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Hey there, Today, something near and dear to my heart. People who have messed with my sleep, and the creators they are impacting. Thank you to multiple 404 Media readers who sent me tips about this story. -Jason As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. “In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator says in a fake British accent. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn’t seen before, called “Sleepless Historian.” I took my headphones out, didn’t think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.
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The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don’t know much about. Some video titles include “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,” “The Entire History of the American Frontier,” “What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.  In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. “It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.” “I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate,” Kelly added. “So it worries me because it’s just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. When I’m researching something, I go straight to the academic journals and books and places that are offline, basically. But these AI videos are just sort of repeating things that are on the internet and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s accurate. You end up with a very simplified version of the past, and we need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from.” Kelly has been making history videos on YouTube since 2017 and has amassed 1.2 million YouTube subscribers because of the incredibly in-depth research he does for his feature-length videos. He said for an average long-form video, he will read 20 books, lots of journal articles, and will often travel to archaeological sites. It’s impossible to say for sure, but he has considered the possibility that some of these AI videos are modeled on his videos, and that the AI tools being used to create them could have been trained on his work. The soothing British accent used in many of the AI-generated videos I’ve seen is similar to Kelly’s actual voice. “A lot of AI basically scraped YouTube in order to develop all of the ways people make videos now,” he said. “So I mean, maybe it scraped my voice.” He said that he has begun to get comments accusing his videos of being AI-generated, and his channel now says “no AI is used in this channel.” He has also set up a separate channel where he speaks directly to camera rather than narrating over other footage. “People listen to the third-person, disembodied narration voice and assume that it’s AI now, and that’s disheartening,” he said. “I get quite a lot of comments from people thinking that I’m AI, so I’m like, if you think I’m AI I’m going to have to just put myself in the videos a little more. Pretty much everyone I know is doing something as a result of this AI situation, which is crazy in itself. We’ve all had to react. The thing I’m doing is I’m appearing more in videos. I’m speaking to the camera because I think people are going to be more interested in an actual human voice.” Kelly said the number of views he gets on an average video has plateaued or dropped alongside the rise of AI-generated content that competes with his, which is something I heard from other creators, too. As a viewer, I have noticed that I now have to wade through tons of AI-generated spam in order to find high-quality videos. “I have seen, and my fellow history creators—there’s quite a few of us, we all talk to each other—we’ve all seen quite a noticeable drop in views that seems to coincide exactly with this swarm of AI-generated, three-hour, four-hour videos where they’re making videos about the exact same things we make videos about, and for the average person, I don’t think they really care that much whether it’s AI or not,” he said.
Kelly has started putting himself in his videos to show he's a real person A few months ago, in our Behind the Blog segment, I wrote about a YouTube channel called Ancient Americas, run by an amateur anthropologist named Pete. In that blog, I worried about whether AI slop creators would try to emulate creators like Pete, who clearly take great pride in researching and filming their videos. Ancient Americas releases about one 45-minute video per month about indigenous cultures from the Western Hemisphere. Each of his videos features a substantive bibliography and works cited document, which explains the books, scientific papers, documentaries, museums, and experts he sources his research from. Every image and visual he uses is credited with both where it came from and what license he’s using. Through his videos, I have learned an incredible amount about cultures I didn’t know existed, like the Wari, the Zapotecs, the Calusa, and many more. Pete told me in an email that he has noticed the AI history video trend on YouTube as well, but “I can’t say much about how accurate these videos are as a whole because I tend to steer clear of them. Life is far too short for AI.” “Of the few I've watched, I would say that the information tends to be vague and surface level and the generated AI images of indigenous history that they show range from uncanny to cringe. Not surprisingly, I'm not a fan of such content but thankfully, these videos don't seem to get many views,” he said. “The average YouTube viewer is much more discerning than they get credit for. Most of them see the slop for what it is. On the other hand, will that always be the case? That remains to be seen. AI is only going to get better. Ultimately, whether creators like me sink or swim is up to the viewing public and the YouTube algorithm.” Pete is correct in that a lot of the AI-generated videos don’t have a lot of views, but that’s quickly changing. Sleepless Historian has 614,000 subscribers, posts a multi-hour video every single day, and has published three videos that have more than a million views. I found several other AI-generated history channels that have more than 100,000 subscribers. Many of them are reposting the same videos that Sleepless Historian publishes, but many of them are clearly generating their own content. Every night before I go to sleep, I open YouTube and I see multiple AI-generated history videos being served to me, and some YouTube commenters have noticed that they are increasingly being fed AI-generated history videos. People on Reddit have noticed that the comments under these videos are a mix of what appear to be real people saying they are grateful for the content and a mix of bots posting fake sob stories. For example, a recent Sleepless Historian video has comments from “History-Snooze,” “The_HumbleHistory” “RealSleepyHistorianOfficial,” “SleeplessOrren,” “SleepyHistory-n9k,” “Drizzle and Dreamy History of the Past,” “TheSleepyNavigator-d6b5c,” “Historyforsleepy168,” and a handful of other channels that post the exact same type of content (and often repost the exact same videos). In one video, an account called Sleepymore (which posts AI-generated history videos) posted “It’s 1 a.m. in Kyiv. I’m a Ukrainian