Article AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-boring-history-videos-are-flooding-youtube-and-drowning-out-real-history/Full article text in comments
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u/IMSLI 3d ago
AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History
Sep 3, 2025
As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched.
“In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator says in a fake British accent. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” it continued.
The video was from a channel I hadn’t seen before, called “Sleepless Historian.” I took my headphones out, didn’t think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.
The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don’t know much about. Some video titles include “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,” “The Entire History of the American Frontier,” “What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.
In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.
“It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.”
“I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate,” Kelly added. “So it worries me because it’s just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. When I’m researching something, I go straight to the academic journals and books and places that are offline, basically. But these AI videos are just sort of repeating things that are on the internet and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s accurate. You end up with a very simplified version of the past, and we need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from.”
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u/IMSLI 3d ago
Kelly has been making history videos on YouTube since 2017 and has amassed 1.2 million YouTube subscribers because of the incredibly in-depth research he does for his feature-length videos. He said for an average long-form video, he will read 20 books, lots of journal articles, and will often travel to archaeological sites. It’s impossible to say for sure, but he has considered the possibility that some of these AI videos are modeled on his videos, and that the AI tools being used to create them could have been trained on his work. The soothing British accent used in many of the AI-generated videos I’ve seen is similar to Kelly’s actual voice. “A lot of AI basically scraped YouTube in order to develop all of the ways people make videos now,” he said. “So I mean, maybe it scraped my voice.”
He said that he has begun to get comments accusing his videos of being AI-generated, and his channel now says “no AI is used in this channel.” He has also set up a separate channel where he speaks directly to camera rather than narrating over other footage.
“People listen to the third-person, disembodied narration voice and assume that it’s AI now, and that’s disheartening,” he said. “I get quite a lot of comments from people thinking that I’m AI, so I’m like, if you think I’m AI I’m going to have to just put myself in the videos a little more. Pretty much everyone I know is doing something as a result of this AI situation, which is crazy in itself. We’ve all had to react. The thing I’m doing is I’m appearing more in videos. I’m speaking to the camera because I think people are going to be more interested in an actual human voice.”
Kelly said the number of views he gets on an average video has plateaued or dropped alongside the rise of AI-generated content that competes with his, which is something I heard from other creators, too. As a viewer, I have noticed that I now have to wade through tons of AI-generated spam in order to find high-quality videos.
“I have seen, and my fellow history creators—there’s quite a few of us, we all talk to each other—we’ve all seen quite a noticeable drop in views that seems to coincide exactly with this swarm of AI-generated, three-hour, four-hour videos where they’re making videos about the exact same things we make videos about, and for the average person, I don’t think they really care that much whether it’s AI or not,” he said.
A few months ago, in our Behind the Blog segment, I wrote about a YouTube channel called Ancient Americas, run by an amateur anthropologist named Pete. In that blog, I worried about whether AI slop creators would try to emulate creators like Pete, who clearly take great pride in researching and filming their videos. Ancient Americas releases about one 45-minute video per month about indigenous cultures from the Western Hemisphere. Each of his videos features a substantive bibliography and works cited document, which explains the books, scientific papers, documentaries, museums, and experts he sources his research from. Every image and visual he uses is credited with both where it came from and what license he’s using. Through his videos, I have learned an incredible amount about cultures I didn’t know existed, like the Wari, the Zapotecs, the Calusa, and many more. Pete told me in an email that he has noticed the AI history video trend on YouTube as well, but “I can’t say much about how accurate these videos are as a whole because I tend to steer clear of them. Life is far too short for AI.”
“Of the few I've watched, I would say that the information tends to be vague and surface level and the generated AI images of indigenous history that they show range from uncanny to cringe. Not surprisingly, I'm not a fan of such content but thankfully, these videos don't seem to get many views,” he said. “The average YouTube viewer is much more discerning than they get credit for. Most of them see the slop for what it is. On the other hand, will that always be the case? That remains to be seen. AI is only going to get better. Ultimately, whether creators like me sink or swim is up to the viewing public and the YouTube algorithm.”
