated that miniature footage every time I got to that point in the video I was expecting to see that real footage so that's what I saw I didn't see the mega coin for the same reason I didn't see that spelling mistake time and time again and for the same reason none of us saw the basketball gorilla you guys on the other hand on getting to the 1 minute 1 second Mark had no idea what I was going to show or even what my next sentence would be so it hit your senses fresh your eyes and brain deciphered this new visual based on what was there in front of you not based on any prior expectations so you saw what was there AI mck so I messed up I should have noticed and I'm not trying to excuse that but the reason I didn't the reason I put that muck into my video the reason I may well have unknowingly used AI stock footage previously was because of my expectation that this paid stock footage platform didn't include AI footage and I'm not saying this to try and exonerate me just to get to a question that I think is more interesting than how far I messed up whether or not I need to get the ukulele out that being was my expectation mistaken at first it seemed so I went to story blocks after this happened to try and figure out if I'd been wrong I had a vague sense somewhere in the back of my mind that I'd had that assumption for a reason but the more I looked the less confident I felt Googling the issue brings up a whole Spate of story blocks blog posts about embracing AI to level up your video editing Journey or whatever and you also get a collection of footage on the site calling on the user to step into the future with their AI stock Video Collection there's nothing about AI content in the s's FAQs and I couldn't find a way to maneuver the onsite chatbot to provide an answer I emailed story blocks support but didn't hear back right away but while there is no version of the clear unambiguous no story blocks prohibits AI stock footage statement I was expecting available to the concerned user there's also no clear yes if you actually look at the files hosted under that AI stock Video Collection it all seems to be normal footage footage depicting AI related technology rather than made with it I think you'll agree that the impression all this gives is one of a companywide hedging that story blocks is trying to keep in the good graces of AI optimists and pessimists alike it's not hard to understand where this impulse comes from because AI represents a potentially existential threat to the stock industry it's a threat that's been reported on Plenty not least by outlets on the side of generative AI writing in tones of barely restrained Jubilation about the Technology's disruptive possibilities but they are right if generating images and footage has been made not only possible but easy and cheap why would people pay for expensive stock licenses the the Counterpoint here is that AI generated videos even AI generated images still rarely look great and maybe never will but many stock use cases don't need perfect visuals likely enough use cases to meaningfully impact the market either way there's a sense of fragility here and many players in or around the stock industry have responded by surrendering to the current one of the reasons I didn't immediately cancel my story blocks membership is that a lot of competitors are doing this kind of thing more directly invar has started integrating AI generated content into their stock library and others like Adobe stock have welcomed AI submissions with two thumbs up adobe's even integrated image generation into Photoshop it's true that you can filter AI out of your Adobe stock searches but you have to remember to opt out and that obviously relies on the honor System hinges on AI content submitters accurately labeling their content and all of this puts more pressure on the stock s sites users who have to expend increasing amount of effort to not use AI content in the comments of my community post were a few other stock footage users echoing this sentiment disappointed by the almost industrywide lowering of quality but it also puts more pressure on those sites contributors I can't show you an adobe or envato press release backing up their side of things but more anecdotally looking at comments and threads across the net it's easy to come across accounts of photographers being made to wait way longer for Content verification or even of them having real pictures rejected because shoddy moderation filters flagged them as AI throughout this industry then platforms customers and contributors alike are feeling the strain of the AI disruption with almost uniformly negative results and then story blocks got back to me hey there thanks for contacting story blocks I'm sorry to share that we do not accept AI generated content from contributors per our contributor agreement contributors must be the exclusive owner of the content or have all the necessary rights have a great day no they seemingly don't like to advertise the fact after this I did find a disclosure of this buried in one of the sites blog posts too but story blocks doesn't accept AI content in theory obviously clearly they do and have but per their next reply these are apparently cases slipping under the radar that the platform is actively trying to weed out I'm not exactly sure of the process as I'm not on the