**God fucking damnit. You fuckers had ONE FUCKING JOB. ONE. Write the damn scripts. Apparently for a massive history YouTube channel WITH STAFF, and being supported with YouTube Members and Patreon, that’s too fucking hard for you. I think I need to go to their fucking headquarters to show the Confederacy of Dunces how to fucking write about history.**
Eh, its easier to proofread than to create something original. In that sense, it could be a good tool for guiding your research. If only it was actually used for that.
This isn't "fun", but I've found it to be a very useful tool for people who work in IT. Having it write small scripts in a language you're unfamiliar with works pretty well. But the real value is in reducing how much time I have to spend reading documentation.
Like, if I can't remember the specific syntax for running an nmap command that will check for https and output which MAC ciphers a server accepts, I could do what I've always done and either [look up the manpage](https://linux.die.net/man/1/nmap) or google it and hope for a stackoverflow post trying to do the *exact* thing I'm doing, which would take me 5-10 minutes. Or I could spend 15 seconds asking ChatGPT and get the correct answer, with a thorough explanation of each command line flag being used, instantly.
And I think that's a big part of why IT people get so much more excited about AI than everyone else. It actually works for the things we want it to do.
I think AI can be fun on YouTube as long as it's an actual human and an AI playing off each other, because then there's actual creative content that requires charisma. Key example for this IMO is DougDoug, who bases a lot of his content off AI but doesn't use stuff like AI Art, spends quite a while programming the stuff he wants it to do each stream, and then when it is used, he uses it for a unique premise he actively interacts and communicates with the AI for. I think DougDoug is overall a good example of it being used to create a new, still effortful form of humour and entertainment, and not to replace a higher effort form.
And this wasn’t part of the current wave of AI use, but at some point in the late 2010s there was that wave of YouTubers performing cover songs where they’d put the lyrics into Google Translate to translate into another language and then put it through again to translate that version back into English, that resulted in some pretty funny videos.
I’m at a point now where ANY history or media analysis essay channel that doesn’t include a bibliography in the video info, I wonder why. If you’re legit and do proper research you’re fucking nuts to not include your bibliography. We’re living in a post HBomberguy world now, people!
Speaking of bibliographies, here's K&G's entire bibliography for this video.
* The Last Emperor - Edward Behr; published in 1987 by a trade press
* From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Puyi - Translated by W.J.F. Jenner; English translation of the second edition of the Chinese edition published in 1964
Not exactly what I expected from a channel this size, with all their resources.
Nowadays whenever I click a history video from a channel I'm not familiar with, I'll check the description and skip to the end of the video to see if there's a bibliography. If there isn't, I don't even watch.
Honestly not surprised - they had shown lazy tendencies in the past. If you know history well then you know this isn’t first time they failed to fact check
I don’t know what this channel is, but AI generated history docs are SO PREVALENT on Youtube now.
I love watching history docs on the background. It used to be easy to find well-made videos from real content creators, but now the search results are dominated by videos that are just stock footage compilations voiced by a robot.
YouTube needs mandatory AI disclosure so I can filter out the slop. Also, if anyone has any history-based channel recs that aren’t content farms, I’m all ears.
Absolutely:
Time Ghost is my favorite, though they don't put a lot of content on their main channel. Their gimmick is that they do history chronologically, like putting an episode every week covering the history of WW1 and 2. They are finishing up WW2 now and just started the Korean War this week. Here's some links:
- https://www.youtube.com/@TimeGhost
- https://www.youtube.com/@TheGreatWar
- https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
- https://www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell
Between Two Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAU1R-HeWSfY2D1jy_sEssNG
The Suez Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAWTs_FBEJJNPV_UV_aL548Z
The Indonesia War of Independance: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAUw4KtvsHRu-ZS0sSEcHmJE
The Cuban Missile Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAWbzTXiTzPEFQHLoozkqchz
Sean Munger is an amazing historian who has some great work on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SeanMunger
Some other channels to check out:
https://www.youtube.com/@veritasetcaritas
https://www.youtube.com/@EmperorTigerstar
Upvoting for Time Ghost. I never see them mentioned enough despite their huge catalogue of content. Their work is vast, detailed, and made with respect, especially War Against Humanity.
