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YouTube’s rollout of AI tools shows nonsensical AI-generated audience engagement and AI slop thumbnails.

YouTube is AI-generating replies for creators on its platform so they could more easily and quickly respond to comments on their videos, but it appears that these AI-generated replies can be misleading, nonsensical, or weirdly intimate. 

YouTube announced that it would start rolling out “editable AI-enhanced reply suggestions” in September, but thanks to a new video uploaded by Clint Basinger, the man behind the popular LazyGameReviews channel, we can now see how they actually work in the wild. For years, YouTube has experimented with auto-generated suggested replies to comments that work much like the suggested replies you might have seen in your Gmail, allowing you to click on one of three suggested responses like “Thanks!” or “I’m on it,” which might be relevant, instead of typing out the response yourself. “Editable AI-enhanced reply suggestions” on YouTube work similarly, but instead of short, simple replies, they offer longer, more involved answers that are “reflective of your unique style and tone.” According Basinger’s video demoing the feature, it does appear the AI-generated replies are trained on his own comments, at times replicating previous comments he made word for word, but many of the suggested replies are strangely personal, wrong, or just plain weird. 

For example, last week Basinger posted a short video about a Duke Nukem-branded G Fuel energy drink that comes in powder that needs to be mixed with water. In the video, Basinger makes himself a serving of the drink but can’t find the scoop he’s supposed to use to measure out the formula. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the scoop was buried in the powder,” one YouTube user commented on the Duke Nukem G Fuel video, which certainly sounds right to me as someone who's been serving up baby formula for the last year. 

YouTube’s AI suggested that Basinger reply to that comment by saying: “It’s not lost, they just haven’t released the scoop yet.  It’s coming soon.” 

Image: LGR Blerbs/YouTube

I can see how that comment could make sense in the context of the types of other videos LGR publishes, which usually review old games, gadgets, and other tech, but is obviously wrong in this instance. 

Another suggested reply to that same comment said: “I’ll have to check if they’re using a proprietary blend that requires a special scoop.”

“My creativity and craft stems completely from my own brain, and handing that off to some machine learning thing that mimics my style not only takes away from the enjoyment of it all for me, but it feels supremely disingenuous,” Basinger told me in an email. “The automated comments in particular come across as tone deaf, since a huge reason YouTube makes sense at all is the communication and relationship between audience and creator. I've had dozens of people say that they now second-guess every interaction with YouTubers in the comments since it could easily be a bot, a fake response.”

Another commenter on the Duke Nukem G Fuel video joked that Basinger should have had a tighter grip on the lid as he was shaking the formula to prevent it from flying all over the place. 

YouTube's generative content features in 2024

Basinger bursts out laughing as he reads YouTube’s suggested AI-generated reply to that comment: “I’ve got a whole video on lid safety coming soon, so you don’t have to worry!”

At other times, the AI-suggested replies are just nonsensical. The Duke Nukem G Fuel review wasn’t posted to the main LGR channel, but a channel called LGR Blerbs, which is his naming convention for shorter, less deeply researched videos about whatever he’s interested in. A few commenters said they were happy he was posting to the Blerbs channel again, with one saying “Nice. Back to the blerbs.”

YouTube’s AI suggested Basinger reply to that comment by saying: “It’s a whole new kind of blerp,” which I suppose is funny, but also doesn’t mean anything. 

The weirdest examples of AI-generated replies in the video in my opinion are those that attempt to speak to Basinger’s personal life. In response to another commenter who said they were happy Basinger was posting to the Blerbs channel again, YouTube’s AI suggested the following reply: “Yeah, I’m a little burnt out on the super-high-tech stuff so it was refreshing to work on something a little simpler 🙂.” Another AI-generated reply thanked commenters for their patience and said that Basinger was taking a break but was back to making videos now. 

YouTuber burnout is a well established problem among YouTube creators, to the point where YouTube itself offers tips on how to avoid it. The job is taxing not only because churning out a lot of videos helps them get picked up by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, comments on those videos and replies to comments helps increase engagement and visibility for those videos.

YouTube rewarding that type of engagement incentivises the busywork of creators replying to comments, which predictably resulted in an entire practice and set of tools that allow creators to plug their channels to a variety of AIthat will automatically reply to comments for them. YouTube’s AI-enhanced reply suggestions feature just brings that practice of manufactured engagement in-house. 

Clearly, Google’s decision to brand the feature as editable AI-enhanced reply suggestions means that it’s not expecting creators to use them as-is. Its announcement calls them “a helpful starting point that you can easily customize to craft your reply to comments.” However, judging by what they look like at the moment, many of the AI-generated replies are too wrong or misleading to be salvageable, which once again shows the limitations of generative AI’s capabilities despite its rapid deployment by the biggest tech companies in the world.

“I would not consider using this feature myself, now or in the future,” Basinger told me. “And I'd especially not use it without disclosing the fact first, which goes for any use of AI or generative content at all in my process. I'd really prefer that YouTube not allow these types of automated replies at all unless there is a flag of some kind beside the comment saying ‘This creator reply was generated by machine learning’ or something like that.”

The feature rollout is also a worrying sign that YouTube could see a rapid descent towards AI-sloppyfication of the type we’ve been documenting on Facebook. 