content team however I've been told that we're actually in the process of manually removing AI generated content that has happened to slip through digital moderation has always been a puzzle there's always been more stuff to check than I to check it with but now that technologies have emerged allowing low effort but superficially similar pieces of content to be cranked out to flood any given Niche or Market at the Press of a button that puzzle has become a battle often a losing one as Vice reported last year it's already been lost on the Amazon reviews front as 404 media reported this this year chat GPT sludge has made it into Google Books and Google Scholar and personal example I haven't bothered checking Twitter DMS in like a year because it's all AI spam bollocks so sorry if any of you guys have tried to hit me up on there and I've AED you blame Zed p8 y y v f FS I guess so it sucks I put AI into a video and it sucks story blocks played a part in facilitating that but I don't want to be too hard on story blocks because well they're victims of assault too right this Deluge of AI content has evidently stymied whatever moderation or review processes the site had in place to the point that they now face the very real risk of pissed off users leaving after seeing more and more AI clog up their search results or heaven forbid after mistakenly putting some of that slop into a video pushing back against slop and looking like a [ __ ] idiot as a result you might say it serves them right for that hedging for trying to embrace AI on their terms trying to have their deformed cake and eat it too and maybe you'd be right but it's a lot easier to decide how a stock industry business should have responded to that AI boom now in retrospect after the anatomically incorrect leopards have started eating their faces than it probably would have been a year or two ago when AI was far less of a known quantity and really even bearing in mind their inability to properly enforce their content ban they are doing more against AI stock footage than many of their competitors in the industry this is way bigger than story blocks and as was eventually pointed out by another commenter a cobra PNG I'd got from another website and also used in the slop video was ai2 was fraudulently licensed despite that and also tricked Yours Truly it's everywhere no source of online art or footage free or paid can be assumed to be free of the taint and I'm not the only one saying so while I was putting this video together I was able to speak with an animation industry professional who confirmed that Beyond YouTube beyond the the stock industry the wild proliferation of generated images has become a real problem free image sharing sites like Pinterest for instance historically provided an invaluable resource of artistic reference material a utility that's falling away as that site is overtaken by AI fax similes as my source pointed out checking for or correcting hallucinations is only possible if you're familiar with the subject matter most of us know how many fingers humans typically have but do you know how many petals a Jasmine flower is supposed to have the shape of a crysanthemum petal Vimeo is another platform that once fulfilled an important role in reliable digital content sharing a role that's fading away as the site makes Overture after Overture toward embracing Ai and well speaking of non-stock video sharing platforms it's not just Vimeo is it now the presence of AI shorts or robot voice movie Recaps on this platform isn't exactly breaking news but as I was editing this video YouTuber blooms dropped an expose revealing a number of other channels in the animation space as low effort content Farms built on generative AI definitely worth a watch if you've not caught that already so the idea of an Internet wide generative AI delu is not a hypothetical future problem a gray goo worst case of what might happen if the technology advances far enough no AI generated content pieces are already the digital equivalent of testicular microplastics they're [ __ ] everywhere and you can't opt out you have to adapt to the new reality be actively filter in the way that I haven't been doing story blocks is not the villain of our story then so who is well this is a video essay from my leftwing channel so say it with me everyone capitalism okay no that's a copout it's true but it's a copout let's get a little more specific to the Layman's perspective generative AI sort of came out of nowhere about 2 years ago Dar e a model producing Rel L primitive images hit the public to most people it was a random fun novelty you'd mess around with for an evening generate some fake movie posters album covers have a laugh with and then forget suddenly the technology leapt forward and chat GPT appeared similarly out of nowhere chat GPT was moderately proficient at producing functional code passible at producing basic summaries able to Yap well enough to give you a shot at a c on your school project not unreasonably this impressed as did the higher quality Imaging models that followed and why wouldn't it the technology came out of nowhere and was doing this just imagine what would be possible down the road with more funding more infrastructure and so on but of course generative AI didn't come out of nowhere big Tech had been putting money into these