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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1539 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Have you noticed the information density of youtube going way way down in the last year-two? Videos that could be 5 minutes are 35, everyone talks slowly and lazily. Up to the point where youtube offers x3 and I think x4 playback as premium features.

Feels like it used to be that a 'video essay' was mostly guaranteed to have some insights and interesting commentary on a topic you cared about.

The videos are just as long but less 'useful' information, lazier editing, and even the entertainment value has gone down.

Plus certain topics are getting recycled pretty often, so I'd just as soon go and rewatch older classics.

I just don't watch 'em anymore.

AI writing's also surely contributing to this. Somebody can toss in like 5 dotpoints and get a 30 minute script, whilst previously if they were writing their own there'd be more a trend towards brevity.

A method I've seen is for someone to copy the transcript of an existing video, feed it into an AI and ask it to make arbitrary changes, feed the outputted script into an AI voice generator, then use AI + third worlders on Fiverr to stitch together visuals to go with it, and voila, a complete video with minimal effort.

There's also a trend of using AI actors or clones. Essentially, since so many videos are just people talking into cameras with minimal movement, an AI generated actor is totally serviceable. It's AI script + AI voice, exposited by an AI person.

Now the question is, is AI mimicking people or were people already mimicking AI?

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