YouTube Transcript:
The AI Poison Pill - We Can DESTROY The Slop Channels

this video is brought to you by S stick
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upper echon Community okay just to get
something out of the way right off the
bat here the title isn't clickbait
anyone watching this in particular any
established YouTube Creator who's ever
had their content stolen by AI slop
channels or websites which is a growing
issue for the platform at large but also
anyone who wants to do this for fun as
well you can effectively poison these
channels and if enough people start
doing it we might even be able to poison
the actual language models themselves
which are constantly scraping YouTube
videos for training data that's kind of
unlikely but hey I'm allowed to dream
aren't I it's a bold claim I know but
I'm excited for this one because you
really can do it and I think it's pretty
cool to have a method of fighting back
against these Tech bro loser content
thieves who cynically advertise all over
the Internet how easy it is to make an
automated faceless Channel and get rich
by doing it let me give some background
real quick because it's actually a
multifaceted problem first on the top
level you have major AI companies who
are actively harvesting as much content
as they possibly can which includes
hundreds of thousands of videos across
tens of thousands of YouTube channels
according to an investigation done by
proof news co-published with Wired
Magazine back in July of 2024 anthropic
Microsoft and Nvidia among others had
already scraped videos from nearly
50,000 different channels and since then
the problem is only ever getting worse
One Step Down Under the publish ERS you
have the parasite ecosystem which is a
much more commonly visible problem for
everyday viewers because thousands of
people probably more like tens or
hundreds of thousands of people have
decided what if we just use these AI
tools to try and make money as quickly
as possible which then leads to a
barrage of channels which are stealing
content plagiarizing and spitting out
generative trash for the sake of AD
dollars you can find all sorts of
different creators complaining about
this because often times an AI content
Farm will have a set of specific victims
and then chronically steal their content
with minimal changes republishing it for
their own channel this is the most
immediately harmful group when it comes
to Everyday YouTubers being impacted
last up you have the Bottom Feeders
which is basically every other platform
stealing content from YouTube and then
putting it back out as blog posts or
news articles or whatever this kind of
stuff is relatively insignificant
because at the very least they don't
directly compete with the original
videos that are being stolen so
poisoning them is certainly a bonus but
it's not really the main concern for
today the main concern is the parasite
ecosystem however depending on what
level of adoption there is we can
potentially poison all three of them
which is awesome now to properly explain
what this is and why it works we need to
understand what precisely the AI content
thieves are doing which is best done
with an example this right here is a
small scale representation of the
problem called cartoon castle which
focused prior to this because it is kind
of inactive now but it used to focus on
South Park these videos are typically
riddled with errors and various
different mistakes but the point isn't
to have good content the point is to
have easy content which is why this
channel primarily stole the videos from
an actual YouTuber named Johnny 2 cellos
we can see a ton more examples of this
happening out in the wild when it comes
to the science community in particular
because for some reason that's one of
the industries that is hyper infested
right now Kyle Hill has an excellent
piece on this which goes into much more
detail about the problem but for right
now I'll stick with my smaller example
of cartoon cassle just so we can get
more clear on the actual process it's
not really complicated AI slop channels
using a variety of different tools which
all basically do the same thing scrape a
YouTube video for its captions in this
case why Kenny is the most important
character in South Park which got 3.2
million views on the original versus the
AI plagiarism version called South
Park's most important character they
scrape the captions and then feed those
captions back into an AI model like chat
GPT or whatever it happens to be and
make slight changes or just summarize
them to make something new after that
they feed the text into an AI voiceover
program and then either steal the actual
visuals from the original video directly
that they copied for the South Park
example you can see that they just
cropped out the original YouTubers
watermark in the bottom left or they use
a combination of AI editing tools to
spit something out for the background
start to finish they can take a video
and republish it within a couple hours
tops but if they really go down the
automation route they can can have a
channel which basically does all of it
for them start to finish by just
selecting a popular existing YouTube
video and feeding it into the system now
for the South Park example it's
obviously a huge discrepancy in
viewership the AI copy only got a few
thousand views versus the original
getting Millions but that's not always
true sometimes the stolen content gets
more traction than the original and
we're talking about content Farm AI slop
channels that have hundreds of thousands
of subscribers here and these videos are
also competing for the exact same
keywords which means they're basically
siphoning traction and revenue from the
original video regardless the more this
happens the worse it is for Real
creators but what we have to remember is
that the majority of AI slop traces back
to some form of original content that
was already produced on the platform and
that's what gives us the ability to
poison it so this is kind of an odd way
for me to announce this right now but
I'm actually going to Japan for 3 weeks
in March more precisely the 3rd to the
23rd of March which means either no
videos during that time frame or maybe a
couple if I manage to pre-make and
schedule them but regardless when I do
go I'm going to be using a service
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back on task just to be completely clear
this is happening in tons of different
ways all the time AI slop channels are
scraping news articles and rewarding
them to make videos they're summarizing
popular videos and turning them into a
bunch of YouTube shorts they're even
combining two or three different pieces
of original content into shorter
