Our Enterprise Value is Over $20B: MLS Commissioner
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-09-04/our-enterprise-value-is-over-20b-mls-commissioner-video?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Profiles @profiles-bloomberg
Chess.com: come un tool di file transfer ha esposto i dati di migliaia di utenti
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Nel panorama dei servizi online, poche piattaforme possono vantare la stessa pervasività e fedeltà degli utenti di Chess.com. Con oltre 100 milioni di iscritti e 10 milioni di partite organizzate ogni giorno, il sito è il cuore pulsante del gioco degli
Oh MY.
"Will redact every Republican" from #Epstein "list"
"O'Keefe Media Group, far-right media org, secretly recorded acting deputy Joseph Schnitt's comments & published them in a move that represents just how large a rift the Epstein case has created bw Trump's administration & his MAGA base"
reshared this
"A year ago, LLMs could only solve some of the easier problems on premier high school math contests. Now they have achieved gold-medal equivalent scores on the International Math Olympiad (IMO), the pinnacle of such contests. However, no LLM has solved even a single problem from the highest tier of difficulty on these contests.
(...)
Publicly available models achieve >95% on problems up to a rating of 5. These models have not fully saturated problems rated 6-7, though GPT-5 achieves >67%. The remaining gap is due to reliability, i.e., it solves each problem at least once when sampled four times. The 2025 IMO contained three problems rated 7, two rated 8, and one rated 9. Certain experimental LLMs, e.g. Google’s Deep Think, solved all but the last of these. Since this sample size is small, we also test the publicly available Deep Think model on two easily-checkable 2024 IMO problems, rated 8 and 9, and find that it fails to solve each even a single time out of 10 samples."
epoch.ai/data-insights/math-co…
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #Math
LLMs have not yet solved the hardest problems on high school math contests
LLMs have come a long way on high school math contests but have yet to show that they can solve the hardest problems found on these contests.Greg Burnham (Epoch AI)
Omar pushes corporate taxes while husband's company skipped IRS bills: Report
The husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who advocates ensuring corporations "pay their fair share," previously owned a company that reportedly owed money to the IRS.
Tim Mynett, Omar's husband, and William R. Hailer, Mynett's business partner, operated EStreetCo, an advertising, design, and public relations business that dissolved in June 2022, according to a Thursday report from the Washington Free Beacon.
'The company has no outstanding tax obligations from the COVID era; in fact, we have a balance due to us.'
A document obtained by the news outlet revealed that in 2023, after the company's dissolution, the IRS filed a lien for nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes.
Omar announced in February that she introduced an amendment in the House Budget Committee to "make corporations pay their fair share." The representative has opposed Republicans' budget resolution, calling it "a blueprint for American decline."
"Let's be clear: They want to exploit your labor, take your tax dollars, and gut your earned benefits — all to bankroll tax cuts for their wealthy friends and donors. They want to increase your health care costs — while Elon Musk and his friends hoard even more wealth," Omar said in February during a speech on the House floor.
RELATED: Here are the top 3 LEAST patriotic members of Congress
The Free Beacon noted that Omar's personal wealth is as much as $30 million. In a 2021 financial disclosure, she described EStreetCo as a "creative agency," claiming that her husband's share in the firm was worth $1,000 or less.
The news outlet reported that the Sonoma County recorder does not have any record that the IRS released its lien against EStreetCo.
RELATED: Trump derangement final boss: Ilhan Omar claims Somalia is better than America
However, a spokesperson for EStreetCo told Blaze News, "The company has no outstanding tax obligations from the COVID era; in fact, we have a balance due to us." Documents provided by the spokesperson showed that the IRS owed the company approximately $3,000 as of September 3, 2025.
A representative for Omar did not respond to a request for comment.