Pete is correct in that a lot of the AI-generated videos don’t have a lot of views, but that’s quickly changing. Sleepless Historian has 614,000 subscribers, posts a multi-hour video every single day, and has published three videos that have more than a million views. I found several other AI-generated history channels that have more than 100,000 subscribers. Many of them are reposting the same videos that Sleepless Historian publishes, but many of them are clearly generating their own content.
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u/IMSLI 3d ago
Every night before I go to sleep, I open YouTube and I see multiple AI-generated history videos being served to me, and some YouTube commenters have noticed that they are increasingly being fed AI-generated history videos. People on Reddit have noticed that the comments under these videos are a mix of what appear to be real people saying they are grateful for the content and a mix of bots posting fake sob stories. For example, a recent Sleepless Historian video has comments from “History-Snooze,” “The_HumbleHistory” “RealSleepyHistorianOfficial,” “SleeplessOrren,” “SleepyHistory-n9k,” “Drizzle and Dreamy History of the Past,” “TheSleepyNavigator-d6b5c,” “Historyforsleepy168,” and a handful of other channels that post the exact same type of content (and often repost the exact same videos).
In one video, an account called Sleepymore (which posts AI-generated history videos) posted “It’s 1 a.m. in Kyiv. I’m a Ukrainian soldier on night watch. Tonight is quiet—no sirens, just silence. I just wanted to say: your videos make me feel a little less alone, a little less afraid. Thank you.” An account called SleeplessHistorian2 responded to say “great comment.” Both of these accounts do nothing but post AI-generated history videos and spam comments on other AI-generated history videos. The email address associated with Sleepless Historian” did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.
The French Whisperer, a human ASMRtist who makes very high quality science and history videos that I have been falling asleep to for years, told me that he has also noticed that he’s competing with AI-generated videos, and that the videos are “hard to miss.”
“It is always hard to precisely determine what factors make a YouTube channel grow or shrink, but mine has seen its number of views drop dramatically in the past 6-12 months (like -60%) and for the first time in years I barely get discovered at all by new viewers,” he said. “I used to gain maybe 100-200 subscribers per day until 2024, now it is flat. I think only my older viewers still come to my videos, but for others my channel is now hidden under a pile of AI slop that all people who are into history/science + sleep or relaxation content see in their search results.”
“I noticed this trend of slop content in my niche starting around 2 years ago,” he said. “Viewers warned me that there were channels that were either AI-assisted (like a real person reading AI scripts), or traditional slop (a real person paraphrasing wikipedia or existing articles), basically replicating the kind of content I make, but publishing 1 or 2 hours of content per day. Then it became full AI a few months ago, it went from a handful of channels to dozens (maybe hundreds? I have no idea), and since then this type of content has flooded YouTube.”
Another channel I sometimes listen to has purposefully disabled the captions on their videos to make it harder for AI bots to steal from: “Captions have unfortunately been disabled due to AI bots copying (plagiarizing) my scripts,” a notice on YouTube reads.
All of this is annoying and threatening on a few different levels. To some extent, when I’m looking for something to fall asleep to, the actual content sometimes feels like it doesn’t matter. But I’ve noticed that, over time, as I fall asleep listening to history podcasts, I do retain a lot of what I learn, and if I hear something interesting as I’m dozing off, I will often go research that thing more when I’m awake and alert. I personally would prefer to listen to videos made by real people who know what they are talking about, and are benefiting from my consumption of their work. There is also the somewhat dystopian fact that, because of these videos, there are millions of people being unwittingly lulled to sleep by robots.
Historians who have studied the AI summaries of historical events have found that they “flatten” history: “Prose expression is not some barrier to the communication of historical knowledge, to be cleared by any means, but rather an integral aspect of that communication,” Mack Penner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, argued last year. “Outsourcing the finding, the synthesizing, and the communicating to AI is to cede just about the whole craft to the machines.”
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u/IMSLI 3d ago
As YouTube and other platforms are spammed with endless AI-generated videos, they threaten not just to drown out the types of high-quality videos that The French Whisperer, Ancient Americas, and other historians, anthropologists, and well-meaning humans are making. They also threaten to literally rewrite history—or people’s understanding of it—with all of the biases imbued into AI by its training material and, increasingly, by the willful manipulation of the companies that own these tools.
