AI Just Killed YouTube

let's talk about Ai and machine learning for a little bit so we're essentially going to be using AI to create a Mr B Style YouTube video artificial intelligence could become a complete disaster for YouTube I'm going to try to start a YouTube channel using only ai ai has no soul but it also might provide some unique benefits the future is here content Creation in general is going to change dramatically over the next few years but there is one thing that's going to follow this conversational AI thing everywhere it goes well artificial intelligence Destroy YouTube [Music] let's begin by going over the biggest problems before explaining exactly how this will impact YouTube and the millions of creators who upload videos to the platform this all started when a tick talker named Ghostwriter 977 uploaded an AI generated song featuring Drake and The Weeknd people had been using AI to create covers and mashups of popular songs for months but this was the first time a new song really sounded like it could have been made by a famous artist part on my sleeve marked a turning point play it for any casual Drake fan and they would never know it was made by Ai and that has some massive implications everyone immediately jumped to the most extreme conclusion will this destroy the music industry as we know it see the situation isn't actually all that dangerous for big creators like Drake in fact he might wind up benefiting the most from these new AI Technologies let's start by analyzing the song hard on my sleeve because a lot of people don't really understand what's going on here [Music] that's why don't get me wrong the song sounds great but while the media is reporting that it was entirely generated by artificial intelligence there's a lot more to it than that first the beat was created by a human using industry standard software they picked out the instrumentals and laid down the notes that they thought sounded appropriate then the lyrics were likely written at least in part by a human cha gbt is getting really good at writing lyrics but it still needs a lot of guidance in order to hit specific topics it's not enough to just ask Chachi BT to write a banger Drake verse the result will be far too generic integrating those specific mentions of Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber was probably the idea of Ghostwriter 977 after all he claims to be a ghost writer this is his job but what about the Drake voice that's what made the song really unbelievable after all well the voice wasn't actually entirely generated by AI there are Services working on being able to generate voices just from text input but this song used a different method called style transfer it's more like a deep fake than a mid-journey style image generation I am not Morgan Freeman and what you see is not real someone who can probably do a pretty good Drake impression recorded the lyrics and then used AI to transfer the style of Drake's voice onto their recording when you're making a deep fake it helps to have someone who at least has the same face shape as the person you're faking so when Corridor crew wanted to create convincing deep fakes of Tom Cruise and Tupac they hired look-alikes to serve as the underlying reference footage and audio deep fakes work the same way better inputs yield better outputs but that's almost beside the point even though it still clearly took a lot of human effort to make this song it was way cheaper than paying Drake to record the verse if anyone can make a Drake song in their bedroom with just a few hours of work clearly the music industry is going to change dramatically right well yes and no we've actually been here before back in 1999 the MP3 format allowed people to share music with each other and Napster used the internet to push that to maximum scale the entire music industry had been designed around selling CDs and the shift away from these physical disks basically destroyed the core business model of the music industry at the time the Napster era was exciting if you are a broke kid who just wanted to listen to free music it's free and it's easy and you know it's wrong yeah but a lot of people do it pretty much everybody does but everyone in the music industry knew that it would be hugely disruptive in the long term business model built on infringement is not only morally wrong but legally wrong if artists could no longer make money selling music they'd stop making music entirely if no one was paying for music artists simply couldn't afford to buy instruments rent Studios hire producers or do any of the other important things required to make great music fortunately a solution emerged pretty quickly instead of fighting the internet in MP3 distribution the music industry embraced it Sean Fanning failed to find a legitimate business model with Napster and the courts shut down the network in 2001 but Sean Fanning had started the company with another Sean Sean Parker yes that Sean Parker the former president of Facebook who was famously played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network in 2006 Sean Parker became a managing partner at Founders fund The Venture Capital firm that backed Facebook early on and while he was there he started looking for a company that could make the original Vision that Napster had pioneered a reality but but they would need to do it legally this time around a few years later a friend showed him Spotify and he invested 15 million dollars in the company Spotify had figured out that what consumers really wanted was access to every song at any time but they were willing to pay for that the plan worked and the music industry was able to hit a new all-time high for Revenue in 2021. CD sales had been shrinking ever since Napster came on the scene in 1999 and the music industry had suffered through a rough 15-year period of declining sales but by finally leaning into the internet instead of fighting it they were able to restore growth the shift from CD sales to streaming did change the nature of music production in some significant ways though now artists weren't limited to what would fit on a single CD so albums could be any length with an unlimited catalog stored on the internet there was no downside to releasing more music so artists started producing more and more songs the internet also removed traditional Gatekeepers instead of needing to get a record label to manufacture physical CDs for you and then distribute them into doors songs were instantly available everywhere so new artists could go viral with a single song faster than ever before so what does all this mean for YouTube when the founders of YouTube first launched the site in 2005 they ran into many of the same problems as Napster there was a ton of copyright infringement in the early days of YouTube people would upload songs movies and TV shows anything that could get them views and earn them ad Revenue it was pretty chaotic but they ultimately solved the problem by creating the content ID system in the early days record labels would have to search YouTube for illegally uploaded songs and then submit requests to