I Challenged AI to Create a Better YouTube Channel Than Me... Here's What Happened

if you are chronically on the internet like me then you may have seen videos like these claiming you can make a bunch of money by making an automated YouTube channel using AI but I have a couple of problems with these types of videos these videos have clickbait titles and thumbnails saying you can make thousands of dollars with AI automation but then they won't upload any videos or show you any results so they have nothing to back up their claims additionally they use the term automation pretty loosely they'll usually get chat GPT to create a script for the videos but they still have to pick out footage for the video get a voiceover add subtitles and then edit it all together which doesn't really feel that automated to me so for this video I decided to create an AI automated Channel with the goal of uploading videos for an entire month and automating as much of the process as possible including the entire editing workflow but to make it a little more interesting I also created a second YouTube channel where I manually created the videos for a month in order to test that people prefer AI or human content more and to explore not only if you can automate YouTube videos with AI but if you actually should and of course I'll share the results in this video I'll start by talking about the AI Channel I began by asking chatgpt to give me a list of video ideas for an automated YouTube channel among those ideas were life hacks fat compilations quote of the day data visualizations and more so I took these ideas and started experimenting with different styles of videos that I could fully automate and after quite a bit of coding and testing the video styles that work best in my opinion were the quote of the day and random fact compilation videos I'll briefly explain the process I came up with for automating both of these styles of videos I'll start with the quote of the day video as described by Chachi PT this video will have an inspirational or thought-provoking quote with beautiful background visuals and calming music in order to get the quote I asked chatgpt for a list of thought-provoking quotes that most people haven't heard this was the only one-time manual part of the process after this everything would be automated once I had the quotes I could get a background clip for the video from pexels which is a stock footage and image library that is free to use I use their API and search for drone nature footage which provided a lot of really aesthetic clips for each quote I would select a different background clip for the voiceover I used 11 Labs AI text-to-speech I also did this all through their API as for the subtitles I used the Vosk speech recognition python module to transcribe the voiceover and get specific timings that each word was set at and then use that information to create a special subtitle file which defines how the subtitles will look and when they should appear now all that was left to do was edit all of the individual components together and to do this I used ffmpeg for example if I wanted to combine audio and video together using ffmpeg to add some background music I can do it like this that's simple enough but the commands can start to become very long and confusing when you need to do more complex tasks nonetheless after a bit of struggling I was able to figure out how to edit everything together to get a final result that looked like this the mind is like a parachute it only works when it's open open your mind to new ideas perspectives and possibilities embrace the unknown and let curiosity be your guide I was satisfied with this result but the best part was that all the steps I described were completely automated with a single python script and all of the videos could be generated in a single run I just went through a lot of technical stuff and that might have been a bit confusing especially if you don't have a lot of experience with coding but what if I told you there is a free and easy way to learn and improve your coding thanks to this video's sponsor brilliant.org brilliant is a fun and Interactive Learning platform with thousands of lessons in math science data science and computer science with new lessons added every month brilliant is the best way to learn these stem subjects interactively through their Hands-On and bite-sized lessons if you're interested in understanding more about how the code from this video works then the programming with python course would be perfect for you since I did all the coding from this video in Python brilliant isn't just for beginners though as they have lessons from basic fundamentals all the way to more advanced topics like Ai and neural networks brilliant customizes content to fit your needs and will have something for you no matter your skill level so whether you're a student learning a new subject or a professional expanding your knowledge you can visit brilliant.org Adam or click the link in the description to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for 30 days and the first 200 of you will get 20 off Brilliance annual premium subscription now let's get back to the video the process for creating the fat compilation style of video was pretty similar to the quote of the day video except for the background video I used some random clips from some only up gameplay I used only up in the background because it's pretty common for this style of video to have some gameplay in the background to hold the viewer's attention and when I started this project only up was becoming really popular I also use pixels again but this time to get a stock image that related to each fact the final result looks something like this Islands the world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat which weighs less than a penny a newborn kangaroo is about one inch long and weighs less than a gram the world's largest now that I had the videos ready the last thing to do was give the channel a name and add a profile picture for the name I asked Chachi BT for a list of names for a channel that uploads daily quotes and the one I liked the best was the daily quotation I also asked it for logo ideas and went with the combination of a calendar and quotation marked idea and with that the AI channel was ready and it was time to work on the human Channel for the human Channel I would basically make the same content as the AI channel so that I could test the AI content against the human content while eliminating as many variables as possible for the human Channel I would have to do everything manually this meant Gathering a list of quotes and facts from around the internet that I thought that people would like and wouldn't already know once I had collected those I would also do all the voiceover and editing in the end the results were pretty similar to the automated videos but what I was most interested in testing was if I could collect more intriguing facts and quotes than the AI and if a human voice instead of an AI voice would make a difference in the amount of views the videos got for both channels I would upload a quote video every day and I would upload a fat compilation video every third day the reason for this on the AI side was that chatgpt can only generate so many facts before it starts repeating facts so it only generated enough unique facts to create about 10 videos and as for the human channel the fat compilation videos took quite a bit more time than the quote videos and were also just very tedious to make so doing this once every three days was more manageable the graph on the left will show the total views each Channel got over time and the graph on the right will show the total subscribers both channels got off to a bit of a slow start but by the end of the first week it was clear that the human channel was doing much better having over four times as many views and subscribers as the AI Channel the main reason for this disparity was this fat compilation video uploaded on the human Channel this video was by far the most successful video that had been uploaded on either Channel and ended up getting over 10 000 views another