Until earlier this year I just watched the ads because in some small way it supports creators and I could deal with it. Then they increased the number of ads per watch-time to egregious levels.
I certainly wasn't going to reward a company for making the existing service worse by subscribing. Started using the apps people mention immediately and also setup pihole to block more ads.
I get that. Before ChatGPT if I had a bad partner it is very quickly obvious that their work is bad.
Now you might be tricked into thinking they're competent, which I can imagine is more frustrating because it's unpredictable.
I guess that right now people are overusing it as it's so new, but in the end the people who want to graduate without trying to learn will always try to abuse whatever tools they have to cheat. Usually they face the consequences at some point in their lives.
I've had partners like that in the past. If ChatGPT didn't exist they would've found another way to cheat or avoid work.
The type of partner who takes the task you asked them to complete, posts the task description on an online forum and hope someone gives them the answer.
AFAIK the changing thumbnails are not made by YouTube. The creator uploads a number of options for thumbnails and video titles, then YouTube randomly? shows those options to users and provides statistics to the creator so they can apply the best performing (in terms of click through and watch time) option to improve video performance. It's all of course linked to how the algorithm works, so is indirectly influenced by YouTube.
Source: a video I watched a while ago but I don't even remember who made the video, so take what I say with a grain of salt.