[acituan]

It might take 50 years to awaken to the abuse of power going on here.

Forget individual videos for a second and look at youtube-the-experience as a whole. The recommendation stream is the single most important "generative AI" going on ever, using the sense of authenticity, curiosity and salience that comes from the individual videos themselves, but stitching them together in a very particular way. All the while the experience of being recommended videos being almost completely invisible. Of course this is psychologically "satisfying" to the users - in the shortest term - because they keep coming back, to the point of addiction. (Especially as features like shorts creep in).

Allowing the well of "interesting, warm, authentic audio & videos having the secondary gains of working on your psychological needs" being tainted with the question of generated content is a game changer because it breaks the wall of authenticity for the entire app. It brings the whole youtube-the-experience into question, it reduces its psychological stand-in function for human voice & likeness, band-aiding the hyper-individualized lonely person's suffering based content consumption habits. I know this is a bit dramatic, and for sure videos can be genuinely informative, but let's be honest, neither that is the entirety of your stream, nor that is the experience for the vast majority of the users. It will get worse as long as there is a mathematical headroom of making more money out of making it worse, that's what the shareholder duty is about.

When gen-AI came about I was naively happy about the fake "authenticity" wall of the recommended streams breaking down thanks to the garbage of generated sophistry overtaking and grossing out the users. Kind of like super delicious looking cakes turning out to be made of kitchen sponges turning people off of cakes all together. I was wrong to think AI oligopoly would let the opportunity of having a chokehold on the entire "content" business, and here we are. (Also this voluntary tagging will give them the perfect live training set, on top of what they have.)

Once the tech is good enough to generate video streams on the fly, so that all you need is a single livestream, that you won't even have a recommendation engine of videos and instead a team of virtual personas doing everything you could ever desire on screen, it is game over. It might already be game over.

To get out of this the single most important legislative maneuver is being able to accept and enforce the facts that a) recommendation is speech b) recommendation is also gen-AI, and should be subject to same level of regulatory scrutiny. I don't care if it generates pixels or characters at a time, or slaps together the most "interesting" subset of videos/posts/users/reels/shorts out of the vast sea of the collective content-consciousness, they are just one level of abstraction apart but functionally one and the same: look at me; look at my ads; come back to me; keep looking at me.