alt Hacker NewsIt’s an 8 minute video…and even shorter at 1.5X that will take me longer to summarize than you to watch.
But in summary, YouTube is rolling out AI summarization features on some content without giving creators any say in the matter.
Concerns include:
- Low quality summarization of high quality content will devalue the content, and in many cases is just a worse version of the content
- Impact to watch time on the channel can impact channel success over time
- YouTube is not doing anything to compensate creators for reducing watch time such as sharing revenue from viewers who primarily interact with the AI summary
But I think he articulates this much better than I did. Much better to watch the video.
Replies
The videos are the intellectual property of the creator, and YouTube has the rights to distribute and make money off of it for hosting it for you to billions of users. What's the problem? The creator can take their content somewhere else or host it themselves on their website
Thanks, I appreciate that!
FWIW, unfortunately, I think the problem is a two-headed one, and maybe reversed for viewers vs creators. Creators want as many people to see their work as possible. But viewers have to sift through a graveyard of 95%+ junk videos to find the 5% worth watching. AI (or Google/TikTok/etc. in general) acting as gatekeeper in between isn't great, but not having any metrics/summaries/descriptions for videos would be even worse.
In this particular case, I get that this particular creator might've had a point to make, but the description and summary were so cheekily written (to make a point, I guess) that I had no idea what it was about.
The creators who I do follow typically make long-form educational videos with a lot of nuance; I wouldn't want to rely on even the best-written human summary for those. But there are many, many videos for which I'd prefer a 1-sentence summary over 3 minutes of intros and jokes, a 45-second sponsorship, and a gradual dramatic buildup before getting to the point.
Not sure what the long-term solution is.