[OPEN POST] - Artificial Intelligence, ISIS and YouTube. (November Update)

Hey everyone! I hope all of you exceptionally wonderful people are doing exceptionally wonderful today!
The Outer Wilds video is finally out and producing this little thing was quite something. It was definitely the most complex video I ever produced and I’m super happy with how it turned out.

Sadly, the YouTube algorithm was not.

As a matter of fact, it is my worst-performing video launch since 2016.

“Tips, Tricks, and Ideas with Piranha Plants” pulled more than double the amount of views within 48 hours after release than the Outer Wilds video did. (To be fair, “Tips, Tricks, and Ideas with Piranha Plants is also peak Piranha Plant Tips Mario Maker YouTube.”)

And that sucks.

It sucks even more because all of the video metrics are fantastic.
It has really good interaction rates, the like-to-view ratio is insanely high, the clickthrough rate (how often someone clicks the video if they get it recommended) is higher than usual, the reception in the comments is extraordinarily nice, the average watch time of the video is a bit higher than the channel averaged so far and so on.

All the metrics that I have control over are pointing towards the video doing great.
So why is the video not performing one might ask?
Well, that is only half the story here.
See, not only is the video pulling a lot fewer views - it is also only doing a fraction of the ad revenue that the channel usually pulls.
The Majora’s Mask or the Hollow Knight video did about five times the ad revenue per view. For whatever reason YouTube is running only a fraction of as many ads on the video as they usually do.
To understand what is going on here, we first have to chat about something different.

We have to chat about AI.
But not about ChatGPT for once.

Let’s travel back in time together and let’s talk about artificial intelligence in ancient times.

The year is 2017.
It’s a simpler time.
Beyonce just announced that she is pregnant with twins, Trump is having a cup of covfefe and the New England Patriots mounted the biggest comeback in SuperBowl History.
And YouTube?

Well, YouTube is in trouble.

See, 2017 is a time not only defined by fun pop culture events but sadly also by Islamic terrorism all across Europe.
Hundreds of people died in dozens of Islamic terrorist attacks that year.
Terror attacks that often have been carried out with self-built bombs.
Self-built bombs that the terrorists learned how to build on ISIS YouTube “how to” videos.

ISIS was using YouTube to share terrorist knowledge back in 2017.
And YouTube was monetizing those videos.

All of a sudden YouTube is at the center of a well-deserved shitstorm.
They ran Coca-Cola ads in front of terrorist content, they rolled out Trump campaign ads before bomb-building tutorials and happily recommended “how to murder someone” tutorials to everyone who seemed remotely interested in it.

Understandably advertisers weren’t that enthusiastic about that.
On the contrary: Advertisers grumpy!

In droves, they left the platform.
Those advertisers spent a lot of money to get their shiny brands that shiny.
They don’t want this shiny being stained by terrible terrorism.

So YouTube was searching for a solution to make the kibbly advertisers all happy again.
And they found a solution.

A solution using back then revolutionary tech.
They solved the problem with artificial intelligence.
They trained an algorithm to automatically detect whether a YouTube video was actually terrorist content.
An algorithm able to differentiate between beauty and bomb-building tutorials.
An algorithm able to detect the difference between shooter games and real-life shooters.
An algorithm that automatically detects if a video is fit for advertisers or not, and that shadowbans all content that is a danger for their precious advertisers.

It took them only a few weeks to craft this marvelous algorithm.
They rolled out their gigantic achievement of human engineering.

And it was exactly the shitshow you’d expect it to be.

Let’s change the scenery for a second.
Let’s leave the hectic YouTube offices of Silicon Valley behind, and let’s travel together over the Atlantic, into the heart of Europe. Let’s visit my self from six years ago.

I am sitting somewhere in a sunny glade in the center of the Alps - staring into my notebook in disbelief.

All of my new Mario Maker Tips and Tricks videos are suddenly only reaching a fraction of the people they reached before.
Overnight I lost about 90% of my reach on YouTube.
And with it, I lost about 90% of my income.

Which leaves us with a question.
What had happened to my channel six years ago?
Had I done anything any differently one might ask?
To which the answer is no.
I was producing the same content as before, and the videos have - if anything - just gotten better.
Nothing I did had happened.
The new terrorism-stopping super AI had happened.
My videos got flagged for being unfit for advertisers.
YouTube’s artificial intelligence thought my Mario Maker videos were potentially terrorist content.