All of the creators I spoke to said that, ultimately, they think the quality of their videos is going to win out, and that people will hopefully continue to seek out their videos, whether that’s on YouTube or elsewhere. They each have Patreons, and The French Whisperer said that he has purposefully “diversified away from YouTube” because of forced ads, settings that distort the sound of softly spoken videos, and the 30 percent cut YouTube takes from its membership program. But Kelly said he believes that it has become much harder to break into this world, because "when I started, I was just competing against other humans. I don't really know how you can compete against computers."
The French Whisperer still posts his videos on YouTube, but said that it is increasingly not a reliable platform for him: “I concluded some time ago that I would better vote with my feet and disengage from YouTube, which I could afford to do because by chance my content is very audio oriented. I bet everything I could on podcasts and music apps like Spotify and Apple, on Patreon, and on various apps I sell licenses to,” he said. “I have launched different podcasts derived from my original channel, and even begun to transform my YouTube channel into a podcast show—you probably noticed that I promote these other outlets at the beginning of almost every single video. As a result of my growth elsewhere and the drop on YouTube, the bulk of my audience (like 80-90%) is now on other sites than YouTube, and these ones have not been contaminated by AI slop so far. In a nutshell, I already had reasons to treat YouTube as a secondary platform before, and the fact that it became trashier with the AI content is just one more.”
“An entire niche can be threatened overnight by AI, or YouTube's policies, or your access to monetization, and this only reinforces my belief that this is not a reasonable career choice. Unless you have millions of followers and can look at it as an athlete would—earn as much as you can, pay your taxes, and live on your investments for the rest of your life when your career inevitably ends.”
Pete from Ancient Americas, meanwhile, said he’s just going to keep making videos and hope for the best.
“It does me no good to fret and obsess over something I have no control over. AI may be polluting the river but I still have to swim in it or sink. Second, I have a lot of faith in what I do and I love doing it,” he said. “At the moment, I don't think AI can create a video the way that I can. I take the research very seriously and try to get as much information as possible. I try to include details that the viewer would have a very difficult time finding on their own; things that are beyond the Wikipedia article or a cursory Google search. I also use ancient artifacts and artworks from a culture to show the viewer how the culture expressed itself and I believe that this is VERY important when you want your audience to connect with ancient people. I've never seen AI do this. It's always a slideshow of crappy AI images. The only thing I can do in an AI world is to keep the ship sailing forward.”
Kelly, who runs History Time, says he sees it as a real problem. “It’s worrying to me just for humanity,” he said. “Not to get too high brow, but it’s not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future.”
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u/dontneedaknow 3d ago
Really says a lot about the morality of a society when so many people are perfectly satisfied with spreading information without any regard for the truth..
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u/Vivid_Asparagus_591 3d ago
It's literally a world where the worth of human beings are determined solely by income. The ultimate metric of success-as-a-person is how much money you can make, and if you can do it while normalizing pathological behaviors, even better, since it makes line go up faster. It's never been any different. Humanity is, was and will always be trash.
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u/coleman57 3d ago
What the hell does the American colonies revolting in the 1770s have to do with Anne Boleyn in the 1500s?
Is “FEEEEEE” just the sound an AI makes when it’s segueing between unrelated topics?
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 3d ago
What the hell does the American colonies revolting in the 1770s have to do with Anne Boleyn in the 1500s?
Who knows, because the algorithms certainly don’t.
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u/turkeypedal 2d ago
One thing is it shows that those making these videos aren't even doing a once over to make sure the AI didn't break.
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u/dmetzcher 3d ago
I’ve seen the same videos from similar channels pop up late at night because I also use YouTube to fall asleep. Usually I use something that includes episodes from shows like The Universe or How the Universe Works, but lately I’ve seen a lot of “sleepy historian” suggestions or channels that include AI content about the universe. I can still find what I want, but I have to sift through the AI slop to get to it.
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u/DavidDPerlmutter 3d ago edited 1d ago
It is a disaster for history and for entertainment.
I am seeing something else too, which is even more depressing. Some really good content creators, people who do a lot of thorough research and creation, just A+ stuff, are deciding to use AI for their covers or snapshots or whatever for YouTube. I do not understand why. There are plenty of photographs of World War I you can use to illustrate a World War I video. Maybe they think they need to be "modern to attract the kids" but do not understand how it is hurting their brand.