companies for years at this point people like Peter teal and Elon Musk were involved with Dary and chat GPT Originators open AI from day one alongside others such as Amazon they started the company off with a billion of investor backing Microsoft seeing potential in the technology became open ai's main backer in 2019 to the tune of another billion dollars a figure they've since exceeded many times over by the way I don't want to minimize the contribution of researchers and academics to the field that have become known as generative AI these models are all built on years decades of innovative research but it took a lot of Industry investment to get to chat PT and getting from the generative AI of 2022 to the generative AI of 202 4 of 2025 has taken a lot more I said that investors saw potential in AI but it would probably be truer to say that they saw AI as potential years of importing leadership from investment and management consultancy spaces has shifted the culture at the top of today's tech industry into one where moderately profitable sustainable business is seen as failure the reality is as Tech writer and podcaster Ed zitan puts it that these increasingly numerous consultancy brained leaders turned their companies and the companies they invest in into management consultancy firms that happen to sell technology if it's not exponential growth this culture asks what's the point it's All or Nothing hyper growth or bust hence the massive empty hype Cycles around crypto or the metaverse which I won't bother going into here because you've all already watched those folding ideas videos right the point of today's tech industry isn't to deliver good products well it's to find the next big thing that the next smartphone the next Cloud the next thing that just prints more and more money and the latest biggest and most transparent bet these players have made on hypergrowth is generative AI what do I mean by transparent zitron has pointed out a number of times that the pr of generative AI particularly as given by figures like open AI Sam ultman builds itself so totally around assumed future advancements some of which like General artificial intelligence are wholly unrelated to their current work that their current products deep flaws ethical failures and minimal progress the reality of these companies can be handwaved away as he puts it why else would Sam mman spend most of the time talking about what AI might do companies that build useful things that people need don't need to talk about what they'll build in the future the point is that thing Alman and friends have been selling so successfully for the past few years is not a thing it's an idea the idea of being at the bottom of the dis disruption Parabola the product is always coming if the chat gpts the DAR the soras aren't the product are just those first few jittery steps toward the product the real Leap Forward the one that's always a couple of years a few more rounds of funding away then it doesn't matter that you're tens of billions in the hall because when the real breakthrough starts when Revelation comes the returns will be so ludicrously unthinkably big that even those tens of billions of dollars will be chump change in retrospect it's the Silicon Valley moas a bubble of bewildering proportions built on carefully manufactured hype and the need to always be making even more money big Tech's initial funding of and subsequent propping up of horribly unsustainable money guzzling business models with their Scrooge McDuck Financial reservoirs their act of legitimizing the rampant plagiarism these models always needed more on that soon was all a deluded cultic quest for this elusive moment of Messianic Ai hypergrowth and I say propping up because most of these businesses are hemorrhaging money are so far from profitability that it beggar belief about 2 months ago open AI made history by raising the largest round of funding ever as always the money came from tech houses like Nvidia and Microsoft as well as huge investment Venture Capital firms like SoftBank and Thrive Capital this is after two previous funding rounds this year and two more huge cash injections the year before one of which was another 10 billion from Microsoft and this keeps happening because open AI are burning cash despite their advancements despite those new models despite all this AI hype peaking and despite having their running costs heavily subsidized by all their big Tech Partners they're set to lose $5 billion this year alone so not only did they have to raise a [ __ ] ton of money again this year to keep a float they'll likely have to do the same next year too and that's not my opinion it's that is an admission from open AI it's fine though because they project they'll be making 100 billion a year in 5 years time which gives me an idea actually Microsoft hey uh I project my channel is going to make 10 more billion dollars every second in one year's time can I get a cool 10 Billy no now it is true that a few individual businesses in this sphere are currently profitable mid Journey being their major example but as has been noted plenty these companies are riding a hype wave created by open Ai and its big Tech money bonfire even mid Journey's founder David Holtz admits maintaining a profitable service will become more challenging the more the user base grows no