AI isn’t just taking the jobs of creatives, it is also determining what parts of our creations are actually worth viewing.
At least that’s somewhat the implicit premise behind YouTube’s latest experiment that uses AI to “skip” over the boring stuff in a video and put viewers right in the action.
In other words, all of that time spent filming, editing, and putting it all together might be reduced to a series of TikTok style clips thanks to the genius of artificial intelligence.
From Lifehacker:
“The Jump Ahead feature will analyze that user watch data and couple it with machine learning algorithms to automatically detect what it believes is the next “best” point in a video that a viewer may be interested in, and offer a prompt to take you to that point via an onscreen Jump Ahead button.”
It’s kind of a strange development, too, because, ostensibly, it is supposed to make life better for viewers (or at least enable them to consume MORE video content on YouTube which probably outweighs everything else) but again at the expense of creators.
Another concern is that such a system could lead to creators optimizing content ahead of time and “anticipating” what the AI will find interesting thus resulting in content that is either barely watchable, bizarre, or downright weird a la intensely optimized SEO content on the web that is engineered from the ground up to scam clicks and sell ads, no real content ever on offer. While parent company Google “filters” out this kind of stuff via its search algorithms, anyone with any amount of experience on the Internet has stumbled upon at least one keyword-heavy piece of nonsense.
Any thoughts you might have on YouTube’s feature that “skips” over whatever it determines is boring are welcome in the comments.
We have some other photography headlines for you to read at this link right here.