thing I noticed after the first week was that across both channels the fact that he was performed better than the quote videos and would get more views on average more people would also watch the fact videos instead of swiping away when it showed up in their feed I also realized that I may have overlooked something in this experiment thus far which is that the main advantage of an AI automated YouTube channel is the ability to create a large number of videos with essentially no effort it didn't really make sense for the AI channel to upload the same amount of videos as the human channel so from now on the AI channel would upload three videos a day while the human Channel schedule would remain the same this seemed like a more realistic use case and this way we can also test quality versus quantity in the YouTube algorithm to do this I brought back some of the different video styles that I had experimented with earlier including this other quote of the day video style which was basically the same except it had a quick intro and also the quotes were a bit shorter I also found a way to get chat GPT to generate more unique facts which was to ask for facts about a particular topic like facts about dogs this way I could automate more fat compilation videos and the last new video style was a quote compilation video of quotes from famous people so now the upload schedule for the two channels look like this and would repeat every three days now the AI automated channel was uploading way more videos but would this actually make a difference well with this change the AI channel did start to see more views and was able to keep on a similar Pace to the human Channel after the change even starting to catch up at this point the experiment was about halfway complete and you're probably noticing something pretty interesting which is that even though the human Channel had more views the AI Channel had twice as many subscribers the reason for this can be found by looking at a few graphs as I already mentioned the fat compilation videos got more views on average than the quote videos Illustrated here showing that the fact videos were responsible for over 80 percent of the views on the human Channel while also being uploaded less often than the quote of the day videos however something had changed with the AI Channel ever since the AI Channel started uploading three videos a day the second quote of the day videos were responsible for the most views on the channel you'll recall that the only difference with the second style quote of the day video is that they have a short intro and they all have the same title which is just quote of the day the second quote of the day video wasn't just affecting the views though its real impact is shown when we look at what videos people were subscribing from for the human Channel most of the subscribers come from the fat compilation videos but for the AI channel the large majority of subscribers were coming from the second quote of the day videos So currently this one style of video was carrying the views and especially the subscribers of the AI Channel here's one last graph to really understand how effective the second style quote of the day video was on average for every 1 000 viewers the fat compilation videos got about two people would subscribe and this was basically the same for both the human and AI Channel however for every 1000 views the second quote of the day videos got over seven people would subscribe this was the main reason the AI had such a large lead in subscribers over the human Channel my theory for why I think this style of video is so effective in getting subscribers is because the intro and title clearly conveyed the viewer that this is a recurring video series that will be uploaded every day so people who like the video are more inclined to subscribe in order to see it again after making this observation I changed the style of the quote of the day videos on the human channel to match this style in order to see if the subscribers to the human channel would increase it seemed to have a positive effect at first however by the 23rd day the AI Channel took over the human channel in views and was continually increasing its lead in subscribers over the human Channel this trend would ultimately continue for the rest of the experiment as the AI would finish with over 76 000 views and 330 subscribers after the month was complete I didn't really have a desire to continue either channel for reasons I'll discuss shortly however I figured if I could achieve 100 complete automation of the AI Channel then I would keep that channel going this ended up being quite a project in itself and uses AWS Lambda to automatically upload a new quote of the day video every day it eliminates the need to interact with chat GPT and also automatically uploads the videos directly to YouTube with the correct titles descriptions and playlists this is 100 Automation and I don't need to interact with it at all for it to upload videos daily as I'm recording this video the AI channel has over 100 000 views and 470 subscribers if you're interested in this project a detailed video walkthrough along with the full code is available by sponsoring me on GitHub Link in the description now it's time to finally answer the question should you create an AI automated YouTube channel in my opinion probably not that answer may surprise you considering the AI Channel beat my human channel in terms of both views and subscribers but my reasoning can basically be summarized in one sentence automated videos just aren't good content the AI channel did get more views in total than the human Channel but that doesn't necessarily mean it made better content for example the human Channel had an average of over 1 700 views per video while the AI Channel had about 900. additionally almost 10 percent of the AI Channel's videos had less than 10 views and most of the videos had less than a thousand views while the majority of videos on the human Channel had over 1000 views the AI Channel got more views because it was able to upload more which as I mentioned before I do think is completely Fair however I generally believe that whatever video you can automate a human can do it better and I think there's kind of a ceiling as to how many views you can get on an AI automated video and that leads me to my next point of trying to make money with AI automation which is the main reason anyone would try to make an automated YouTube channel in order to monetize on YouTube I would have needed 10 million shorts views in a 90-day period And as you can see I wasn't even close you can't just Spam uploads of low quality automated videos to reach 10 million views you actually need to create videos that will go viral or consistently get hundreds of thousands of views and I'm not saying it would be impossible to do this with an automated Channel but I think it would require a creative idea a lot of experimenting and a bit of luck and at that point I think you're better off putting that effort into creating high quality videos even if it requires manual effort all that being said I don't think YouTube automation is completely useless I was able to get over 470 subscribers on the AI Channel which is a decent amount you need 1 000 subscribers to monetize on YouTube and given enough time I think the AI channel will reach that however as I already mentioned I think the harder goal is to reach 10 million shorts views or 4 000 watch hours on long form videos I did also try to create one automated long form video but it only got 50 views I also think it's viable to use some of the tools from this video to speed up the workflow in creating good quality content but I would probably stay away from using chat GPT to create a script because I think that's the most important part and humans can still come up with much more creative interesting and engaging ideas than chat GPT if you made it this far and enjoyed the video then consider leaving a like and subscribing thanks for watching

Channel: adumb

Views: 244,221

Keywords: youtube automation

Id: vLOgzi5y9xE

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023