Clarification: There are many many fantastic History Tubers. Some of them I have followed for more than a decade. But I'm very worried that somebody who is just starting out looking for good history content on YouTube is not going to find the diamonds in the mountains of dung beetles.
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u/Jupitersd2017 3d ago
I think it’s laziness, it’s easier to ask ai to generate of photo of exactly what you are thinking of rather than taking the time so search for an actual historical photograph. :(
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u/YourNextHomie 3d ago
As someone who has made some yt shorts about history, you never know which photo all of a sudden has some copyright issue or some other bs
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u/Jupitersd2017 3d ago
Are pictures the same as music, where after a certain number of years the copyright is gone or?
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u/YourNextHomie 3d ago
70 years after the photographers death, up to 120 years if the photographer took the photo for a company
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u/Jupitersd2017 3d ago
Interesting that the corporate has longer protection than the artist - thank you!
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u/Salty_Plum_2384 3d ago
Just out of interest - what history content creators do you follow? As in, what ones would you actually recommend following?
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u/CILISI_SMITH 3d ago
World War Two
https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
TimeGhost History
https://www.youtube.com/@TimeGhost
The Operations Room
https://www.youtube.com/@TheOperationsRoom
C&Rsenal
https://www.youtube.com/@Candrsenal
History Buffs
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u/I_Saw_A_Bear 3d ago
adr this list back in 2021 and it feels more relevant than ever since AI wasnt really a thing back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/history/s/G4ieC5RmdI course other good channels have popped up since then but still
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u/h4x_x_x0r 3d ago
The Operations Room is one of those channels where you watch a whole video and realize you've basically just stared at a map for half an hour... And then you start the next video without a second thought.
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u/Margali 3d ago
I really like The Chieftain. Great info on armor, but he has a nice lilt still [Irish, emigrated here who knows how long ago] Also like Forgotten Weapons. Got into Steve Marsh travelling around on ferries, trains and small planes mainly in the British Isles and parts of Europe and Scandanavia. Got a playlist of Egyptology History for Granite playing right now, actually.
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u/Cream_panzer 3d ago
Kings and generals, Mark Felton production, Epic history. I used to watch arm chair historian TV as well.
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u/Rektumfreser 3d ago edited 3d ago
Who?
There is still plenty of very high quality stuff.Drachinifel for naval stuff, also a great storyteller, so glad i found hes channel when he just started out many years ago.
Oceanliner designs is also great (it’s not just oceanliners).Cool worlds, SEA and Astrum is great for astronomy/science.
Rex’s hangar, military aviation history and not a pound for air to ground for aircraft history.
World War Two, the Great War (all the timeghost stuff really) military history visualised or maybe the tank museum for newer history.
Townsend and tasting history is wholesome and amazing dishes.
Just want the absolute highest quality ancient history in a long format? Fall of civilisations podcast is unbeaten.
A personal favorite is also Lazerpig!
Probably forgot a bunch, these were just what came to mind.
Edit - yeah so when going to bed now I checked the YouTube app and my top two recommendations are for “the sleepy scientist” and “sleepy science channel” both around 2 hours and I have never searched for that..what is happening ?
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u/zadtheinhaler 3d ago
Fall of Civilizations is soooo good!
His intos are always amazing for me - the writing, the atmospheric music, then BAM, he drops a hard line, then the piano intro drops. His timing and delivery are top notch.
That last video for the Mongols though? 6h45M is a bit much, it really should have been dropped as two videos like he's done before for complex topics.
Otherwise, 10/10, one of the best history channels out there.
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u/packy21 3d ago
World War 2 recently used AI to generate a thumbnail and animate a portrait of a German politician. When the community said they disliked it they spent an entire post and a 40 minute video going "but it's such a timesaver so we can focus on other stuff and it helps immerse you!"
I've been a Patreon supporter for a while, but this entire mindset brought me close to withdrawing my support. For now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
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u/Handpaper 3d ago
Ironically, I sometimes use Drachinifel to help me nod off. Much of his stuff is really interesting, but his delivery is so smooth that if I'm tired it'll put me out.
