I’ve “watched” a bunch of these, now. They have even inspired a speech, which I may or may not actually present. I’m not sure Toastmasters is ready for it, which makes it both tempting and intimidating at the same time.
I have two things to comment upon: Presentation and Content.
Digression: I donated $50 to Starbound. They have humans narrating the stories and several frames of AI video to go along with it. Many of the HFY channels have AI narrators and a frame or two, often zooming in and out, of video. Starbound was demonetized by YouTube for being an AI channel. I don’ t love them, but it triggered my unjust prosecution reflex(1), so I gave them some money. Leaving them aside, because this does not apply…
The presentation baffles me. The writing is often very good, or at least fun. The AI narrators are iffy, but usually OKish. The captions suck ass – and not in that fun way. How does this happen? It appears that text is fed into an AI for narration then that narration is fed into another AI to generate the captions. Not surprisingly, at each step things get worse. The baffling part: Why wouldn’t one use the original text as captions? Why let two AI layers make a hash of it? I suppose it is possible that there is no original text and the entire thing is AI generated, but the writing seems too good – or at least too whimsical – for that to be the case. It doesn’t make sense to me.
The content is generally “tail of the bell curve” for humanity. Most of humanity, myself included, are insipid. The outliers, however, can be astonishing(2). These stories are about them, for the most part. This is fine. Most inspiring stories are. What I like is the whimsy, for lack of a better word. Made-up-on-the-spot pseudo-examples: “The rations tasted like stale bread and despair” or “a mix of cleaning fluids that made my olfactory senses reconsider their life choices”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is “good” writing, but it is very fun to read. That tone is one reason I am writing LitRPG, where it is not uncommon.
I rarely make it to the end of these “videos”. After I discern the trajectory of the plot, some irritating thing (e.g. zooming in and out on the same still frame or the bad captioning or bad background music) drives me away. I’m still enjoying the genre, though.
So, which do you prefer? Footnotes, digressions, or long parentheticals?
(1) Don’t even get me started on Maude Farms. The Feds were complete and utter assholes to those poor people. They happen to sell at my local Farmers Market, where, I want to be sure to point out, they never said a word about it. I donated a bunch of cash because of that insanity.
(2) What’s up with Sam Frick? Yay for him, in that he’s a great diver, but why is he all over YouTube? His life is/appears to be more-or-less normal for a champion. Australian. Diving since 12. Olympic Gold in 2020. Hot body. Sparkling personality. Nothing to complain about or object to, but nothing OMG, either. Maybe it’s just the YouTube algorithm bombarding me with his stuff.
Marked Up 