I don’t watch TV much, and haven’t for quite awhile. It’s a bad use of my time, and never more than recently, when a friend sent me a link to a YouTube group called Isabella Advice. The link was to a video on prostate health, which is a topic of considerable (if fairly recent) interest of mine.
Well. What we have is a video of Isabella, a pleasant-looking forty-ish African American woman who says she’s an MD. It’s a 24-minute video, and I watched it to the end. By the time I reached the end, I knew the truth: The video was generated by an AI, and although the advice was fairly sound (and mostly aligned with the rest of my research) the presentation was a little, well, freaky.
What I noticed first were her hand gestures. There were five or six variations, but each variation was used identically many times during the video. She raises her hands to the same height, sometimes alone, sometimes clasped, sometimes just rising at once without touching one another. Her hands remained in her lap unless she was raising them, and the position of her body didn’t change except for a very slight up-an-down bounce. I’ve seen enough videos to know that presenters rarely sit this odd sort of stock still—not for 24 minutes, at least.
There are captions of what she’s saying, and her voice is good, if a little monotonous. But then…the caption contained a weight, something like 20 lbs. She didn’t say “twenty pounds.” She said, “twenty ell-bees.” Later the caption read ”with your daily 30-inute” with the initial “m” missing, and that’s precisely what she said, “thirty in-oot.” (It’s at 16:35 in the video.) She was literally pronouncing typos.
That nailed it. I’m guessing that someone who knew something about prostate health wrote a script, and the AI voice read it mercilessly verbatim.
When I’ve watched YouTube, it’s usually because somebody is doing something visual and explaining it: crafts, ham radio, building electronic projects, robots, telescopes, and so on. The visual focus isn’t 100% on the presenter. I could have read what the AI was saying in probably five or six minutes. For the most part, I research by reading, unless there are necessary graphics. Watching an AI sitting in a chair reading a script for half an hour is truly a waste of my time. I won’t do it again, but I’m going to watch for other examples of AI in use, not just on YouTube but anywhere else I run across it. If I spot any, you’ll read about them here.