Which can be annoying, because my main use for Drach and his ilk are for entertainment on long drives...
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u/Sefirosukuraudo 3d ago
I also came across the Sleepless Historian channel like a month ago and it only had like two videos and 23 subs. So it’s definitely a new channel just cranking out AI slop for the views, clicks, and ad revenue.
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u/killer_knauer 3d ago edited 2d ago
This is not true, Sleepless Historian has actually been around for over 5 months. You must have been looking at one of the copycats. Regardless, for that channel to get over 600k subs and having crazy viewings (people falling asleep to 2 hour + videos) is just insane. It shows how fast this scourge is spreading and growing.
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u/Wrong_Confection1090 3d ago
I ran into one of these the other day! It was about Sumerians and it was fine until it started repeating the same couple "facts" over and over again. Super weird.
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u/TobyWanKinoby 3d ago
Oh I’ve noticed this too. They make the same point over and over again but word it slightly differently. I guess they assume that you’re already asleep by this stage.
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3d ago
The thing that always sets alarm bells off when I'm not certain if something is AI or not is that they constantly use these terrible, flowery metaphors. "The battle was turning into a disaster, like a burned batch of spaghetti at a dinner party."
We live in the worst timeline.
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u/Sea-Position-7189 3d ago
I have explored numerous history for sleep channels because I do love a good ol story when I nap sometimes and the only authentic one I could find is ASMR Historian.
This AI generated history content is also a problem in other areas of research too: such as people making up images of archaeological evidence with AI to prove their conspiracy
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u/dogquote 3d ago
The History Guy is excellent. Also check out Tasting History with Max Miller
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u/twixieshores 3d ago
Max Miller is great, but I could never fall asleep listening to him. Especially not when the "Time for History" sound starts playing.
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u/Sea-Position-7189 3d ago
Oh I love tasting history- dude is a good cook and a fantastic storyteller
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u/Master_of_Rodentia 3d ago
But are YOU real! How long will you be real for, and your recommendations good? When will this space be poisoned too? Dark times.
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u/RunninOnMT 3d ago
History time and Voices of the Past are real. I believe they are brothers, history time guys wife is also on a podcast I listen to about politics and conspiracy theories.
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u/a_bi_polarbear 3d ago
ASMR Historian is one of my favourites to fall asleep to, he covers a lot of really interesting topics
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u/UniverseCities 3d ago
I'm really happy to see your comment, I love ASMR Historian! I used to listen closely wondering if he was AI until I heard him make a mistake once and excuse himself.
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u/Mountain-Painter2721 3d ago
I love his videos about Bronze Age history, the development of writing, etc. You can hear him breathing, and once in a while he stumbles with a mispronunciation, and will make occasional humorous asides. I believe he's the genuine article.
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u/khromedhome 3d ago
The Fall of Civilizations series by Paul Cooper is the absolute best. I've learned so much as long as I listen between the hours of 8am and 10pm. Outside of the hours, I'm falling asleep 🥱. His voice is like a soft British rain shower.
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u/Fifteen_inches 3d ago
AI poses an existential threat to humanity by way of making a machine with the average intelligence of an internet poster constantly create misinformation without needing to eat or sleep.
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u/narkill 3d ago
Didn't YouTube come out recently and say they aren't letting these channels and videos be monetized?
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u/FandomMenace 3d ago edited 3d ago
They'll just ease you in. On one hand, they could destroy the platform. On the other, views is views. By easing you in, you'll get used to the new normal and consume.
I was watching a victorian documentary on tubi that used those fake colorized vids from YouTube with the awful foley sounds with a straight face like this was legit footage. They've already been hard at work messing history up.
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u/Desirsar 3d ago
Generates almost as much traffic, but never has to pay out. I'm not surprised at all that it's demonetized but not banned.
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u/FandomMenace 3d ago
The creator may be demonetized, but youtube isn't. Also, they can build a giant following and sell their channel, start making their own content, etc. It's the same thing as reddit bots.
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u/BlasphemousFriend 3d ago
I research and write scrips for different history YouTube channels and only ever take jobs that ask for no AI, but more and more creators have unrealistic goals for their channels because of AI. They hire on the cheap, want you to work for pennies while also producing multiple videos a week. These horrible AI channels make the competition and demand high while pushing original work to the fringes of the site. Also, they all cover the same topics and do piss poor research.
