Well, this sucks · 1:46am Nov 17th, 2024
So. TheQuinch is deleting his Youtube videos.
It's a short video, and the latter half is him asking for voice actors, so you won't have to sit through a lot to get why.
Or I can just tell you: YouTube is now scraping videos to train AI.
(Aside: If you feel like commenting here to defend AI for any reason? Don't.)
This is fucking devastating, if not unsurprising. And leaves me in a quandary. Because I should really do the same thing, maybe even stop using it altogether... But it's become such a part of my life. D: I've spent over a decade pouring effort into hundreds of videos that received little to no attention, and I'm stopping my channel come the end of the year anyway, but like...
I don't wanna go. :( Not like this.
I'm not sure if I'm in any danger of being subjected to this nonconsensual digital terrorism -- as Quinch says, his channel is so small, it may fly under the radar, and mine's not a whole lot bigger -- but it's still the principal of the thing. I don't want to support this in the slightest. It's bad enough they don't pay their talent enough, now they're going to exploit them as well? God.
Fuck everything. >:(
EDIT: This might be the video Quinch was talking about:
If I may paraphrase Gandalf, Neither do I, and neither do all who live to see such times. All we have to decide is what to do with the horror that is forced upon us.
Do you know The Pict Song by Kipling?
Do what you can.
This is like companies tracking your activity and selling the data. It's going to happen and it's going to get worse before it gets better... and by that I mean it's going to get real bad, some places will fight back and they'll "stop" while setting it up for other third parties to do it under the table for them.
This is happening and your only options are to stop creating an never create again... or accept that it's going to happen (as if it hasn't already happened unofficially) and carry on.
I know I don't have a leg to stand on, not being a creator in that way but deleting your videos probably won't change them scraping them later, or someone scraping stuff on another platform. As much as I wish there was a solution that didn't involve people literal voices being stolen for profit, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle and to be honest, this is a company doing officially what individuals have already been doing for awhile.
Thor (PirateSoftware) already outlined precautions to take if you're paranoid about people taking your voice and using it... and he did it long before Google made the announcement.
Local storage may be the answer. If a viable competitor ever makes itself known, you'll have them on hand. Worst case scenario, they won't be gone forever.
(And the blowback may be extreme enough that YouTube backs off, but that seems less than likely.)
Well shit. News to me, and I now have to decide what to do with my own meager YouTube channel... Ugh...
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Keeping local copies of completed work is always a prudent choice in general. A handful of false claims against a channel can get it completely wiped before the owner can blink.
That sure does suck, though I'm one million percent not surprised. I'm old enough to know that no website lives forever, but damned of YouTube doesn't have a lot of inertia for any competitor to overcome. Though if this AI shit keeps up (spoiler: it will right up until the bubble bursts, just like the crypto nonsense) then "will not train AI on your posts/uploads" may begin to be enough of a selling point to switch.
My sample size isn't great, but I have seen a lot of artists finally, actually leaving Twitter for BlueSky after Blue announced a firm no AI training promise. Now, a corporation is a corporation so we'll see how long that lasts, but for the moment it's something, at least.
Edit: Actually this is a prime opportunity to post absolutely loads of poisonous videos. Just, days of static noise, nonsense words, or whatever garbled nonsense I can think.
Or, yeah someone will create a Glaze/Nightshade for videos like UrsaMajor mentioned.
There are AI-poisoning tools available for still images. I wonder if there's something similar that can be used for YouTube.
It’s been brutal saying goodbye to so much of the internet lately.
I’ve given up Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. Reddit was the hardest to leave and it hurts so much. Being a digital refugee is awful when the real world is… like it is right now.
I’m sorry you’re looking at leaving YouTube. That’s a hard decision to make.
What's the source on the "Google officially using YouTube to train AI thing?"
I believe you if you say it. But I looked it up, and can't find anything recent about it. Recent as in past 100 days. It feels like the kind of thing people would be talking about a lot more if it were officially announced. But maybe I was just unlucky enough to not see anything verifiable in my search.
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I went looking this morning and found this, which is pretty short, focuses the scraping entirely on captions (still bad), and came at the end of a long list of results that all wanted to teach me how to scrape Youtube videos with AI to make scads of free money >:| which is a poor reflection on Youtube if nothing else, but it's also not the video Quinch was talking about
but it's not Hank Green, I've asked Quinch for a link
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Unfortunately, I don't think I have the storage :/ and I'm if anything more afraid of other channels following Quinch's suit. Which they should. It just means my life is going to get harder. Which I don't need right now. >:|
not sure if burying it down here is useful, maybe I'll update the post as well, but I may have found the video in question? it's at least a video by some variety of Hank and/or Green (I don't know who these people are)
I won't deny that's a more difficult quandary than deleting Twitter, and I feel like it's complicated enough that how creators respond is going to be heavily contextual. I don't feel there's a clear correct answer, (aside from, obviously, killing AI, if only) since it's still so unclear what exactly is being targeted and used.
For my part, I can't really see that my continued activity on YouTube will do a significant amount to aid and abet these morons. A niche audio narrator focused on pony fanfic is probably going to poison the algorithm more than anything, a side effect of my work I do take some small amount of enjoyment from. The decision will be quite different for someone with a more valuable/sought after voice or other work to clone.
I guess in the end, one of the most powerful acts of resistance in the surveillance capital age is absolutely to not participate. But when that extends to ceasing to work on anything, as abandoning YouTube would require in my case... I think for now I'd rather side with those a lot more powerful than me who will litigate and hopefully one day eliminate AI's rights to just appropriate whatever. Disappearing won't contribute anything to winning that, though that answer could change for me down the line.
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yeah, I think this is basically the conclusion I've come to over the past couple of days :/ this is really a situation with no clear answer, and very likely a no-win scenario
now to decide if it's worth trying to follow Quinch on Ponytube, and how that would actually work c_c;