[gumboshoes]

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

[al_borland]

> I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time.

I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.

When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple’s AI to do the rewrite), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I figured it would be good to send the person articles generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person listen to in a week?

[fwip]

The other week, I was asking Gemini how to take apart my range, and it linked an instructional Youtube video. I clicked on it, only to be instantly rickrolled.

[ecshafer]

This is the best argument for AI sentience yet.

[sidewndr46]

I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.

[g947o]

Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe websites.

[kube-system]

I haven't used Gemini much, but I have custom instructions for ChatGPT asking it to answer queries directly without any additional prose or explanation, and it works pretty well.

[jeffbee]

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.

[ffsm8]

YouTube has almost no original knowledge.

Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions.

I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.

[pjc50]

I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.

Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes.

Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for accuracy.

[thewebguyd]

YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious personalities, etc.

By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like & subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a straight to the point article/text.

Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while doing something related to said reference material.

[latexr]

> If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers.

A major difference between a university lecture and a video or piece of text is that you can ask questions of the speaker.

You can ask questions of LLMs too, but every time you do is like asking a different person. Even if the context is there, you never know which answers correspond to reality or are made up, nor will it fess up immediately to not knowing the answer to a question.

[adrian_b]

There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text.

Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.

[pengaru]

This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...