taken as a whole generative AI is little more than a marketing ritual performed by a slew of firms Chasing The Impossible Dream Of Perpetual growth one that'll make money for those conducting it and continue to inconvenience the rest of us whether or not that hypergrowth market ever actually appears which see seems increasingly unlikely by the way not least because even factoring in the scummy tactics these models developers have been using they're running out of data to improve them with but the last essential point to recognize is that this inconvenience isn't even a bug it's a feature it's the feature because there is a common theme here one that's always been there right at the heart throughout the history of commercial ai's development in the years since the Heyday of European imperialism a number of historians and economists like Kenneth balding and Patrick krien have argued some variation of the point that Empire was always financially irrational because it tended to cost more than it made it's an interesting point one that does seem to be borne out by a lot of the evidence but there are two essential counterpoints the first was given by figures such as Edward SED for whom ascribing a sense of perfect economic rationality to the often irrational EMP Builders of the past is to miss out entirely the cultural impetus behind much imperialism as he writes profit and hope of further profit were obviously tremendously important but there is more than that to imperialism and colonialism second while Empire may have been a net loss for some colonizers as American writer and historian Michael parenti famously observed money spent and money returned weren't necessarily all that linked discussing the claim that us invest m in the Philippines was costing more in foreign aid 6 billion than the 3 billion it was worth parenti rejects the notion that this setup was not profitable it's very profitable because the people who have the $3 billion investment aren't the same ones as the people who pay the 6 billion and so it was with the British Empire in India it was the Brits the ordinary working people who paid for the cost of Empire while it was the bank of England and the East India Trading Company that got the cream a m major function of Empire then was and is the role it plays in laundering class exploitation in moving costs and profits around within the Metropole what does any of this have to do with big Tech or AI well do you remember Amazon's nextg AI powered shopping promises the idea that supermarkets built with cameras and artificial intelligence would track what you put into your basket as you went removing the need for checkouts and cashiers well it was reported earlier this year that no they never actually got the tech to work how they wanted it to and the illusion had been maintained by paying thousands of Indian workers to manually check and correct the camera data the whole thing was Amazon making a modern day Mechanical Turk which we probably should have guessed because they also have a service called Mechanical Turk for exactly this type of menial Global Outsourcing feels like there's some sort of irony there maybe generative AI too has been built on the back of underpaid workers from the glob Global South time reports that open AI paid Kenyan workers less than $2 an hour to provide data training chat GPT to be less toxic the core principle here of AI as a futuristic concept performing a branding slight of hand to disguise depressingly mundane acts of Labor exploitation extends all over the globe because AI as it currently exists does have a use but that use isn't cutting cost it's displacing it onto under classes workers more widely and yes creatives flipping back to Mid Journey the poster boy a profitable generative AI companies yeah here's the bit you all knew was coming that profitability only exists on the back of mass art theft fair use is a complex thing ultimately more dependent on court rulings than objective principles but key considerations often include how much of the copyrighted work is used and whether or not the use results in Market competition and feeding scraped images whole cloth into a machine that learns and replicates visual Styles is designed to produce competing products kind of goes directly against both of those points so factor in the cost of legitimately licensing all their training data and they too would be deeper in the hole than Mr natas that's that's a motherload joke shout out motherload yet again AI isn't profitable doesn't reduce cost or burden just displaces it in this case to artists the world over and it's obviously not just mid Journey it's the case for practically all of these monetized generative AI tools and they don't even try to hide it what data was used to train Sora we used publicly available data and licensed data so videos on YouTube I'm actually not sure about that okay videos from Facebook Instagram you know if they were publicly available to use um there might be the data but um I'm I'm not sure what about shutter stock I know you guys have a deal with them I'm just not going to go into the details of of the data that was those was used across continents and across markets generative ai's overarching purpose Remains the displacing of cost the burdening of workers and the stealing of value some of the writers in the