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YouTube Is Littered With Mass-Produced Videos Made By Automated Bots (hackernoon.com)
A report via Hacker Noon sheds some light on the practice of using bots to mass-produce videos for YouTube. The YouTube channel Breaking News Today, for example, constantly generates new videos from recent news sources, and posts as often as every few minutes. You can tell the videos are bot-produced because they always start off with a cringe-worthy 80's style intro, followed by a robotic voiceover and floating low quality images. From the report: Someone has effectively created a fully automated process running 24/7 that is taking and stripping recent articles, converting them into video format, and posting it on Youtube as their own. And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it. Some videos, especially the ones that gain momentum and get popular, even feature a large juicy ad on the bottom, in which Google displays and shares profits with. Sure, one video with a few thousand views isn't really that significant, but when you have hundreds of videos being pumped out week after week, you can see how quickly things can add up. And while many new videos are still awaiting their first dozen views, others are in the tens of thousands. One even amassed almost 50k views in just two days. In total, the channel's videos have been viewed more than 225,000 times just in the past month, with an average of around 8,000 views per day. Did I mention that there are more than just this one channel? There's also this one, and this one, both following the same concept. There's actually many, MANY more. There are few solutions to deal with this new type of fully automated plagiarism. While you can certainly down vote the videos and report them to YouTube if the uploader is infringing on your copyright, they will likely stay online for days racking up views and revenue before any action is taken. There's also no reason why the videos couldn't be uploaded to separate channels to fly under YouTube's radar.
Surely, YouTube/google doesn't just pay people instantly, do they? It would be easy enough for them to either not pay the money or switch it to the actual content creator, long before any check was sent out.
Yes, this does mean that you have to be watching to see if your content is being plagerized, but this is part of the whole DMCA legislative compromise - just from the content creator's point of view.
YouTube Is Littered With Mass-Produced Videos Made By Automated Bots
So is Hollywood. Zing!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Or at least highlight them in searches?
Ezekiel 23:20
What has Obama's Nobel Prize had to do with this? Did Obama award it to himself or what?
Ezekiel 23:20
Isn't procedurally generated content with no input from a person outside of copyright protection? So someone can repost the videos on their own account?
I'm not a lawyer, so a real lawyer's answer would be appreciated.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Did Obama award it to himself or what?
Thats the only explanation.
"His name was James Damore."
Did Obama do it with the possibility of bombing Russian forces directly, which could result in the sinking of U.S. Navy ships, which results in WW3? No? Then you're full of shit here.
Until it's full of (free) 4K AI produced 2 hour porn vids, completely indistinguishable from "real" actors.
they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"report them to YouTube if the uploader is infringing on your copyright, they will likely stay online for days racking up views and revenue before any action is taken."
Youtube, as you may not have noticed, is a lot more on point with this than ever before.
Now, you might be thinking "Well even if they get 3 strikes and lose the channel, they can just start a new channel", but you'd be both right and wrong. Yes, they could start a new channel... and not be eligible for revenue until it has amassed 4,000 hours of watch time AND 1,000 subscribers.
240,000 minutes watched. With an average video length of 2 minutes, they need 120,000 views, about 2 weeks.
The main channel sited in the article, has 0 subscribers. The other two channels had 4, and 8. If these are taken down, they'll never get monetization again no matter how many videos they post.
Sounds like a snowflake got their feefees hurt by the FBI investigating crimes.
They love selling us fake wars. I wish I knew how to stop it. Practically everyone is complicit.
I guess there's a change.org petition. Not much, but at least it's a start.
This is likely the main reason YouTube changed their monetization policy, contrary to the whole "YouTube is against me!" or the "YouTube is censoring me!" narrative. People were using bots and stolen/fake content etc.. to exploit their advertising platform. Unfortunately their solution couldn't distinguish between scammers and small YouTubers trying to grow their channel. But YouTube would rather play the bad guy than to admit advertising dollars were being wasted on con artists.
Everyone else should too .Report them if possible as well.
Perhaps we could make a robo-DMCA reporter tool to overload them with takedown requests.
Was China closely aligned with Serbia? Was China sending troops to help the Serbians? If not, your anecdote is a red herring.
Google prioritizes censoring channels that engage in legally protected speech but allows video spam en masse.
Google is fucked up. Really fucked up. Maybe fucked up in a different sort of way than Facebook, but just as grubby and noxious.
And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it.
We can do all these amazing things with modern technology, and yet Slashdot STILL CAN'T SUPPORT UNICODE.
At the very fucking least, you could implement something to identify Unicode in a submission and strip it out.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I have reported channels like that in the past, but really Google ought to be paying people for it because it is work and it is doing Google's job for them. Similarly, Microsoft should be paying people to use Windows 10 because they benefit from the spyware and adware.
If Google offered money to people who report bot channels, then I bet we'd see far fewer of them.
Everyone thinks Trump is so horrible, but what exactly has he done?
...you're joking, right?
