YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
But I do think removing the role of an editor and cinematagrapher and being able to programmatically convert a script/screenplay instantly into a useful video content seems like a great idea; the right approach. In addition, something like this could also create internationalized video content very quickly.
Why not go further? Once we can determine an affordable way to programmatically stimulate every necessary region of our brain to bring about emotions and the effects of nostalgic or sentimental introspection traditionally stimulated by beautiful artwork, then we can just plug in and go for the ride and get on with our daily work.
But seriously, that is not what art is. Art is not created automatically by a machine. We can program a 3d printer to spit out an exact copy of the veiled virgin, but will we find it as beautiful? Certainly not.
Part of the charm of the artistic process is that a human being's perspective becomes illuminated, in part, in the medium. The natural imperfections of that perception are made beautiful and become less like imperfections and more like variations. A machine, as of yet, cannot do this. A computer program cannot have this multiplicity of perspective which is at once flawed and beautiful. It cannot understand the human emotive experience beyond what is input-output-- and the human emotive experience, as we can all attest, is not composed of input-output events.
If we let the machines make our art for us, or to artificially induce the emotions in us, we have lost all understanding of what art is. Art is not utilitarian. We cannot have machines perform art.
I think there is nothing magical about being a human. We are complex machines with lot of processes, but nothing that can't be replicated.
That's just to start.
I think you are young. I hope you grow out of that state of mind.
this is repackaging and theft of real creators' content.
Are the videos the net negative, or is the net negative that we have a laxly-moderated automated platform that gives a super-large platform to crap?
You're not a parent, are you?
EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly).
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
If you don't think your kids should use YouTube then don't let them...easy as that! It's like with cookies...if you really want to I'll bet you find a way to stop you kids from eating them.
Sort of. If I let my kid watch Peppa Pig on the TV, I can be reasonably assured that it won't suddenly take a turn (while I'm in the next room washing dishes) into Peppa Pig having sex with Barney just before they're both ground up into sausage.
The same isn't true on YouTube.
You can have millions of parents address the issues themselves or you could have one company with massive resources fix the program for millions of parents.
Aside from morality, I think it's a clear product / business issue for them.
I can totally empathise how easy it is. I can give my one year old the wiggles and he's calm and quiet for hours if I want. Holy crap it's quiet. I can clean. I can rest. I can do my taxes. But it's just not a panacea. And as he gets older he will naturally try to control the content flow himself. That's fine. But I need to parent this to protect him from what he can't yet regulate himself.
I am trying to raise an interested and independent child with her own interests who goes through this world awake, not a member of the phone-zombies you see everywhere who have a never ending hunger for flashy videos and other entertainment. That there are parents who put their babies/toddlers in a stroller with a phone in their hands is just mind boggling to me.
My daughter is almost a year old and the only time she has ever looked at a screen (including TV) for longer than 10 seconds is when we video call her grandma who lives in another country.
Impressive bit of cognitive dissonance there. Although I suppose it can be explained with
> I couldn’t care less.
Which is fine, but then there is no logical reason for anyone else to care about your point of view either.
The accountability for YouTube would come in the form of less users or less advertisers. Until this happens though, these ‘crappy’ videos are appertently just what the users want to see and the automated advertising bots don’t care.
Accountability for the video-makers? I don’t see why. The copyright system is broken and counter productive in many cases to our ability as humans to create more knowledge. One could always argue that it is an art project anyway.
I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky.
Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
Yeah, except for the whole "negative contribution to society" part.
> it is a company that has a business model that is based on getting people to waste as much of their time as possible on YouTube
Society = people. There is good stuff on youtube, and there is bad stuff on youtube. Why do you want to be part of the problem? Seems pretty selfish to me.