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Faceless AI-generated YouTube channels have turn into an issue as of late, so one tech YouTuber took it upon themselves to poison the information they’re skilled on.
In her newest video (through Ars Technica), f4mi has proven off a solution to mess with the information that AI is skilled on, particularly the subtitles of YouTube movies. Effectively, these bots can scrape all the data within the video by accessing the information in subtitle information, that are then synthesised with all the opposite YouTube movies it has taken information from.
Someone can then instruct that bot to create a brand new video within the type of different movies. The instruments aren’t fairly superior sufficient to animate a lifelike face and the creators will not put their very own face on it. That is the place the “faceless YouTube channel plague” (as common YouTuber Kurtis Conner describes it) comes from.
“All this AI slop that is showing on each social media platform shouldn’t be made by robots making an attempt to steal our jobs,” says f4mi, “it is made by people making an attempt to generate income utilizing AI to launder different individuals’s work.”
A short while again a life hack popped up on-line. Job candidates had been placing constructive key phrases in white between margins in doc folders to trick AI bots into considering they had been extra employable. The poisoning technique that f4mi invented is type of like this.
It grabs the usual subtitle textual content for a video, provides gibberish in between the strains, makes it invisible to the typical person, after which feeds it again to YouTube. She did this by placing works within the public area into her information and utilizing a device to make synonyms for lots of the phrases so the AI would not spot what she’s doing. A Python script merely went by way of and made these adjustments.
Unfortunately, instruments that may transcribe audio get round this however a couple of giant LLMs like ChatGPT cannot. Instead, the AI would ‘hallucinate’ inventing concepts concerning the video primarily based on what it could actually grasp from the large quantity of textual content in its subtitles.
And that is the place the ‘.ass’ subtitle format comes from. It can be utilized for traditional subtitles but in addition for animation and graphics, which permits the extent of customisation wanted to sneak in all of that pesky further information. Entire books could be hidden with the file sort’s place device to make each the dimensions and transparency of unneeded textual content zero.
.ass shouldn’t be among the many supported information for YouTube movies—however you’ll be able to convert an .ass file to an SRV3 file, which is able to then maintain all the information out of your unique file.
Unfortunately, f4mi’s video had issues with telephones crashing “because of the subtitles being too heavy”. YouTube has regional subtitle information you’ll be able to activate, which permits customers to account for cultural variations in phrases and tone, so the poisoned observe solely exists within the UK subtitle observe for now, which is the unique .ass file. f4mi has uploaded normal information for Australia, which suggests AI abstract instruments are getting across the poisoned observe and to an untouched one.
This signifies that plugging the video into an AI abstract device now works. However, as a proof of idea, it is a very sensible workaround meaning customers desirous to steal your movies could should do it the old style means, which could simply be sufficient to discourage many.
f4mi is one among a protracted line of YouTubers (like Drew Gooden and Hank and John Green) who’ve been combating in opposition to AI plagiarism on the platform, and sure will not be the final. It’s unlikely the following main anti-AI effort may have fairly pretty much as good a file identify hooked up, although.