YouTube to get the offending videos taken down Content ID solved this by scanning every Youtube upload and cross-referencing new videos against copyrighted material now if you upload a video featuring a Drake song YouTube doesn't even need to take that video down they can just divert the ad Revenue to Drake's record label and everyone's happy and this is clearly the future of AI generated content Drake owns his name image and likeness it doesn't actually matter that he didn't record hard on my sleeve he'll be able to get paid for it this will still mean a big change for the way the music industry works and how artists get paid right now Drake's record label is fighting to remove every copy of heart on my sleeve from the internet you can't stream it on Spotify anymore and uploads are constantly being taken down from YouTube but we're far from the end of the road here it's important to remember that most major artists work with large teams Drake himself admitted in an interview with Vader that he works with a group of writers to help develop his lyrics but it doesn't really matter since the value of a Drake song comes from the fact that it's Drake song and not some unrecognizable artist even though the record labels are scrambling to ban AI generated content in the short term this is probably going to play out just like it did 20 years ago eventually the music industry will learn to lean into Ai and figure out a way to continue to make money while giving people what they want so what could that look like well the simplest solution would be something like what YouTube has already built with content ID if the platforms detect a song using Drake's voice that song is ineligible for monetization and all ad Revenue flows directly to Drake's label big platforms like YouTube and Spotify are also in a unique position to authenticate what's real and what's fake real artists already have verified accounts on that so if you want to make sure you're listening to a real Drake song you better be sure that you're on his page and in the longer term it's clear that artists will Embrace working with AI instead of against it small Independent Producers have been uploading type beats to YouTube for years these tracks often mimic the style of a particular rapper and sometimes they even get used by the actual rapper they are mimicking earlier this year J Cole searched for J Cole Type Beat on YouTube and found something that he liked ultimately it was good enough to be a real song so he recorded vocals and let the producer upload the final track to his channel something similar could happen with AI generated vocals if Drake winds up liking a particularly viral AI song he could record an official version and even perform it live big artists like Drake are going to be massive winners in the AI Revolution they own their intellectual property and it won't matter if someone else prompted AI to create a song with their voice they are still going to reap the financial rewards but what about smaller creators the average YouTuber someone who doesn't have international Fame like Drake well this is where things get really interesting [Music] it's easy to look at the crazy news about Ai and assume that all video will soon be entirely synthetic and it makes sense in theory right chat GPT can write a script mid-journey can generate visuals and plenty of services can synthesize voiceovers put those together and you have all the ingredients to make a YouTube video automatically but we aren't quite there yet every piece of AI generated content still requires a lot of human effort to produce high quality results AI is clearly advancing quickly but people are starting to get a little crazy with their predictions in order order to predict how things will unfold here it's critical to understand what I call the Centaur era just like the half man half-horse creature from Greek mythology the near-term future of content creation will involve humans working in close coordination with AI to push production to new heights this Centaur concept first showed up during chess competitions in the 1990s Gary Kasparov was the world chess champion at the time and he thought that no computer could ever defeat him computers were still so simple back then they didn't really seem capable of advanced reasoning but then in 1997 IBM's deep blue beat him in a public match it was a huge turning point in the development of artificial intelligence and deep blue didn't even use any modern AI methods but after that match ended and deep blue had been crowned chess champion a new Challenger emerged instead of just a single human playing a single computer a human would now play alongside a computer and work together as a centaur this combination of human and machine wound up being incredibly effective the computer could act as a check on every move to prevent unnecessary blunders while the human could read the opponent and focus on long-term strategy for years these mixed AI human Centaur teams were able to outperform Pure AI programs at chess and this is the era that we're entering now with content production increasingly YouTube creators who are able to work alongside tools like Chachi PT and mid-journey will be able to produce better videos faster and more efficiently we see Sparks of this already with videos like the Harry Potter Balenciaga mashup it's not impossible to create a video like that without AI a team of Pixar level artists working for a few weeks could probably recreate it without any AI tools but it would be extremely expensive to do so mid Journey was able to give the creator of Harry Potter Balenciaga the ability to bring this bizarre and hilarious concept to life basically for free it still required a lot of human work to combine find the different AI generated elements and most importantly come up with the idea the video works so well because combining characters from a beloved children's book with a pretentious High fashion brand is so non-sequitur the originality and unconventional thinking that went into deciding to make this viral video is something that humans will be better than AI at for a very long time but at the same time that Advantage may not last forever after all Centaur teams don't stand a chance of winning a chess anymore if artificial intelligence continues to compound exponentially it's hard to imagine a particular skill set that will remain untouched we don't know how long it will take to create super intelligent AGI it could be years or it could be decades so instead of jumping too far into the future it's more useful to work through the various parts of YouTube that will be affected by AI first we know that YouTube content creation is entering a centaur era so how will this change the platform the most basic videos will get automated by AI simple videos that are just adaptations of Wikipedia articles or listicles of Reddit comments those will be replaced by AI generated content but for more ambitious YouTubers AI will very much be a co-pilot Microsoft partnered with openai for this very reason they recognize that AI is best used as a co-pilot right now so they are