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So because YouTube is an essential subscription on the internet if you want to avoid being bombarded by nonstop ads, I use YouTube Music as my primary streaming app to avoid paying for another service. I’ve been beta testing their YouTube Labs ‘AI Hosts’ feature. I’ve been noticing a distinct lean towards the kinds of things.
It is comfortable summarizing a musician or a song. It will go on about an artist’s queer journey or struggles with mental health or how a song is meant to represent the Iraq War. It will also go into a Latino accent when playing songs or artists whose names sound like they’re from Central America, though the host is a milquetoast man.
I’ve been trying an experiment where I play traditional conservative, usually country, songs to see what it says about them. I’ve been trying old Johnny Cash, that Rich Men North of Richmond song, and old Dixie songs. Haven’t been able to get the host to comment on any of these. I was just thinking about how this should work if released out of beta.
It’s pretty hard to provoke the host to talk about certain songs. Sometimes it will describe the last track or the upcoming track - or the song / artist from either in general. Not easy to predict when it will jump in between songs.
I could be wrong, but it seems odd to let an AI talk about music with left leaning undertones but (possibly..) not do the same for right wing music because it’s not as ‘safe’. But then again, there is some left leaning extremist music à la ‘Punch a Nazi’ - should YouTube not allow their host to talk about real underground punk band origins or Dixie songs?
Seems contentious and risky to let your AI potentially talk about music or musicians with extremist undertones. But what about like Kanye? What should it say about his antisemitism? Should his name just blacklisted from mention by an AI host?
Music is the one place where there is little to no appetite for outright censorship - it is very bad PR to gatekeep music, in most cases. In Kanye’s case, you might get removed from official playlists, but they’re not going to prevent people from listening to your music.
Curious why folks jump through so many hoops to avoid either ads or paying for a subscription.
If the content is so compelling that you’re willing to give it a slice of your finite attention, why would you not want creators to be compensated for it?
I say this somewhat hypocritically as someone who used to sail the high seas. Decades ago that was a matter of funds, then convenience, and now both those are non-issues.
A) There is effectively infinite content out there. The value of any individual slice of it asymptotically approaches zero. My life would not degrade notably if it were to disappear.
B) Ads are a GENUINE waste of time, 99% of the time I will never click on it, have no interest in the product or service in question, and in fact am driven AWAY from such product if the ad is particularly offputting. Get better at targeting your ads if you want my attention. I will not spend my money, why would I spend my time watching?
C) I'd rather give money to the creator directly, and not to the platform that is honestly a minimal value-add, but leverages its network effects to continue to act as the middleman between creator and viewer whilst pretending to be the reason this connection happened at all.
I want to punish the platform for bad behavior.
But platforms are the reason that creators and viewers can match each other at all. It's not a minimal value-add, it's a necessary (but not sufficient) piece of the entire transaction.
Which platform?
I find creators and content I like via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit (well, not much anymore), Youtube, Goodreads, Rottentomatoes/Metacritic, Google searches, like six different streaming services, group chats, very rarely via normal broadcast television, and the occasional word of mouth.
TheMotte occasionally, too.
Which of these should I be sending money to to 'thank' for acting as an intermediary for my awareness of some creator and their content?
Like, do I owe a local Movie Theater an ongoing allegiance past my ticket purchase for showing me a movie that I later go on to purchase on a DVD?
The Algorithms are not providing some unique functions that isn't available elsewhere, and the content they're 'curating' is, as stated, nearly infinite.
If these platforms were happy to act as just dumb "show me what I want and help me find other things I want" services, I'd be more tolerant. What they ACT as is "we'll show you what you want, smothered in Ads, then try our damnedest to funnel you to the content we want to show you and keeps your attention as long as possible... while shoving ads into your eyes the whole time."
Its practically hostile design, and I return that hostility with hostility.
Sure. Neither is a gas station or a grocery store or any other service. The fact that you can go to Whole Foods doesn't mean Albertson's isn't providing value. And I guess it's hypothetically possible to contract with General Mills to buy your Lucky Charms directly, just about as impractical as viewers and content creators figuring out how to interact directly without TikTok or Instagram.
With the exception of TheMotte, they all already have very solid business plans. And FWIW, I doubt most of them are basing it on curation or discovery as a fundamental source of value. If anything, their only metric when deciding what to show is whatever scores the highest engagement when they A/B test, which I think you already grok.
You're only burning your own soul, being angry at the world like that. Especially for something that you can very well live without (live everyone pre-2010).
The gas station or grocery store sells me the desired product, takes my money, and gives me a receipt.
If a grocery store also attempted to add random items to my grocery cart that I had to physically remove before I hit the checkout line, because "we algorithmically predicted you'd want to buy this one too!" I would probably go to a different grocery store.
Incidentally Aldi is my favorite Grocery Store because it doesn't play games with putting items on 'sale' or do weird pricing practices with coupons. It provides reasonable quality products at what I can generally expect is the lowest price around, and that's it. I appreciate this commitment to simply providing the goods and not trying to futz with the customer to get them to buy more.
That's the sum total of what I want from my media platforms too.
I hope I don't have to explain why grocery stores putting all the products in one physical place is certainly a greater value-add to me (from a pure logistics standpoint) than youtube attempting to shove random videos into my eyes, when I can go to any website I wish with no effort and find the precise content I want with minimal time investment.
Grocery stores have put trashy magazines, Diet Coke and candy bars in the checkout aisle since time immemorial.
Not Aldi. At least, not so aggressively.
And I have dreamed of setting the magazine rack at the Publix checkout on fire for as long as I can remember.
Someone buys those things, I assume. I've literally never seen someone pick one up.
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