Ezekiel 23:20
Author is not getting the whole picture. Views on many of these channels are automated as well. In fact, it's an issue on YT in general.
It is one reason why monetization is all fucked up on there right now. They're getting rolled by highly sophisticated botnets more or less.
I felt giving them a click myself.
Why feed the people who produce this crap?
I went to their channel, selected a news story I was interested in and what was really " cringe-worthy 80's style" was the digitized audio reading the script no doubt lifted directly from other sources. Then there's the video. It appears they just lifted images from other sources and display them drifting across the screen. Apparently the one I clicked on only had one image.
That video has 1359 views. I didn't even watch the whole thing and at least my ad-blocker still works on YT (do they still get ad revenue if I don't see the ads?). It wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know and that audio was truly cringeworthy.
I used to think Newsy and other sources like them were bad. If you've never seen any of their videos it's basically the same rehashing of stories from other sources but at least they have actual humans compiling them and repeating what you could have gotten from dozens of other video sources.
It sort of makes me a little envious. Why didn't I think of doing this?
Someone on Reddit wrote a little bot that does an okay job at summarizing articles. If they can do that, it's just one more step to grabbing images and putting the words on the screen and having a cheesy digitized voice read them too you.
If you're really lazy you could just randomly grab text off any other news site, string them together, put them in a video and collect revenue. Why am I wasting time posting on /. when I could be doing that right now?
If they let us block crap, how would they make money off of our kids watching Elsa and Spiderman dancing in their underwear, getting drunk, injecting each other with needles, and dry humping each other?
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
The petro-dollar is just a means to an end. When the time is right, the'll support the petro-yuan.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
You however are not.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
I remember the "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave Russia 20 percent of our uranium" story.
The claim (by Donald Trump and others) is that Hillary Clinton approved a deal giving a Russian company named "Rosatom" 20 percent of our uranium.
But that's not true. The Clinton State Department had no power to veto or approve the Rosatom transaction, AKA "Uranium One". It could do neither. Here’s how it does work:
Uranium One is the name of a South Africa-based mining company.
Back in 2007 it merged with "Urasia Energy" based in Canada. And in 2010 the mining arm of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom, bought controlling interest in the company. Among other places, that mining company had operations in Wyoming that amounted to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions or the NRC said was at the time was about 20% of the uranium production capacity in the U.S.
By law, when a foreign company wants to buy ANYTHING with potential national security implications, an interagency committee of the federal government must approve it. The committee was given a broad mandate under President Reagan to advise the president on foreign investment transactions.
That committee is called CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). It includes nine department heads. The Secretary of the Treasury is the chair person. The rest are the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense, State and Energy, plus the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s CFIUS. The nine department heads all approved the sale of Uranium One.
It was unanimous - not a Hillary Clinton approval.
Also, the State Department wasn't even represented by Hillary Clinton at CIFUS. The Assistant Secretary of State, Jose Fernando, represented the State Department on CFIUS, not Hillary Clinton. And Jose Fernando stated that Clinton never intervened.
Further, neither Secretary Clinton nor the committee as a whole could stop any deal of this kind, even if they wanted to.
The committee members evaluate the sale of anything potentially related to national security.
By law, if just one member objects, the president and only the president can veto such a transaction. No committee member of the nine objected.
The whole "Uranium One" accusation is predicated on the charge that "Secretary Clinton approved the sale". She did not, and more to the point, she couldn't because the as Secretary of State, she didn't have the power to do that.
This whole "Clinton and Obama gave away our uranium" thing is just plain bullshit.
Go ahead, think whatever you like. Don't take my word for it. These are the facts and you can verify all of them by spending a minute or two on Google.
That was just one example of a lie that was made up out of whole cloth to damage a candidate. Clinton wasn't the only one hit with these stories. Remember the "Ted Cruz's father was with Lee Harvey Oswald" story? It was pure bullshit too, and we all know it.
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Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Well, I don't even know where to start... Government corruption? Support for torture? Incessant lying? Sabotaging wind power projects in foreign countries? Hell, the list must be half a page long.
Ezekiel 23:20
I won't have to do anything, Mr. Sea Lion.
Ezekiel 23:20
So you're being willfully obtuse. Bombing Iraq, Libya, Yemen etc etc is not "okay", dumbass. The point is that none of that warmongering placed us one step away from a few decades of nuclear winter.
Youtube took a huge nose dive, contentwise when it monitized. It had almost zero oversight so on content, making it place of free expession for the sake of sharing fun and learning. Now it's just a another anerican whore, trying to catch a trick to gimd a buck. Sadness indeed for our poor internet. RIP. The internet was sillently murdered and replaced by eccomerce
What's the problem? Sure it's bad content, but I don't submit Slashdot articles when Jake Paul uploads. The truth is that some people like it and would rather be read the news rather than read it themselves. Maybe other AI researchers are seeing what these bots can do. The worst case scenario is that all of the bots' views are from other bots in which case the view bots are the still the real problem here, not the fact that the videos are being made.