[em]Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. [/em][em]Sign up here[/em][em]![/em]
Sign up for the Blaze newsletter
Get the stories that matter most delivered directly to your inbox.Blaze Media
⚡️‼️Czechia Stands Tall: NATO's Future Depends on Us! – Mark Rutte (EU Debates VIDEO) #Ukraine #Paris #Rome #London #Berlin #Finland #Brussels #Czechia #CzechRepublic #Denmark #NukesForUkraine #Germany #UN #France #Italy #OSCE #PACE #CoE #SouthKorea #Press #News #Taiwan #Media #Japan #USA #US #UK #EU #NATO #UnitedStates #UnitedKingdom #EuropeanUnion #russiaUkraineWar #11yrInvasionofUkraine #RussiaIsATerroristState #TrumpIsARussianAsset
A federal appeals court panel on Thursday put on hold a lower court judge’s order to end operations indefinitely at the immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #GOP #Politics #uspolitics #uspol #Breaking #BreakingNews
Lessons from Europe on Energy Efficiency and House Insulation - WACOCA NEWS
The “SOAP II” project, funded by the European Union’s SWITCH-Asia Program and the FRESH Project supported by the French Development Agency (AFD), has been implemented in Mongolia to reduce air pollution by improving the energy efficiency of detached …WACOCA News Editor (WACOCA NEWS)
https://www.techtudo.com.br/listas/2025/09/quantos-episodios-tem-minha-vida-com-a-familia-walter-veja-elenco-e-mais-streaming.ghtml?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Quantos episódios tem Minha Vida com a Família Walter? Veja elenco e mais
Romance teen de sucesso mostra triângulo amoroso envolvendo dois irmãos gerando capítulos cheios de reviravoltas e indecisões; veja enredo e o que esperar da sérieTechtudo
🤖 Tracking strings detected and removed!
🔗 Clean URL(s):
x.com/cl1576/status/1963418470…
❌ Removed parts:
?t=yZnoEc5Udg5gj2-pfsC_NA&s=09
このミクさんかわいいね
DECO*27 - モニタリング feat. 初音ミク
youtu.be/kbNdx0yqbZE?si=rJCzNl…
「ぅう～わぉ！」のキャッチーさが異常
アニメーションも相まって、なんかすべてこのＭＶ作った側の掌の上って感じ
ただ、最後ドアが開いたあとの表情が嬉しいって感じじゃなくて驚いてるのがなんか面白かった
檻の中からだとめちゃくちゃ吠えてるのに、檻を外すと大人しくなる犬みたいな感じなのかしら？
ガンガン押してるときは強気だけど、対象が堕ちると「
えっ！？」みたいな
そういう意味だと、このミクさんは相手のために無理してヤンデレを装ってたとも言えるのかも
すげえ甲斐甲斐しいね
…こんな同級生いねえよっ
🤖 Tracking strings detected and removed!
🔗 Clean URL(s):
youtu.be/kbNdx0yqbZE
❌ Removed parts:
?si=rJCzNldKPAXaX5Ku
How entire villages lived in just 1 building in remote Far North
For thousands of years survival in Norway’s countryside, where farms were miles from each other, meant complete self-sufficiency. Farmsteads were like small villages with several families liv…*faircompanies
🤖 Tracking strings detected and removed!
🔗 Clean URL(s):
youtu.be/isaEQfMsRIY
❌ Removed parts:
?si=V2aN2H8rBGeUOlM9
youtube.com/live/L6QmvDqJbOw?s…
We’re Live!!! ⚡️
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
🤖 Tracking strings detected and removed!
🔗 Clean URL(s):
youtube.com/live/L6QmvDqJbOw
❌ Removed parts:
?si=AQbu00CjDLoNt5IA
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Alzheimer, un nuovo test individua il rischio in 3 minuti
https://www.lastampa.it/salute/2025/09/05/news/alzheimer_rischiotest_3_minuti-424826116/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Pubblicato su La Stampa Spettacoli @la-stampa-spettacoli-LaStampa
Alzheimer, un nuovo test individua il rischio in 3 minuti
Ideato un metodo rapido e poco invasivo per capire se si ha un rischio di sviluppo della patologia più alto della media. Ne abbiamo parlato col suo ideatoreGiuliano Aluffi (La Stampa)
US files lawsuit against California utility over Los Angeles wildfires
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/4/us-files-lawsuit-against-california-utility-over-los-angeles-wildfires?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into US & Canada News @us-canada-news-AlJazeera
US files lawsuit against California utility over Los Angeles wildfires
The Department of Justice alleges that negligence by Southern California Edison sparked deadly Eaton Fire in January.Al Jazeera
Scoperto il meccanismo che collega ansia e stress all’aumento di peso
https://www.lastampa.it/salute/dossier/stop-obesity/2025/09/05/news/meccanismo_ansia_stress_aumento_peso-424823426/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Pubblicato su La Stampa Spettacoli @la-stampa-spettacoli-LaStampa
Scoperto il meccanismo che collega ansia e stress all’aumento di peso
Uno studio svela il meccanismo che collega il metabolismo e situazioni stressantiLa Stampa
“Our Fairyland” (2022) by About Us
This is Naga rock in full bloom—soaring vocals, blistering guitar shredding, drums locked in like a machine. It takes every flavor of rock and distills it into something tight, polished, and electrifying. Strap in—this one’s a ride.