So I’ll never know exactly what happened in that terribly stressful time in 2017 but my best guess is that YouTube thought my Mario Maker videos were potentially ISIS bomb tutorials.
And … as bonkers as that may sound … it makes a surprising amount of sense when we think about it in detail.

See.
The videos were about building contraptions.
We often wired a bob omb to a trigger, which then caused it to explode once Mario got close, killing everything in its proximity. We had bombs explode, we were killing plumbers left and right, we were wiring all of those contraptions together, and worst of it all: The videos were definitely tutorials.

It took me forever to figure out what the problem was, but I believe YouTube’s stellar AI actually believed my family-friendly videos to be bomb-building tutorials.
So I’ll never know what was going on behind YouTube’s closed curtain here.
But.
I stopped to name bob ombs in my videos and started to refer to them as boom bots.
I stopped to say something explodes in the videos and started to say it goes boom instead.
I stopped saying we killed Mario but started to refer to us ouching our poor plumber instead.
And so on.

And suddenly my reach came back.

Little by little, until my videos were once again reaching people.
And the little yellow light showing that my videos were a potential threat - not only for humankind but also for advertisers - started to flash green again.

Here’s the thing with AIs. They sometimes make mistakes.
Humans make mistakes.
And since it’s humans that make AIs - AIs end up making mistakes as well.
The only problem.
Humans can recognize their mistakes and fix them.
AI’s can not.

For most people, this year is the first time they are really confronted with systems running on artificial intelligence. Everyone everywhere appears to be extremely excited because of this.
I had the honor of working within AI-moderated systems for over half a decade now.
And to put it mildly, I do not share this excitement.

So what has all of this to do with the Outer Wilds video again, one might ask?
Well, I believe the same thing that happened to me in 2017, happened to the Outer Wilds video.

YouTube has hidden algorithms running, that try to shadowban content that they believe to be potentially problematic.
I believe the Outer Wilds video somehow managed to trigger such a flag.
How did it do it?
I have no idea.

Maybe I said “explosion” and “death of everything that is” a bunch too often.
Maybe YouTube thinks the video is a reupload of a movie since it is about movie length and people probably interact with it in a way reminiscent of a movie.
Maybe discussing Nietzsche, God, and Faith is potentially problematic for advertisers.

I have honestly no idea.
It’s total arbitrariness, to be honest.
If this is what is going on, then there is nothing that I can do about it.

If it is just this video then it’s no big deal.
If I somehow managed to get a flag on the entire channel, however, then I can pack my things and look for another career.
Maybe becoming a failed fiction writer doesn’t sound that bad after all.

Though, we’ll probably be fine.

For now, I’m just eternally grumpy and grateful.
I’m grumpy because I honestly don’t want to deal with YouTube’s shit all the time.
And I’m grateful for the fact that there are you wonderful people here on Patreon.
You wonderful people, that keep the lights on when something like this happens.

I usually say at the end of the videos that the video would not have been possible without your support.
I don’t mean that as a catchphrase.
It’s the truth.

Without your support, I would have worked the last six weeks of my life on a video that now pulled exactly 20 euros and 91 cents of ad revenue because YouTube’s hidden AI bugged out.
And I would now work on my next videos with the full knowledge that something like this can happen anytime again.
That would not be sustainable.
It is however sustainable for me as of right now because of your generous support.

And for this a huge and honest, straight from the heart thank you.

Hooray.

So the Outer Wilds video bombed and it is arguably ISIS's fault. Who knew!

So what’s next? Well, I’ll have to change up my plans a bit because of this tragic mishappening.
This little incident sadly killed all the momentum that the perspective channel had going and because of this, I have to be super careful doing videos that I can be sure get at least a decent amount of traffic.
The next video will be as planned a Mario Wonder critique. That one shouldn’t take terribly long to produce, since I already played the game.
Expect that one in early December.
Wind Waker will have to wait a bit afterward, however, as we’ll probably visit the Land’s Between first.

Elden Ring is very likely to have its DLC revealed at the games awards on the 7th of December.

I planned to do a video about Elden Ring soon anyway, and I’ll prioritize it now because interest in the game will massively rise soon and I need a video of which I can be sure that it gets decent traffic because of the trainwreck that this video launch ended up being - so Elden Ring is very likely the one after Mario.

Thank you again for your support - it’s invaluable to me - especially right now.

Lots of hugs!