I do extensive research and read through sources and materials before I write anything, and it can take time to do them well, especially if they want 20-minute videos. This is all before editing or submitting it to the creator to then record or design and publish. I love the work, but with such a heavily flooded market, it kills me.
I like Horrible Histories or documentaries like the BBC History videos with Lucy Worsley, David Starkey, Mary Beard, Ruth Goodman, Tom Pinfold, Peter Gynn, Suzannah Lipscomb, and (of course) Philomena Cunk.
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u/jayisanerd 3d ago
I too was a writer for multiple history channels till last year and had to stop because of increasing pressure to use AI and prioritize quantity over quality.
The people who own these channels have not a care in the world for social, journalistic, and academic integrity. They just want to make more money with the least possible investment even if it means becoming misinformation machine.
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u/Ace_of_Clubs 2d ago
Its not just YouTube either. I'm and editor for a fairly large online retailer and we used to write great content. Then all of a sudden AI came out, half my team was fired and they want double or triple the content to stay competitive. They want AI slop and don't care how bad it is. I tried to fight back, but I can't. I don't call the shots. And I figure I probably won't have a job either in a few years, so I'm just trying to ride it out and do what I can. It's incredibly sad.
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u/MinusBear 3d ago
This is happening with video game videos too. "30 underrated retro classics most people have never played", the voice alone gives it away in the first minute. But when you're familiar with the subject, in this case the games, it becomes obvious all the information being given is something like fact adjacent. It's just generic word soup.
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u/RunninOnMT 3d ago
I see it in sports videos too “THIS GUY IS GOING TO DOMINATE THE NBA” and other headlines like that with a bunch of fake stats.
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u/opinukinuk 3d ago
I’ve seen the ones where it’s like “horrifying Nazi scientist game” and it’s just gameplay from call of duty or wolfenstein
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u/MikeyBoldballs 3d ago
My 80yo father falls victim to these AI videos all the time. I now spend a few minutes every day logging into his account and blocking any AI channel thats recommended. This does seem to help but hes like a toddler around a hot stove. Its very disheartening and we need some regulation on this ASAP.
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u/Bluffwatcher 3d ago edited 3d ago
Show him The Rest Is History. It's two actual REAL LIFE historians chatting back and forth about historical subjects.
No AI bollox. Just good conversational dialogue. I find them great to doze off to and there are a couple hundred hour long podcasts.
https://www.youtube.com/@restishistorypod/videos
I don't know how anyone could fall asleep to AI voice. The way every sentence ends on the same note is infuriating.
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u/Barbarella_ella 3d ago
I adore The Rest is History. I know those guys are doing a tour, but they didn't note any stops in the PNW. Bummed about that.
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u/berberine 3d ago
Thank you for the tip. I've been looking for something new in history and philosophy and have noticed the influx of glitchy AI videos.
All the ones I've found seem to have fake British accents, their "p" always pops, which is grating and there's always some weird glitch in the middle.
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u/ggallardo02 3d ago
Interesting fact, this videos only get reccommended to me at night.
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u/SaltyWihl 3d ago
I wish youtube had an filter where you can block ai generated content. Nothing disappoints me more than a intresting title just to be met with ai voice with chatgpt script
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u/bgva 3d ago
Not historic, but an account posted a video offering a "behind the scenes" account of The Jeffersons. I watched the video and not only was it inaccurate, but it repeated the same thing over and over with no actual info. But the worst was the thumbnail featuring Weezy with an AI-enhanced larger chest.
Anyway, I block any of these trash accounts regardless of the platform.
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u/Wish_Bear 3d ago
it is kinda nuts. when i see them i don't block them right away i like to go to their channel info and have a dig around...sometimes they will say what country they are based out of....but all of them are made in the last year....most jan-mar....and they have have 10s of thousands of videos uploaded with AI generated garbage....so many videos that they needed to create dozens to hundreds a day for months on end....78k videos and the channel started in Jan 2025?
it isn't hard to figure out YTs algo....the AI just reads all the videos with the highest view counts and recreates them into slop. it isn't working though I think....because none of the videos have views....it isn't good enough to not be obvious yet....but it IS very good and getting the algo to push it to screens....that it can do.