youtube.com/watch?v=hi2myQCgAz…
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Chaotic showdown over Guatemalan children exposes fault lines in Trump’s deportation push
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-unaccompanied-children-trump-deportations-guatemala-73c9fa9db57472c0c74e7584c9ebc9a2?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Politics @politics-AssociatedPress
Sensitive content
Sensitive content
Another JimmyTruth for those who keep count. I've suspended him here and also suspended some 50 of his remote accounts, just in the past 3 weeks. But he's been at it for a long time, apparently. So there must have been more than 50 places that have suspended him in total.
He's homophobic, transphobic, insensitive to people, and wraps all his stuff in a bible.
Never heard of him? Does your instance allow enrollment? If so, you'll probably hear of him soon enough.
@ J @ ruhr.social
@orga
#flagrant #rightwing #taco #instagram
The right winger “ Flagrant “ podcast is finally seeing the truth, Trump is a liar and now they admit it .
instagram.com/reel/DOMB7JnD-wV…
The Lincoln Project on Instagram: "Flagrant Podcast: Why would Trump run on releasing the Epstein files? Because he's dishonest. Point blank. He told us that on the pod. He said, 'I'm a mostly truthful person,' basically saying 'I lie sometimes, when it's
3,791 likes, 91 comments - lincolnproject.us on September 4, 2025: "Flagrant Podcast: Why would Trump run on releasing the Epstein files? Because he's dishonest. Point blank. He told us that on the pod.Instagram
Mexico's president increasingly backed against a wall in managing Trump relationship
https://apnews.com/article/mexico-sheinbaum-trump-tariffs-rubio-4342060e1e14fd9f2eb044f7e33ea547?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into International News @international-news-AssociatedPress
A staffer in the Justice Department said in a secretly recorded video that the department would redact any Republican names from its investigative files on the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
#AlexAcosta #ChildRapistTrump #JeffreyEpstein #TrumpEpsteinFiles #DonaldTrump #PamBondi #USPol
Asia to Join Global Equity Rally Before Jobs Data: Markets Wrap
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-04/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-live-updates?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Economics @economics-bloomberg
⛔️🇺🇸President Macron: Twenty-six nations vow to provide post-invasion security guarantees, Trump want EU to cut Russian oil (CNN Media VIDEO) #Ukraine #Paris #Rome #London #Berlin #Finland #Brussels #Denmark #Norway #Sweden #Germany #UN #France #Italy #OSCE #PACE #CoE #SouthKorea #Press #News #Taiwan #Media #Japan #USA #US #UK #EU #NATO #UnitedStates #UnitedKingdom #EuropeanUnion #russiaUkraineWar #11yrInvasionofUkraine #RussiaIsATerroristState #TrumpIsARussianAsset
During an interaction with the owner of the company I work for today I found out we just paid $125,000 in tariffs on a $250,000 steel order. I asked if it was making our company great again and got glared at. I'm not sure who he voted for but a majority there voted for Trump.
Unfortunately, there are only about three companies in the world that manufacture the steel we use and none are located in the US, so buying American is impossible. We're also a small business.
We have raised prices but at some point the tariffs will out pace us. Most CNC equipment comes from Europe and it's getting hit too.
@TywyllSeren
Breakdancing gives Gaza’s children a way to express themselves | Gaza | Al Jazeera
aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2…
#Palestine #Gaza #Israel
@palestine
Breakdancing gives Gaza’s children a way to express themselves
A dance academy is giving Gaza’s children a way to express themselves as they deal with the daily realities of war.Al Jazeera
Im Nachhinein hatten wir Spaß und hören jetzt Les Mis 😂
Bêta haram - Il cherche à imiter Chichi mais n'a pas le pouvoir de dissoudre l'Assemblée alors à partir du 8 septembre le vieux-never-né nivernais va donc aller promener son si beau nombril ailleurs.
