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If you are a parent, remember that YouTube results and suggestions can sometimes be rather "suggestive". All society needs some baseline of a moral code and an algorithm doesn't understand that.

Imagine if your child asked an adult neighhbor about the movie "beaches" and they responded with the same answers YouTube does. Go ahead search beaches. Or Beach, or vine.

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I just tried this, and my first four results were for the Bette Midler film.

The rest are about beaches (most dangerous, weird things found on beaches, top 5 beaches in Brazil etc)

What is striking, and I've noticed this before on YouTube, is that the thumbnails all feature nearly nude women. You'd perhaps expect this to happen randomly for beach related videos, but I've noticed that if there even a fleeting bit of nudity in a film trailer or similar, it seems to end up in the thumbnail.

Does a human scan through and choose that moment, based on trying to maximise clicks? Or does an algorithm try random frames and then keep the ones that are click baitiest?

That's a human doing it. The algorithm just picks a timestamp to screenshot, and before people were allowed to choose their own thumbnails, they would put a single-frame picture at the timestamp the algorithm was expepected to use.

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