audience will no doubt be familiar with the tactic of AI empowered employers firing off copywriters and translators before hiring staff back to correct the generated textt that's replaced them naturally for a fraction of the pay despite AI humanization often taking more effort and time than doing the job from scratch value produced by these kinds of generative AI tools is always sort of Zero Sum the companies maybe even the user benefits but only by scraping small amounts from everyone else's piles to put on theirs and the effects of that kind of theft are rarely visible but when you hear about distinctive artists losing work because the machines that have been trained on their data can do a passable Recreation of their style you can catch a glimpse and it's sickening for Years big Tech and Venture Capital forces have thrown their weight behind the development and legitimization of this technology of a machine that sucks in Fair wages Mass plagiarism and country's worth of electricity on one side to churn investor Goodwill and shitty fake video out of the other whose ripples throughout the digital landscape recreate in miniature that fundamental displacement in everything they touch there is no opting out we are all being buried in sludge sludge cascading down from the highest levels of our late capitalist ziggurat making everything it touches just a bit slower and just a bit worse it's that sludge that's csing through the digital content economy ruining products placing more and more barriers between contributors and their platforms polluting artists reservoirs of reference material reaching all the way to story blocks and their failure to effectively moderate their platform and to me sitting at my desk having to spend longer now on each video to make sure I don't accidentally include any more misshapen cobras or deformed piles of money in the end those dreams never came true AI didn't lift us into the stars or send us down to Hell and maybe that's because those dreams were always melodramatic or maybe it's because despite the name none of this is artificial intelligence not really there is no thinking no knowledge just glorified autocorrect with an overly ostentatious trading name either way we've not come close to Miracles and we've not even been granted a flashy death the AI future is simply a pain in the ass I'm sorry about the coins but I'm also pissed off about the coins myself a little sure maybe even at story blocks too but mostly at the C of richer than God firms investors and Executives who have spent years trying their damnest to claw yet more wealth and influence onto their already infinite hordes of it even especially if doing so rips everyone else off and fills every inch of the online environments people like you and I have built with our effort and our art and our care with an unending torrent of liquid [ __ ] just so long as it keeps their [ __ ] number going up for a few months more and don't even get me started on the AGI dweebs that was a bit of a downer ending but I'd probably be remiss not to point out that the future's not necessarily all doom and gloom counter to your Vimeos and your pinterestsubmit with Nightshade and glaze being the premier examples at present these tools are limited in scope their effectiveness varies and they're obviously not retroactive solutions to the plagiarism that's happened already but they probably do warrant a mention all the same major American unions in the entertainment industry wga sag Afra and now tag have all somewhat recently renegotiated their contracts in part to implement anti- aai safeguards none of these are silver bullets but they might not need to be resisting for a while until those bubbles burst themselves and Executives across the world find another next big thing to focus on a different would be exploitation device that may well be the answer here but yeah that's the video thanks for watching I'd also like to be clear that while I only directly quoted him two or three times the direction I'm coming at particularly the business end of AI from in this video is very informed by the work of Ed zitron so if you want to go down that rabbit hole check out his newsletter and his podcast better offline if you've watched my slop video and now this and wishing there were some video bridging that Gap more explicitly talking about AI as slop great news there is it just isn't one of my videos go and watch this piece by Hoots if you haven't already as always you can check out my patreon if you want access to cool perks and a way to support more videos like this and I'm going to roll credits because I'm trying to be in my make fewer longer better videos era now and this whole mess really got in the way of that big thanks to Hanan Daniel goon something something capitalism bad Thomas R and Wy BTY and everyone else who supports me thanks also to the animation professional who gave me a bunch of thoughts and insights on this script way more than I managed to fit into it in the end hopefully I can bring some of that forward into future work and Shout Out anyone watching this that supports any Creator on patreon YouTube COI or similar platforms you guys all rock and we are all very thankful later [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Music]

2024-12-06 07:18

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