Pauvre petite chose vivant si loin ...
... du seuil de pauvreté.
Combien de temps ensuite avant que le gigolo de Matignon nous mette un Adolphe Hitler franchouillard à sa place ?
Pas dans la seconde (sauf si Bolloré et Arnault on déjà décidé) : ils sont légions et il faudra bien prendre du temps pour en choisir un, surtout si la rue tient bon.
Justice fiscale : doit-on faire payer davantage les plus riches ? Les habitants de quartiers aisés du Touquet répondent
Le premier, qui confond les Français, avec les 5% ou 10% des plus riches ! Ce niveau de déni !
franceinfo.fr/economie/budget/…
Justice fiscale : doit-on faire payer davantage les plus riches ? Les habitants de quartiers aisés du Touquet
Faut-il taxer les plus riches ? Les équipes de France Télévisions ont tendu le micro à des habitants du Touquet (Pas-de-Calais), dans des quartiers cossus et aisés. Ceux-ci sont divisés sur la question.France 2 (Franceinfo)
"n the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.
“It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.”"
404media.co/ai-generated-borin…
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #YouTube #History #Disinformation
AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History
As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched.“In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator says in a fake British accent. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” it continued.
0:00
/0:15
1×The video was from a channel I hadn’t seen before, called “Sleepless Historian.” I took my headphones out, didn’t think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.
The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don’t know much about. Some video titles include “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,” “The Entire History of the American Frontier,” “What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.
In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.“It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.”
“I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate,” Kelly added. “So it worries me because it’s just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. When I’m researching something, I go straight to the academic journals and books and places that are offline, basically. But these AI videos are just sort of repeating things that are on the internet and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s accurate. You end up with a very simplified version of the past, and we need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from.”
Kelly has been making history videos on YouTube since 2017 and has amassed 1.2 million YouTube subscribers because of the incredibly in-depth research he does for his feature-length videos. He said for an average long-form video, he will read 20 books, lots of journal articles, and will often travel to archaeological sites. It’s impossible to say for sure, but he has considered the possibility that some of these AI videos are modeled on his videos, and that the AI tools being used to create them could have been trained on his work. The soothing British accent used in many of the AI-generated videos I’ve seen is similar to Kelly’s actual voice. “A lot of AI basically scraped YouTube in order to develop all of the ways people make videos now,” he said. “So I mean, maybe it scraped my voice.”
He said that he has begun to get comments accusing his videos of being AI-generated, and his channel now says “no AI is used in this channel.” He has also set up a separate channel where he speaks directly to camera rather than narrating over other footage.
“People listen to the third-person, disembodied narration voice and assume that it’s AI now, and that’s disheartening,” he said. “I get quite a lot of comments from people thinking that I’m AI, so I’m like, if you think I’m AI I’m going to have to just put myself in the videos a little more. Pretty much everyone I know is doing something as a result of this AI situation, which is crazy in itself. We’ve all had to react. The thing I’m doing is I’m appearing more in videos. I’m speaking to the camera because I think people are going to be more interested in an actual human voice.”
Kelly said the number of views he gets on an average video has plateaued or dropped alongside the rise of AI-generated content that competes with his, which is something I heard from other creators, too. As a viewer, I have noticed that I now have to wade through tons of AI-generated spam in order to find high-quality videos.
“I have seen, and my fellow history creators—there’s quite a few of us, we all talk to each other—we’ve all seen quite a noticeable drop in views that seems to coincide exactly with this swarm of AI-generated, three-hour, four-hour videos where they’re making videos about the exact same things we make videos about, and for the average person, I don’t think they really care that much whether it’s AI or not,” he said.
youtube.com/embed/5Pxvk7ddgVM?…
Kelly has started putting himself in his videos to show he's a real personA few months ago, in our Behind the Blog segment, I wrote about a YouTube channel called Ancient Americas, run by an amateur anthropologist named Pete. In that blog, I worried about whether AI slop creators would try to emulate creators like Pete, who clearly take great pride in researching and filming their videos. Ancient Americas releases about one 45-minute video per month about indigenous cultures from the Western Hemisphere. Each of his videos features a substantive bibliography and works cited document, which explains the books, scientific papers, documentaries, museums, and experts he sources his research from. Every image and visual he uses is credited with both where it came from and what license he’s using. Through his videos, I have learned an incredible amount about cultures I didn’t know existed, like the Wari, the Zapotecs, the Calusa, and many more. Pete told me in an email that he has noticed the AI history video trend on YouTube as well, but “I can’t say much about how accurate these videos are as a whole because I tend to steer clear of them. Life is far too short for AI.”