compilation videos all for the sake of
easy Revenue but the critical thing to
be aware of is that they do this because
they're lazy AI slop channels are not
painstakingly watching understanding
transcribing and then modifying the
content that they plagiarize they're
going down the path of least resistance
and what allows them to go down that
path is the YouTube caption system now
obviously captions are a good thing in
general it lets people read supports
those with disabilities and I'm not
advocating that people stop using them
far from it but but it turns out that
there is something we can do without
impacting most people that rely on
captions which simultaneously poisons
the content so much that AI tools either
fail to analyze it totally or produce a
completely compromised and nonsensical
version even so far as to be able to
make the output from your videos just
straight up insulting to the people who
are attempting to steal it thereby
forcing them to either do a [ __ ] ton of
manual labor themselves or just stay
away from your videos completely quick
shout out I was not the person who first
discovered this that would be a YouTuber
named famy definitely subscribe to her
she is absolutely fantastic super cool
videos it's very very worth it but for
something like this to be effective as
many people as possible need to know
about it and they need to understand how
to do it for themselves because the more
people who end up poisoning their
content in some form or another the
harder it is for the slop channels to
even exist and going all the way out to
an extreme example it could turn YouTube
itself into a Minefield for major AI
companies when it comes to training data
right and training the llm unless they
find new and more cost demanding ways of
scraping the videos to be clear it's not
a permanent solution by the way because
much the same way cyber security is a
Perpetual tug-of war match with the
hackers AI scraping and content theft is
sort of like that too but at the very
least it's a mechanism where creators
can start to push back because for a
while now it's been a really one-sided
match where content thieves were
practically facing zero resistance
whatsoever in the short term on a much
more realistic level it deals damage to
plagiarism slop channels and it's all
thanks to a creative use of the caption
system discovered by famy which hides
information in the video and makes it
basically poisonous for AI take a look
at this these are two identical uploads
unlisted on my channel I'll put links
Down Below in the description one titled
feed the machine the other titled poison
the machine both of these videos are
functionally the same it's a 42 second
poem about how amazing artificial
intelligence is for Humanity but if you
feed these videos into any of the
typical AI summarizing or transcription
tools you get wildly different results
for today I'm using crisp. a com. and
galaxy. as basic examples but every
other tool that I also tested while
making the video either failed to
transcribe the poison version at all
which was pretty common or spat out
similar gibberish because the poisoning
method actually works let me show you
crisp spits out a text file summary of
the video that you give to it and this
is what the file says for feed the
machine my 42 second non-poisoned poem
that's praising AI quote AI is depicted
as a transformative force that brings
thought and light acting as a guiding
presence in the various aspects of life
end quote I won't read the whole thing
but it's basically summarizing my little
trashy poem correctly as well and if we
move over to a transcription tool comb a
we can see an actual word forword
transcript which is pretty much accurate
in terms of what I said last up is
Galaxy and this one also apparently
turns it into a blog post with like a
fake writer or author for it and
everything massively expanding how much
text is there to do it but the point is
that my poem feed the machine when it
gets scraped by these AI tools doesn't
really present them with any problems
now let's switch over this is Poison the
machine saying poem same words same
everything same audio literally
everything except this time if I analyze
it with crisp. the text file that it
spits out looks like this quote the
discussion Begins by Framing Silicon
Valley as a collective toilet a metaphor
that encapsulates the social
environmental and economic issues
associated with the region end quote
again I won't read the whole thing it's
on screen right now if you want to and
it's painfully over embellished by the
AI program to sound smarter and more
eloquent than it actually is but my
little 42 second poem is now a giant
convoluted explanation of why Silicon
Valley is America's toilet if we switch
over to comb directly transcribing it we
see this which is a massive text dump of
not only why Silicon Valley is a toilet
but also why the Earth's core isn't
actually rock or metal it's human [ __ ]
because this video has been poisoned not
only against AI but also the lazy people
who use AI to steal content for them
keep in mind the videos are functionally
indistinguishable from each other you're
not seeing different subtitles here
because the viewer experience is pretty
much unimpacted by any of this however
the resulting effect on AI is that one
of them is an accurate summary of the
actual content while the other is
whatever I want it to be gibberish
insults completely incoherent rambling
it doesn't matter because the end result
is that someone using that content in
some sort of automatic AI pipeline to
steal content for YouTube will output a
completely garbage video from it that
has nothing to do with what they think
it does and doesn't compete with the
original at all if we jump over to
galaxy. the same little poem is now this
pompous self-indulgent blog post
attempting to explain how the idea that
the earth's core is filled with human
waste is a hyperbolic reflection on how
Society deals with its own wastefulness
both literally and metaphorically when
none of that is actually in the video
and also no it was literally an argument
that scientists are idiots in the center
of the Earth is filled with [ __ ] these
summarizers are often extremely
pretentious and kind of self- glorifying
for some reason so it didn't really seem
to like summarizing the content properly
which I did think was kind of funny
anyway this can be done with any video
on all of YouTube as long as you have
access to subtitle tracks and the method
itself is pretty simple I find it
incredibly satisfying actually because
you get to use the same AI tools that
are being used to steal your content in
order to make it poisonous for them so