integrating it into Microsoft Office to help people write more efficiently and that co-pilot branding which was first used in their GitHub code generation tool speaks to the importance of the Centaur model AI co-pilots allow humans to act as centaurs and produce better results faster and this works on the visual side of things as well generative imagery has already helped me a ton when openai released Dolly I produced a video telling the history of artificial intelligence and Illustrated the entire video using only AI generated images the technology has gotten a lot better recently and is starting to replace stock footage and some of my videos it still requires human input to know what images look good and fit the story just like searching through a stock footage library but the possibilities are endless many YouTubers like to say that gear doesn't matter when they get asked about starting a YouTube channel it doesn't matter to me just just make something put something into the world this is good advice for new creators instead of worrying about buying the perfect camera it's usually best to just get started and then improve your equipment over time AI is going to make gear even less of an issue going forward not only does every modern smartphone already have a ton of AI features integrated into the camera system to produce better output but there are also a ton of new AI tools to restore the quality of low-res video add slow motion after the fact and even clean up noisy audio the cost of creating a YouTube video is going to drop lower and lower until basically anyone can create any video they want just by typing a few prompts so in that world who wins what will the top YouTubers look like there are basically two paths forward as I see it and to understand them we need to talk about Jake Tran and James Janney these these new guys are Youtubers with over a million subscribers they both make video essays about business and they focus on cinematic storytelling but they run their businesses completely differently Jake is all about scale while James is all about quality even though they both have nearly the exact same number of subscribers Jake uploads nearly every single day while James Spends months working on a single video the end result is that even though James Janney gets 10 times the amount of views per video on average Jake Tran still gets four times as many views per month the quantity at all cost strategy has allowed Jake to get lots of views but in the process most of his audience turned on him and he drew some negative attention from coffeezilla James Janney on the other hand is loved by his community they patiently wait for the next upload and show up in droves when it goes live if making YouTube videos is just about paying the bills either strategy can work Jake Tran is at the extreme of optimization he outsources everything and at one point he even hired other narrators to do the voiceover so that he wouldn't have to spend any time on that AI will push this even further there will clearly be channels that Outsource nearly everything to AI systems but on the other end of the spectrum I think there will still be a place for the James jannies of the world so let's talk about the things where AI falls short [Music] EBT is only going to get better at summarizing information repurposing existing articles and generally delivering the right answers this means that humans will need to focus on finding truly original ideas thinking unconventionally and asking the right question so any YouTuber who can consistently provide a unique Viewpoint that isn't just a summary of what's already been written about a topic will remain relevant another area where humans will have the edge over AI for a long time will be in surfacing information that doesn't exist on the internet coffeezilla has basically become an investigative journalist at this point when he reports on a fraud he isn't just paraphrasing a CNBC article about the topic he's actually going out and talking to real people and finding new facts to help tell the story this is going to be extremely valuable for a very very long time and it doesn't stop there the most successful YouTubers today are able to establish a connection with their audiences and it's going to be really hard for AI to replace that take live streamers like Ludwig for instance distance not only will it be years before AI video generation gets to the point where it can be used on live streams but Ludwig's audience likes the fact that he's a real person and seems like a relatable guy AI models still require months to train and it's a big challenge to keep them up to date with the latest information so recreating something like a Ludwig live stream where he's reacting to the latest news and what his viewers are saying in chat will be a big challenge even still it won't be impossible and it's probably only a matter of time so what then what happens when there are AI channels that are truly indistinguishable from the YouTubers we know today well I think it's useful to return to the history of chess for hundreds of years humans were dominant at chess then we got beat by AI in 1997 and entered the Centaur era for about 20 years human AI centaurs were the best at chess and then AI took over completely it's simply impossible for a human to win at chess against an AI system no matter what tools they have at their disposal but here's the interesting thing he human chess has never been more popular chess.com has over a hundred million users Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlson have massive followings on Twitch and Netflix even produced a hit show all about Chess for some reason we humans don't just want to see the best possible game of chess get played out between two AIS we want to see humans battle it out it might just be an innate bias against computers but I think this will stick around for a long time fundamentally every YouTuber is going to reach a fork in the road they'll have two options two opportunities really they can either use AI to optimize their production for maximum quantity pumping out as many low-cost videos as possible in order to gain a lot of views or they can focus on quality let AI help them with what it does Best But still focus on injecting that human element that makes their videos special to their core audience the risk of going the mass production route is that it can be a bit of a race to the bottom eventually these videos might be automatically produced by YouTube directly since they have all the training data on the other hand if you focus on what's hardest for AI to replicate UniQue Ideas personal stories investigative reporting that will probably be a much longer and more defensible Road this AI stuff is moving incredibly quickly right now but if you zoom out this has actually been in the works for decades so if you want to understand the history of artificial intelligence just go watch this video next thanks a lot

Channel: John Coogan

Views: 150,740

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Id: TGYlJDuUST8

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023