“Of the few I've watched, I would say that the information tends to be vague and surface level and the generated AI images of indigenous history that they show range from uncanny to cringe. Not surprisingly, I'm not a fan of such content but thankfully, these videos don't seem to get many views,” he said. “The average YouTube viewer is much more discerning than they get credit for. Most of them see the slop for what it is. On the other hand, will that always be the case? That remains to be seen. AI is only going to get better. Ultimately, whether creators like me sink or swim is up to the viewing public and the YouTube algorithm.”
Pete is correct in that a lot of the AI-generated videos don’t have a lot of views, but that’s quickly changing. Sleepless Historian has 614,000 subscribers, posts a multi-hour video every single day, and has published three videos that have more than a million views. I found several other AI-generated history channels that have more than 100,000 subscribers. Many of them are reposting the same videos that Sleepless Historian publishes, but many of them are clearly generating their own content.
Every night before I go to sleep, I open YouTube and I see multiple AI-generated history videos being served to me, and some YouTube commenters have noticed that they are increasingly being fed AI-generated history videos. People on Reddit have noticed that the comments under these videos are a mix of what appear to be real people saying they are grateful for the content and a mix of bots posting fake sob stories. For example, a recent Sleepless Historian video has comments from “History-Snooze,” “The_HumbleHistory” “RealSleepyHistorianOfficial,” “SleeplessOrren,” “SleepyHistory-n9k,” “Drizzle and Dreamy History of the Past,” “TheSleepyNavigator-d6b5c,” “Historyforsleepy168,” and a handful of other channels that post the exact same type of content (and often repost the exact same videos).
In one video, an account called Sleepymore (which posts AI-generated history videos) posted “It’s 1 a.m. in Kyiv. I’m a Ukrainian soldier on night watch. Tonight is quiet—no sirens, just silence. I just wanted to say: your videos make me feel a little less alone, a little less afraid. Thank you.” An account called SleeplessHistorian2 responded to say “great comment.” Both of these accounts do nothing but post AI-generated history videos and spam comments on other AI-generated history videos. The email address associated with Sleepless Historian” did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.
The French Whisperer, a human ASMRtist who makes very high quality science and history videos that I have been falling asleep to for years, told me that he has also noticed that he’s competing with AI-generated videos, and that the videos are “hard to miss.”“It is always hard to precisely determine what factors make a YouTube channel grow or shrink, but mine has seen its number of views drop dramatically in the past 6-12 months (like -60%) and for the first time in years I barely get discovered at all by new viewers,” he said. “I used to gain maybe 100-200 subscribers per day until 2024, now it is flat. I think only my older viewers still come to my videos, but for others my channel is now hidden under a pile of AI slop that all people who are into history/science + sleep or relaxation content see in their search results.”
“I noticed this trend of slop content in my niche starting around 2 years ago,” he said. “Viewers warned me that there were channels that were either AI-assisted (like a real person reading AI scripts), or traditional slop (a real person paraphrasing wikipedia or existing articles), basically replicating the kind of content I make, but publishing 1 or 2 hours of content per day. Then it became full AI a few months ago, it went from a handful of channels to dozens (maybe hundreds? I have no idea), and since then this type of content has flooded YouTube.”
Another channel I sometimes listen to has purposefully disabled the captions on their videos to make it harder for AI bots to steal from: “Captions have unfortunately been disabled due to AI bots copying (plagiarizing) my scripts,” a notice on YouTube reads.
