Let’s be completely frank for a moment: YouTube has taken some not so great steps in recent years. This has led to mass frustration amongst users as people complain about the YouTube team focusing on the wrong problems. Now, a new feature currently under development aims to make things easier for creators at the expense of their fans.YouTube, like almost every other platform on the market today, is incorporating AI into its app. But instead of using AI to perhaps make it easier to find that video you saw years ago, YouTube is instead going to use it for its most mundane purpose: text generation.
Specifically, YouTube is looking to provide creators on the platform with an AI that can mimic their tone and writing style to reply to comments. That rush of excitement when a famous YouTuber replies to you? Looks like now you’ll be wondering if it was really them or just an AI pretending to be them.
And here I thought I had gotten a reply from Markiplier. | Image credit — PhoneArena
The idea is to let creators instantly generate a reply to a comment. Said creators can edit this reply if they wish or they can just post it and quickly move on to the next comment. Mark my words, soon YouTube will let creators run this AI on autopilot so it’s replying to comments to farm engagement without any direct supervision.Text generation is, in my mind, the most boring use an app can find for modern LLMs (
Large Language Models). Generating visuals, or even better, understanding them and acting on them is a much cooler concept. It’s what Apple Intelligence aims to do with on-screen awareness. This is also what Microsoft wants to accomplish with the controversial Windows Recall.
Unfortunately, most apps seem to just be implementing AI for the following boring reasons:
- Generating text
- Summarizing text
- Or customizing text
And this leads us to the dead internet theory: a scenario where the entire internet is just bots replying to or creating content for other bots. Seeing how YouTube has yet to do anything significant about its existing bot problems, I can only imagine how much more soulless the platform is about to become.