anyone who comes after you and tries to
skim your work gets a dose of whatever
narrative you want to feed to them which
I think is fantastic I'll go through it
right now step one is to take whatever
video it is that you want to poison and
feed it into an automatic subtitle
generator in this case I used happy
scribe which then spits out an SRT file
which is a subrip subtitle file that
contains a pretty decent Baseline
subtitle track for the content that's
step one and of course you can edit it
and take out the mistakes and you can
put as much work as you want to into
this process but I'm just going to give
you the rudimentary one for the moment
step two is to use a conversion tool in
my case I used e.co to make the SRT file
an ass file. ass Fami has way more
explanation in her video about what
these file types are and why you do this
and it's super entertaining and well
done on top of that so you should
absolutely go watch it but the simple
version is that the ass file has a lot
more customization options step three is
to open the ass file in whatever editing
program you want to I used agub all the
links will be down below in the
description obviously and go through
adding subtitle lines in between all of
the legitimate subtitles by just
rightclick add before or after in
between all of them once that's done you
have to put a command that looks like
this right a bracketed command for
positioning in front of all those new
blank lines which basically moves the
subtitles way off of the screen because
position is one of the functions that
the ass files have which other subtitle
formats don't have then we get to the
fun part hop on over to chat GPT or
whatever llm you want to use and ask it
to generate some sort of incoherent
garbage or insulting story or I don't
know literally anything you want big
bird is a cult leader bringing about the
apocalypse Purple Rain actually has
nothing to do with music it's giant
Smurfs peeing on everybody genuinely the
guy is the limit funny story with that
actually after I did a bunch of
experiments with this using the Silicon
Valley toilet example I came back the
next day and it kept telling me that the
exact same prompt was now a violation of
their terms I don't think the tech Bros
like the fact that someone made the chat
bot generate an essay that was insulting
to them which is hilarious but anyway
once you have the incoherent rambling or
the insults or the gibberish or whatever
it is you go back and you paste it
paragraph by paragraph into the empty
subtitle lines and then you save the
file and use this converter available on
GitHub to turn your ass file into ayt
file which is YouTube's actual supported
subtitle format but by doing this you
keep the formatting that you had from
the previous version that is the
placement of the subtitles relative to
the screen lastly you go to the same
video that you originally got the
subtitles from and you upload the ytt
track deleting any other a automatic
subtitles afterward and poof you now
have a video that displays normal
subtitles to your audience depending on
whether or not there's minor spelling
mistakes is just whether or not you want
to fix them but it works it looks normal
to the audience but also contains
offscreen giant paragraphs of gibberish
all over the place tricking the AI
summary or transcription tools into
thinking that your little 42 second poem
in my case is really 10 minutes of
rambling about how Silicon Valley is
America's toilet and the center of the
earth is human [ __ ] any of the AI slop
channels that now use this video for
their automatic pipeline without
checking like a human being looking at
it and checking all of it will output
complete nonsense even if they do check
they can't do anything about it unless
they spend their own precious time and
money actually watching and transcribing
based on what you say in the video and
maybe they can go find a transcription
tool which listens to the actual audio
which does exist there are tools like
that but they'll probably have to buy
get another subscription to do that and
you can do this in subtle ways you don't
have to be blatantly obvious about it
you can have a video that is like a
sandwich the first third looks normal
the last third looks normal and the
middle third is just completely
destroyed with incoherent trash right
like you can be I don't know pretty
nefarious with how you poison these
videos on a larger scale for the models
scraping YouTube content every single
day for the purpose of training data
this can make a science video into an
hourong nonsense rant about beanie
babies you can take a video about math
equations or coding and pollute it with
a badly written screenplay about
invisible kebler elves or whatever you
can possibly imagine using badly written
AI slop to protect your own content from
the AI slop content thieves it's genius
and at the very least it will sift out
the lowest common denominator and make
stealing your videos a whole heck of a
lot more difficult for the average
person you might see flashes of white
text at the top of the screen for a
split second here and there on the
mobile version of the videos where this
was done but it really just comes down
to tweaking the subtitles move them
further off screen with a different
command use different line breaks etc
etc there's definitely more ways to do
it but the ability for any YouTuber out
there to take a video right now and
effectively poison it against the slop
farmers and the AI scrapers and the
thieves in my view is incredibly
valuable and I want to once again show
appreciation for famy who spent a
tremendous amount of time and creativity
coming up with all this at the end of
the day the problem of lazy AI fueled
plagiarism is only ever increasing but
now there's a method of let's say
vaccinating your content against them
sort of and the landscape of what it
looks like will obviously change over
time but right now it's incredibly
simple and it seems pretty effective for
the amount of effort required for the
channels out there who have been
specifically grappling with someone
stealing massive amounts of your content
please do consider doing this because at
least short term it will directly
negatively impact the people that that
are stealing from you and they've been
impacting you negatively this entire
time so yeah anytime you can do
something to strike back I think that's
pretty cool that's it if you want to
support the channel check out the links
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patreon monthly memberships and more but
I'll cut it there and stop rambling as
always thank you all for watching
question everything and have a nice
night
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