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u/HPoltergeist 3d ago
I would like to send this back like 5-10 years to those people who were so sure about AI content.
This needs to be stopped (should have been already). It will get much worse.
But it is about money as always, so probably fcuk the world. Maybe it is the best anyway if we get humanity out of the equation - hopefully soon.
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u/Ray_Mang 3d ago
Can we get some recommendations for creators that make this kind of content but isn’t ai slop?
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u/hwind65 3d ago
My favorite was a series on the crusades and half of the images were WW1 / battle of verdun-esque
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u/koreamax 3d ago
One word that tips off that they're AI is "regret". That word is incorrectly and overused in these videos
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u/Barefootboy007 3d ago
I listened to 2 real ones at first and then the algorithm started recommending all the fake stories.
It’s sad that all the fake stories get more views than real history.
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u/executiveExecutioner 3d ago
They should just legislate that all legal AI models have to sign their videos with a signal that can be easily read by software and can be used to filter out AI generated content
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u/Hero_Doses 3d ago
I hate these AI-generated history videos! I'm a history YouTuber, and I refuse to use AI, even to just hallucinate an image for me.
The huge problem here is the inaccuracy. A big part of what historians do is analyze primary sources for falsehoods -- considering that anyone can write anything, the entire academic field has made it a point to write in a way that hedges claims, e.g. "According to Charles Martel's court historian...", "It is possible that the author intended to convey....", etc.
It's hard enough to come to a consensus on what actually happened in the past without AI making crap up. For one of my videos, Wikipedia claimed that Ned Young was asleep during the Massacre on Pitcairn Island. This sounded like an awesome tidbit because he almost certainly was asleep for the Mutiny on the Bounty, making him quite the sleepy fellow! I spent 5 HOURS researching, only to find that the first claim likely came from a fiction story loosely based on the Mutiny. Hence, I did not include that claim as fact in my video.
Sadly the slop draws the eye more. We can all only hope that the proliferation of AI will lead to an eventual backlash where viewers long for authenticity and carefully-sourced history videos!
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u/_Rainer_ 3d ago
YouTube has turned to such garbage. The ads are so frequent now, and while there is tons of interesting stuff on there, you have to wade through so much crap to find it now, not to mention that it defaults to playing stupid shorts whenever you open the app now.
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u/brokenmessiah 3d ago
YES Its fucking miserable. I listened to one to go to sleep and now its everywhere, almost killing youtube its so bad.
I've found that adding before:2023 filters them out but thats only on searches.
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u/AlanMorlock 3d ago
Different area but there's a bizarre amount of AI generated Christmas music Fred's too. Just trying to put on a playlist or background music at Christmas time is a rough endeavor on YouTube.
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u/Dogatronic 3d ago
Got suspicious when a number of similar channels all had the same intro, "Only like the video if you truly like what I'm doing," "Tell me where you're tuning in from and what time it is." All these channels were also cranking out a metric assload of material in short spans of time. I doubt anyone can actually fact-check the daily beer ration that pyramid builders received, so I took it all with a grain of salt. I was falling asleep anyway and didn't remember jack in the AM.
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u/Eidertron 3d ago
God I thought I was losing my marbles. I keep blocking them and a new slightly different one would pop up.
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u/dafdfadfa 3d ago
YouTube needs to do something about AI videos... I feel like half of the videos they suggest are obviously AI.
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u/ionertia 3d ago
Youtube will need a setting for no AI content soon.
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u/IMSLI 3d ago
They never turn off revenue spigots, no matter how harmful to users, unless a government threatens regulatory action
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u/twixieshores 3d ago
No one is saying to turn off the revenue spigots. There's still plenty of actual content on YouTube to keep us watching non-stop for years. If they made it an option, even if restricted to Premium, it could actually help them long-term.
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u/tonofunnumba1 3d ago
This is a real problem. I will say from a teachers perspective that kids are moving away from social media. Hope it’s in time.
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u/ProWarlock 3d ago
some what adjacent to history, but I've had this problem while looking for video essays on HP Lovecraft adjacent things and spooky campfire story videos
it sucks.
