Last month, YouTube introduced a new generative AI-powered “Inspiration” tab for creators. Like so many other gen AI products foisted on us by our increasingly shameless tech overlords, it has proven to be a solution looking for a problem. To creators producing award-winning journalistic work, for example, it has suggested absolute bangers like “Ranking the most iconic video game villains” and “Top 5 hidden video game secrets revealed.”
Before we get into more suggestions YouTubers have shared with Aftermath, I want to point out what I feel is the funniest part of this whole thing: Each YouTube-generated video idea is also rated in terms of potential audience interest. The above two suggestions, given to Polygon’s Simone de Rochefort, are considered “very low interest” and “low interest,” respectively. Most suggestions I’ve come across so far, in fact, have been dubbed total snoozers by the system itself. Why would anybody use this?
Perhaps YouTube is trying to motivate people to spend time with the Inspiration tab’s “Let’s brainstorm” module, which allows you to suggest a topic to get YouTube’s creativity-corroding juices flowing. You can then click on a video to see an outline, titles, and a spread of AI slop thumbnails. In its video introducing the feature, YouTube noted that you can further refine these suggestions with prompts of your own, like “incorporate humor.” Whose humor? At what pace? To what specific end? Who cares. The robot will add a packet of Humor Powder to your gruel, and you’ll like it.
It’s grim stuff, especially considering companies like Netflix’s documented interest in bulldozing through concerns like licensing and taste to churn out endless – and endlessly bland – buckets of AI mush. YouTube evidently wants actual creators to function as cogs in that machine, which will eventually replace them if the unimaginative soul voids currently running our world have their way.
But on the upside, this stuff sucks! A lot! That has been and will remain a massive impediment to generative AI’s widespread adoption, which fills me with hope that the AI bubble is on a one-way collision course with a very big needle. That in mind, let’s have a laugh at its expense.
Here’s the Inspiration tab of YouTube video essayist Jacob Geller:
Once again, we’re working with bottom-of-the-barrel ideas like “Games that don’t age well” and “Video games that deserve a sequel,” but I want to give special recognition to “How video games teach us about life,” which is accompanied by this incredible thumbnail:
Honestly, I’d be more likely to click on a video titled "How viideo qvormes teach us aboul tde" than the original suggestion, so maybe YouTube is onto something here.
“Fdrogttten NENS GEMS," which YouTube’s AI thought would be up Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish’s alley, is similarly exceptional:
I, too, love the Nintendo Entertainment Nintendo System.
You will not be surprised to learn that an overarching theme of YouTube’s video ideas is rehashing what creators have already posted before, down to the title. Except, as per usual, generative AI can’t actually understand anything, so it seems to be playing mix and match with titles and ideas. Take, for example, these masterpieces offered to GameSpot associate editor Brendan Hesse:
"I already made basically all these videos, including 'Lunacid vs The Crawl,'” Hesse told Aftermath, "but it wasn't a versus; it was just an interview."
Indie-focused YouTuber Wander received a selection of ideas that seemed to be based on recent high-performing videos, but again, with little rhyme or reason. This resulted in entirely made-up games like Digseum Artifactor Excavator and Eldritch Museum Entity:
George "Chairman George" Weidman of Super Bunnyhop believes the AI is skimming titles and basically nothing else of substance.
"I especially like how after making a video essay titled 'The Boisterous Bibliography of Pentiment,' it suggests I make a video titled 'The Boisterous Bibliography of Other Games,'" Weidman told Aftermath. "It doesn't seem to be scraping the YouTuber's script transcriptions or bio pages for topics we might be interested in, just flashy titles and thumbnails. These suggestions are just spitting back out what are the already-existing SEO optimization trends, and it's funny how one of those trends seems to be an aspirationally highbrow appeal that so many Gamer video essays strive for."
Suggested video outlines are also a trip. YouTube asked games writer and hobbyist YouTuber Chris Baker to take a walk down memory lane and hark back to all the “iconic” voice acting of Spider-Man games from the days before games really had voice acting:
Baker’s AI-generated thumbnails – one of which seems to depict Spider-Man using his hand like a phone or perhaps Spider-Man yanking his own head off – are also really something:
Are you feeling inspired? I sure am.