All of this is annoying and threatening on a few different levels. To some extent, when I’m looking for something to fall asleep to, the actual content sometimes feels like it doesn’t matter. But I’ve noticed that, over time, as I fall asleep listening to history podcasts, I do retain a lot of what I learn, and if I hear something interesting as I’m dozing off, I will often go research that thing more when I’m awake and alert. I personally would prefer to listen to videos made by real people who know what they are talking about, and are benefiting from my consumption of their work. There is also the somewhat dystopian fact that, because of these videos, there are millions of people being unwittingly lulled to sleep by robots.
Historians who have studied the AI summaries of historical events have found that they “flatten” history: “Prose expression is not some barrier to the communication of historical knowledge, to be cleared by any means, but rather an integral aspect of that communication,” Mack Penner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, argued last year. “Outsourcing the finding, the synthesizing, and the communicating to AI is to cede just about the whole craft to the machines.”
As YouTube and other platforms are spammed with endless AI-generated videos, they threaten not just to drown out the types of high-quality videos that The French Whisperer, Ancient Americas, and other historians, anthropologists, and well-meaning humans are making. They also threaten to literally rewrite history—or people’s understanding of it—with all of the biases imbued into AI by its training material and, increasingly, by the willful manipulation of the companies that own these tools.
All of the creators I spoke to said that, ultimately, they think the quality of their videos is going to win out, and that people will hopefully continue to seek out their videos, whether that’s on YouTube or elsewhere. They each have Patreons, and The French Whisperer said that he has purposefully “diversified away from YouTube” because of forced ads, settings that distort the sound of softly spoken videos, and the 30 percent cut YouTube takes from its membership program. But Kelly said he believes that it has become much harder to break into this world, because "when I started, I was just competing against other humans. I don't really know how you can compete against computers."
The French Whisperer still posts his videos on YouTube, but said that it is increasingly not a reliable platform for him: “I concluded some time ago that I would better vote with my feet and disengage from YouTube, which I could afford to do because by chance my content is very audio oriented. I bet everything I could on podcasts and music apps like Spotify and Apple, on Patreon, and on various apps I sell licenses to,” he said. “I have launched different podcasts derived from my original channel, and even begun to transform my YouTube channel into a podcast show—you probably noticed that I promote these other outlets at the beginning of almost every single video. As a result of my growth elsewhere and the drop on YouTube, the bulk of my audience (like 80-90%) is now on other sites than YouTube, and these ones have not been contaminated by AI slop so far. In a nutshell, I already had reasons to treat YouTube as a secondary platform before, and the fact that it became trashier with the AI content is just one more.”
“An entire niche can be threatened overnight by AI, or YouTube's policies, or your access to monetization, and this only reinforces my belief that this is not a reasonable career choice. Unless you have millions of followers and can look at it as an athlete would—earn as much as you can, pay your taxes, and live on your investments for the rest of your life when your career inevitably ends.”
Pete from Ancient Americas, meanwhile, said he’s just going to keep making videos and hope for the best.
“It does me no good to fret and obsess over something I have no control over. AI may be polluting the river but I still have to swim in it or sink. Second, I have a lot of faith in what I do and I love doing it,” he said. “At the moment, I don't think AI can create a video the way that I can. I take the research very seriously and try to get as much information as possible. I try to include details that the viewer would have a very difficult time finding on their own; things that are beyond the Wikipedia article or a cursory Google search. I also use ancient artifacts and artworks from a culture to show the viewer how the culture expressed itself and I believe that this is VERY important when you want your audience to connect with ancient people. I've never seen AI do this. It's always a slideshow of crappy AI images. The only thing I can do in an AI world is to keep the ship sailing forward.”
Kelly, who runs History Time, says he sees it as a real problem. “It’s worrying to me just for humanity,” he said. “Not to get too high brow, but it’s not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future.”
Behind the Blog: Ancient Civilizations and Modern-Day Driving
This week, we discuss learning from civilizations past and learning to drive.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
(((Cindy Weinstein)))
in reply to Laffy • • •Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈
in reply to (((Cindy Weinstein))) • • •(((Cindy Weinstein))) reshared this.
(((Cindy Weinstein)))
in reply to Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈 • • •Bill
in reply to (((Cindy Weinstein))) • • •@CindyWeinstein
Can't release it soon enough.
They will get sued for libel, but the truth will be on their side. And discovery should get interesting.
K_L_Cooper
in reply to (((Cindy Weinstein))) • • •👌🏻
Laffy
in reply to Laffy • • •