I watch a lot of STEAM videos on YouTube. In the past I loved supporting new creators but some time last year I stopped trying new channels that don't have human presenter, there's just so much slop. Now I've noticed that there are channels where even the presenter is AI. I can spot a few tells (presenter is never on screen for very long, voice pacing doesn't vary, no ums and ahs, etc) but it's getting harder and I wish I knew more clues.

One thing that seems to help is checking the channel history (does the presenter age, have they only started making content very recently etc)

Can someone recommend a good, recent guide to spotting AI videos?

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[–] 3 points 14 hours ago* (3 children)

Don't have any recommendations you haven't mentioned. As a blind person I listen to synthesized speech nearly all day long, so I'm pretty good at catching AI voices. I think the ones trained on IRL people have a "choppy" or "quavering" quality. I'm not an audiophile or computational linguist so I'm sure there's a term for this I'm missing, but the overall audio has a particular tell to it.

It's getting harder, though. Now I listen for things like odd prosidy, stuff like odd pauses or inflections or inconsistent pronunciations.

For example, the phrase "So I went to the store" could have a number of inflections that encode info about the ongoing conversation, whether I intend to continue speaking or whether I'm yielding the floor, whether I'm asking a question, indicating surprise, etc. AI is getting better at this but it's not perfect.

Pronunciation of proper nouns or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts is a good indicator. Just the other day my mom was watching some AI-generated listicle and the voiceover mispronounced the name of a city after correctly pronouncing it every time before.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 hours ago (2 children)

    Thanks for your suggestions! Now that I think about it I've definitely heard a few of these tells before. Im sure your sick of these kind of questions but I'm curious about your experiences as a person with blindness - how has AI affected your daily life? (I know that this is a generally anti AI space/thread, but please feel free to speak openly, I'll be the first to admit that the technology is a double edged sword!)

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    Disclaimer: I only speak for myself. Blindness does not respect class, creed, or culture, so every blind person will have their own opinions and experiences. In my case AI hasn't shown much tangible benefit beyond what clever algorithms are already doing, for optical character recognition etc.

    Beyond blindness My knee-jerk reaction to AI is strongly negative simply because it's another locus of concentrated societal power (Who else is there besides Open AI and Anthropic and maybe Groq? IIRC everyone else is just using one of those on the backend. So that's what, three people, a few dozen if you include the other C-suite folks at each company, pulling a lot of very consequential levers) But that opinion is probably par for the course for your average Lemming.

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