In addition to demoing the AI-enhanced reply suggestion feature, Basinger is also one of the few YouTube creators who now has access to the new YouTube Studio “Inspiration” tab, which YouTube also announced in September. YouTube says this tab is supposed to help creators “curate suggestions that you can mold into fully-fledged projects – all while refining those generated ideas, titles, thumbnails and outlines to match your style.”

Basinger shows how he can write a prompt that immediately AI-generates an idea for a video, including an outline and a thumbnail. The issue in this case is that Basinger’s channel is all about reviewing real, older technology, and the AI will outline videos for products that don’t exist, like a Windows 95 virtual reality headset. Also, the suggested AI-generated thumbnails have all the issues we’ve seen in other AI image generators, like clear misspelling of simple words. 

Image: LGR Blerbs/YouTube

“If you’re really having that much trouble coming up with a video idea, maybe making videos isn’t the thing for you,” Basinger said. 

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

YouTube is launching a new feature called Watch With for watching sports with creators and, in general, leaning even further into its place as a premium TV service.

YouTube just released some new stats that show how the service is being consumed on televisions, and the numbers are enormous. Watch time on TV for sports content was up 30 percent year over year; viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts on their TVs every month. 

This is YouTube we’re talking about, though, so of course the numbers are huge. The living room has been YouTube’s fastest-growing platform for years — Alphabet’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that watch time is growing across YouTube “with particular strength in Shorts and in the living room.” Even as YouTube continues to dominate basically all facets of the entertainment business, the arrow on your TV still points up.

The trend hasn’t changed in forever, but YouTube has spent the last couple of years finally doing something about it. It launched a way to sync your phone and your TV, so you can watch a video on the big screen and interact with it on the small one. Earlier this year, the company redesigned the TV interface to make it easier to find comments, links, and channel pages while you’re watching a video. It redesigned those channel pages, so content starts playing more quickly on your TV. It added collaborative playlists, so multiple people can sit around and program the big screen.  

Today, along with all those stats, YouTube announced a new feature called Watch With, which lets creators add their own commentary and analysis to sports content in real time. For years, YouTube has seen viewers and creators hack this kind of setup together, says Kurt Wilms, YouTube’s senior director of product for TV. “They’ll put the commentary on their computer or their phone, and then they’ll put the game on their TV.” Now there’s no futzing with two screens. The feature is starting with sports, but Wilms says you can expect to see it all over YouTube soon. “There’s the Apple keynote,” he offers by way of example. “All the creators talking about that, you can imagine with Watch With.”

Getting the living room experience right has always been tricky for YouTube. The company has always tried to make the platform feel the same no matter how you’re consuming it — the theory is that YouTube should feel like YouTube no matter what screen you’re looking at and that creators shouldn’t have to think about all the platforms individually but just focus on making stuff for YouTube as a whole. That’s tricky enough to get right across mobile and desktop, but TVs are a completely different beast. You’re usually farther away from the screen; you don’t have easy access to a full keyboard; let’s be honest, you’re probably also still looking at your phone.

YouTube is very much trying to become a premium streaming service

Wilms tells me that one easy way to think about YouTube in the living room is as a study in extremes. On the one hand, it’s the biggest screen in your house and almost certainly the place you do your most dedicated and focused watching. That’s why YouTube built the quicker-playing channels and why it created a new Shows page that lets creators organize their videos more like a Netflix series. It has invested in Primetime Channels and Sunday Ticket and lots of other high-end content. YouTube is very much trying to become a premium streaming service, without losing focus on creators.

But on the other hand, lots of people use their TVs as a sound system or simply want some background TV. “The TV is the new home stereo,” Wilms says. Music is huge on living room YouTube, and he says that’s why podcasts are booming, too; you’re just putting on something to listen to while you do dishes or clean up, but now there’s also something to look at.

As YouTube has grown on TVs, it has become a bigger part of the creator economy — the company said earlier this year that the number of creators making a majority of their revenue from TV viewing is up more than 30 percent since last year. The question for those creators, then, and for YouTube, is what to do about that. Should creators start uploading different kinds of videos aimed at the viewer on their couch instead of on their phone? Should they make videos that fans can listen to instead of watch? 

Wilms acknowledges that the TV audience might want something slightly different from other YouTube platforms. He says creators are asking for better platform-specific analytics and hints that maybe YouTube shows should be treated like TV shows on IMDb and findable on platforms like JustWatch. But he says he’s convinced that it can all still feel like YouTube, too. “Our model is to bring all of YouTube to the TV,” he says. “How does it work on the TV, without burdening the creators or making them do different things?” 

That’s been the question for a while now. Can YouTube be super interactive and super immersive, equal parts lean forward and lean back? Can it be home to all your favorite vloggers and the next big hit show? The company thinks it can. And to be fair, history says it’s right — it already dominates watch time across platforms, is one of the biggest platforms in music, is rapidly eating podcasting, is now a major cable competitor, and much more. If YouTube can make the big screen and the small screen feel like the same screen, it’ll become even more unstoppable. But that won’t be easy to get right.

I joke to Wilms that the solution is obviously to just build a television, and he’s fairly clear that’s not going to happen. But he’s dead set on being all over the one you already have.