soldier on night watch. Tonight is quiet—no sirens, just silence. I just wanted to say: your videos make me feel a little less alone, a little less afraid. Thank you.” An account called SleeplessHistorian2 responded to say “great comment.” Both of these accounts do nothing but post AI-generated history videos and spam comments on other AI-generated history videos. The email address associated with Sleepless Historian” did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. The French Whisperer, a human ASMRtist who makes very high quality science and history videos that I have been falling asleep to for years, told me that he has also noticed that he’s competing with AI-generated videos, and that the videos are “hard to miss.” “It is always hard to precisely determine what factors make a YouTube channel grow or shrink, but mine has seen its number of views drop dramatically in the past 6-12 months (like -60%) and for the first time in years I barely get discovered at all by new viewers,” he said. “I used to gain maybe 100-200 subscribers per day until 2024, now it is flat. I think only my older viewers still come to my videos, but for others my channel is now hidden under a pile of AI slop that all people who are into history/science + sleep or relaxation content see in their search results.” “I noticed this trend of slop content in my niche starting around 2 years ago,” he said. “Viewers warned me that there were channels that were either AI-assisted (like a real person reading AI scripts), or traditional slop (a real person paraphrasing wikipedia or existing articles), basically replicating the kind of content I make, but publishing 1 or 2 hours of content per day. Then it became full AI a few months ago, it went from a handful of channels to dozens (maybe hundreds? I have no idea), and since then this type of content has flooded YouTube.” Another channel I sometimes listen to has purposefully disabled the captions on their videos to make it harder for AI bots to steal from: “Captions have unfortunately been disabled due to AI bots copying (plagiarizing) my scripts,” a notice on YouTube reads. All of this is annoying and threatening on a few different levels. To some extent, when I’m looking for something to fall asleep to, the actual content sometimes feels like it doesn’t matter. But I’ve noticed that, over time, as I fall asleep listening to history podcasts, I do retain a lot of what I learn, and if I hear something interesting as I’m dozing off, I will often go research that thing more when I’m awake and alert. I personally would prefer to listen to videos made by real people who know what they are talking about, and are benefiting from my consumption of their work. There is also the somewhat dystopian fact that, because of these videos, there are millions of people being unwittingly lulled to sleep by robots. Historians who have studied the AI summaries of historical events have found that they “flatten” history: “Prose expression is not some barrier to the communication of historical knowledge, to be cleared by any means, but rather an integral aspect of that communication,” Mack Penner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, argued last year. “Outsourcing the finding, the synthesizing, and the communicating to AI is to cede just about the whole craft to the machines.” As YouTube and other platforms are spammed with endless AI-generated videos, they threaten not just to drown out the types of high-quality videos that The French Whisperer, Ancient Americas, and other historians, anthropologists, and well-meaning humans are making. They also threaten to literally rewrite history—or people’s understanding of it—with all of the biases imbued into AI by its training material and, increasingly, by the willful manipulation of the companies that own these tools. All of the creators I spoke to said that, ultimately, they think the quality of their videos is going to win out, and that people will hopefully continue to seek out their videos, whether that’s on YouTube or elsewhere. They each have Patreons, and The French Whisperer said that he has purposefully “diversified away from YouTube” because of forced ads, settings that distort the sound of softly spoken videos, and the 30 percent cut YouTube takes from its membership program. But Kelly said he believes that it has become much harder to break into this world, because "when I started, I was just competing against other humans. I don't really know how you can compete against computers." The French Whisperer still posts his videos on YouTube, but said that it is increasingly not a reliable platform for him: “I concluded some time ago that I would better vote with my feet and disengage from YouTube, which I could afford to do because by chance my content is very audio oriented. I bet everything I could on podcasts and music apps like Spotify and Apple, on Patreon, and on various apps I sell licenses to,” he said. “I have launched different podcasts derived from my original channel, and even begun to transform my YouTube channel into a podcast show—you probably noticed that I promote these other outlets at the beginning of almost every single video. As a result of my growth elsewhere and the drop on YouTube, the bulk of my audience (like 80-90%) is now on other sites than YouTube, and these ones have not been contaminated by AI slop so far. In a nutshell, I already had reasons to treat YouTube as a secondary platform before, and the fact that it became trashier with the AI content is just one more.” “An entire niche can be threatened overnight by AI, or YouTube's policies, or your access to monetization, and this only reinforces my belief that this is not a reasonable career choice. Unless you have millions of followers and can look at it as an athlete would—earn as much as you can, pay your taxes, and live on your investments for the rest of your life when your career inevitably ends.” Pete from Ancient Americas, meanwhile, said he’s just going to keep making videos and hope for the best. “It does me no good to fret and obsess over something I have no control over. AI may be polluting the river but I still have to swim in it or sink. Second, I have a lot of faith in what I do and I love doing it,” he said. “At the moment, I don't think AI can create a video the way that I can. I take the research very seriously and try to get as much information as possible. I try to include details that the viewer would have a very difficult time finding on their own; things that are beyond the Wikipedia article or a cursory Google search. I also use ancient artifacts and artworks from a culture to show the viewer how the culture expressed itself and I believe that this is VERY important when you want your audience to connect with ancient people. I've never seen AI do this. It's always a slideshow of crappy AI images. The only thing I can do in an AI world is to keep the ship sailing forward.” Kelly, who runs History Time, says he sees it as a real problem. “It’s worrying to me just for humanity,” he said. “Not to get too high brow, but it’s not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future.”
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