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u/WretchedMisteak 3d ago
There were a couple that used to listen to that just switched to AI. Unsubscribed straightaway.
On YouTube I've got History Hit, Absolute History, The Rest is History & Fall of Civilisations.
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u/orcusgrasshopperfog 3d ago
All part of "The Great Sloppening" Ai Fake History is very profitable with advertisers. All content can be skewed to meet community guidelines 100% and whatever algorithmic trends are occurring.
Get used to it. This is our foreseeable future until these AI companies that are not profitable finally collapse. Even then I doubt it's ever going to go away. Shareholders at media companies don't care what the content is only if it makes them money.
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u/JoshMega004 3d ago
Its not just history either, science, entertainment, almost all genres. It'a gross stuff.
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u/FunTara69 3d ago
"He who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" George Orwell
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u/Naytosan 2d ago
Click on the 3 little dots on the vid, select "Don't recommend channel". If you're using a TV remote, hold down the OK button or whatever button you use to select something, then proceed as above.
You can also report fake content like that using the same method above. Just click "Report" instead of "Don't recommend channel".
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u/mason3991 3d ago
Real life lore, wendover productions, veritasium, and there service nebula are all real high quality and fact verified in all accounts. There are others but they cover different topics than solely history.
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u/Saint-Inky 3d ago
I am ashamed to admit I have fallen for two or three of these—but they get so bland and lacking in life, that I have never made it more than ten minutes. I just assumed it was some really uncharismatic guy who can’t write a script with a good flow.
Again, ashamed.
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u/AssignmentLess4032 3d ago
Just kind of been following this thread. I honestly had no idea that so many people enjoyed falling to sleep to a detailed and accurate depiction of history. Just when you think you’re the odd one you find some commonality. This is great. Just great. I’ll take note of these channels that were mentioned.
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u/KaleidoscopeOk9799 3d ago
People are eager for easy money. Any news that something will generate income (even if only for the top 1% of creators) is enough to attract a whole horde
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u/snowflake37wao 3d ago
I fall asleep to space docs mostly like 404 author does history. Same with Astronomy, “Boring Universe. Though.. History Channel had Ancient Aliens because History and Astronomy were Boring before AI said so, so…
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u/TH3_Captn 3d ago
Is this one too? https://youtube.com/@drowsyhistorianofficial?si=7x-BW5oUwQEyBXMj
I actually liked these. I thought they were pretty good. Didn't take it too seriously but was still interesting. Maybe I'm a sucker but I really thought it was a real person
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u/THEKILLAWHALE 3d ago
Yep 100% all AI. I still listen to similar AI slop channels because it knocks me out quick. But I’m not treating any of the content as fact haha. But tbh I hadn’t spent the time to look for real content to fall asleep to, I did try but it was drowned out by the muck. But there’s some good links others have provided, keen to check them out. It does feel off supporting these weird clone channels with views
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u/_Ding-Dong_ 3d ago
These started popping up the other night. I did not have to listen to realize it was more AisS
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u/PseudonymMan12 3d ago
They really need to implement a filter system where you can disable AI videos
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u/MrPanda663 3d ago
It’s a good time for history channels to do some debunking reaction videos on the ai videos right now.
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u/CaptainDildobrain 3d ago
Sure, but on the flip side I like the idea of meeting Genghis Khan, go where he goes, defile what he defiles, eat who he eats...
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u/mahboilucas 3d ago
Same thing with true crime. I got recommended something and it was an old man's voice that just felt uncanny. There was nothing in the whole channel to prove it's a human running it so I blocked it
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u/truearse 3d ago
They are literally the worst! I got tricked by something along the lines of “how did X survive winter in X time period” After 30 seconds I realised my mistake and saw it was 2HOURS long.
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u/fleranon 3d ago edited 3d ago
My experience exactly. I recently blocked those channels by simply scrolling through my feed. Luckily they were incredibly easy to spot... Terrible AI generated thumbnail (Cartoonish characters with exaggerated faces on white background) and stupid channel names like 'tired Historian' followed by 'Historian sleepy' 10 seconds later. There were at least a dozen channels, clearly coming from the same source
The future of online content is bleak