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?

I check not only if the channel is recent but also how often they release
a video.AI channels churn them out at quantity real creators don't.
Still not perfect,need more ways to spot them.

I find that I can't catch AI more easily if I've seen what it can output.

For example, the older videos used to use generative AI on the images and videos themselves, which made it easier to spot those.

Some newer videos are made with the "agentic" tools that have access to various scripts and animation libraries, which come out looking very polished and visually identical to human produced ones. For those, I find that the AI will put unnecessary "work", into the irrelevant parts of the visualizations. Some of the libraries and fonts are more popular than others, so you might notice a pattern that way too.

For an example to the second category, check out the recent videos from this channel, which has AI generated "music videos": https://m.youtube.com/@degenerativepixels

The audio is often a tell. Listen to a few that you know are AI and pay close attention to the "human" voices. They often make sounds that can't come from human anatomy. They also often sound "over produced" or "over compressed" (like poor quality audio).

You ever listened to a radio with the treble turned up too high? AI always sounds like that to me.

There's a channel I recently got into where every episode was "I watched every episode of [LONG-RUNNING TV SERIES] and here's what I found."

They were posting 2 episodes a week.

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.

Part of the problem is that even human presenters use too many effects so that they look - well, artificial.

Overproduced, as another commenter put it.

Maybe look for channels that don't do that? On its face, that would be an indicator of quality in my book.

https://m.youtube.com/@degenerativepixels

Honestly, is that the best AI can do nowadays? The video looks obviously unreal even at low resolution. Where's the difference between 100% CGI produced and AI? Visually, I mean. I know there's a difference overall.

The music is just bland; but unfortunately there's also many humans that produce slop like this (it's still their IP though!).

Paraphrasing another commenter here, I'd say "overproduced" is the thing to avoid - whether it's human or machine made.

I agree and it can be the same with the voice - Over-edited speech can sound monotonous or unnatural in the same was as AI. I find it amusing and even a bit ironic that AI has led to an entertainment landscape where low production value and human error have become more valuable!

Thanks for the advice and the link. I almost don't mind AI used for traditional animation, I know its awful and plagiaristic so I avoid it but it doesn't creep me out in the same way that photoreal deepfake stuff does. Do you know if there are limits to movement, expression etc that are tells for the realistic video?

I have never seen more slop than on YouTube. If you continue to use it, but don't want to see slop, you're going to become increasingly disappointed. It's already so bad that most things you search for turn up 50%+ slop. I see no reason that won't get much, much worse.

I find it amusing and even a bit ironic that AI has led to an entertainment landscape where low production value and human error have become more valuable!

As someone who's been listening to lo-fi/independent music since the '90s, that's not a new phenomenon.
The music industry has been full of slop long before AI made that even easier.

Same goes for movies I believe (not really an expert there).

AI generated anything has been easy for me to identify so far.

Primarily there is nothing "organic" in the generations. Nothing in the texts, nothing in the images, nothing in the videos.

Unfortunately, I can't summarize it in a lemmy post, or a Wikipedia article, or maybe even a textbook.

Essentially, every generation yields something that is not real that triggers in my mind "wait, this isn't real."

Take the voice synthesis LLMs like Gemini. The voice is constantly changing throughout the response. In images, something is usually shaped off, or the lighting is incorrect, or something that should be comepletely parellel isn't. There's too much to describe what I've noticed but there's always something.

Video is even easier - just like how the voice changes throughout the response, the videos "morph" throughout the frames. Sometimes its very obvious, sometimes its more subtle.

Sometimes I wonder if its because my autistic brain is so bad at filtering sensory input that I just catch ALL that stuff.

How do you know things you don’t clock as AI aren’t AI?

Do you know if there are limits to movement, expression etc that are tells for the realistic video?

With how many different models there are, I don't think there is any standard to look for

Corridor Crew (a small VFX team with a long history on YouTube) have made a couple of videos on identifying AI generated video. Start with this one for example.

The points that I can remember are:

1. AI tools can't generate more than 10-20 seconds, if you see an unbroken shot longer than that, its not AI.
2. Check for consistency between shots, this is pretty hard to do with AI. E.g. if the same person keeps appearing with similar, but still different clothes, its probably AI.
3. Visual artifacts, especially in the background can be a good tell.

I think we're at the point where trying to identify things as specifically AI-generated is becoming too difficult to be worth it, i'd say just start generally filtering out things that aren't made in good faith.
I've been judiciously telling youtube to not recommend me channels that post sensationalized/inflammatory/etc content whenever they show up in my recommendations, and the algorithm has mostly given up on trying to brainwash me at this point.

My rule of thumb is that anything that isn't borderline fucking boring is probably trying to manipulate me, if a dry wikipedia-style description isn't interesting then i see no reason to bother with it.

That would mean that things I don't clock as AI are equivalent to things I don't care about being AI.

But that's pretty simple to me - I don't consume most media that's culturally popular.

I don't watch things on youtube unless its a clip from a movie/tv show, or a music video, or cartoon, or its a live thing (one could argue AI can be presented live, but AI doesn't tend to introduce the minor mistakes in language or coughs or pauses or other organic non-communicative behaviors). News comes from a few reputable sources (but that list is ever dwindling).

I ignore anything that isn't a post or shared picture by friends on Facebook or Instagram, so you can imagine how much I use them.

I do read a lot of Wikipedia, and that scares me that I might not be able to clock it.

Degenerative Pixels is a channel for music videos made with AI. The songs are generated in Suno, and the animation is written as code by Claude, so every scene is built by a program instead of coming out of a video generator.

It sounds like it's explicitly not AI-generated video in the sense I think most people would mean?

Also, the irony of being told to "sign in to confirm you're not a bot" to access a video generated by a bot.