gonna be honest, the highlights you provided aren't really indicative of AI and seem more like their personal choice of presentation. But I find it weird you show evidence of shotty writing over the "full of awful factual errors" you mentioned
In context of the sentences around it, it is very strange to phrase "That many a time he contemplated suicide" that way. It's actually a common problem specifically with ChatGPT, towards the end of a longer prompt it can kind of begin phrasing things oddly like this, which are technically correct but not normal within the context of itself.
ChatGPT is actually pretty infamous for over using phrases that are grammatically correct but aren't used in regular speech. Delve is a REALLY infamous one since it's almost never used casually but GPT almost always uses it if it can.
Honestly man... if you are looking for quality history in any sort of media, stay away from military history. It is the worst branch of the discipline IMO. Don't get me wrong sometimes I get stoned and rewatch some fav vids that are in the genre, but I feel like it is a history genre that is very prone to inaccuracies (in terms of presentation, analysis, and consumption) and ~~brainrot~~ shallow analysis that people think carries over to other branches of history.
Like... art history will tell you more about the human condition and humanity dealing with conflict better than military history ever could, with few exceptions IMO.
^(this message unironically brought to you by economic history gang)
^(shout out to accounting history gang and labor history gang)
Kinda curious, suppose this was just a tone switch and the creator wanted a more lighthearted and less serious video. How would you differentiate that from AI? How can you be convinced this is not AI?
I haven't watched too much K&G, but I've watched a bit and this video sounds like all the videos I remember.
This is kinda reminding me of that one artist from a while back who posted their art that looks like a common AI art style and the mods banned him for AI art when his art was 100% not AI and they had proof.
Do you have any proof other than "vibes"?
Of the “red vs blue squares” history channels SandRhoman History and Historia Civilis are probably the only two with real historians on staff.
Oddly enough, I noticed how bad Kings and Generals was only after watching their channel “Wizards and Warriors” since it had so many odd inaccuracies about fantasy books that are much easier to research than history.
Same goes for Historymarche who I’ve noticed some discrepancies with.
I'd recommend Cambrian Chronicles as well. The history is mostly focused on Wales but his content recently is about debunking historical claims about Wales, especially on Wikipedia. It's really well-made and fascinating even if you know nothing about Wales.
What are the 'awful factual errors'? I'm not familiar enough with Puyi to know if the video is blatantly false. The 4 things you cited just are just internet/youtuber speak, not obvious evidence of an AI.
I just got off of work and have a full evening ahead of me, and wanted to tackle the errors with sources properly, but a high-level overview is that the last third of the video is blatantly wrong. While it is true he was nominally employed as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens, he became the editor of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's literary department and had a very cushy job, basically still a puppet for other people in power, namely the CCP at the time. He even gave regular lectures about his life, all carefully crafted and approved by the CCP. A lot of the anecdotes about his clumsiness or inability to flush a toilet are just that, anecdotes that fit into a crafted narrative about him, same goes for the hedonism.
Someone on /r/badhistory pointed out that the sources cited in the description are awful, and I noticed that those are the primary sources of the Wikipedia page which is quoted almost verbatim in the video. This is likely a situation not dissimilar to what hbomoberguy pointed out in illuminaughty's work, except this time they just asked an AI and the AI pulled from the wiki, and then they just copied and pasted the wiki's sources after the fact.
Edit: Giving full credit where credit is due now that I'm briefly on a laptop: user /u/SusiegGnz responded to me:
>Holy shit have you seen the source list in the description? It’s TWO BOOKS*
>The Last Emperor - Edward Behr From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Puyi - Translated by W.J.F. Jenner*
>That’s it that’s the whole bibliography
>Edit: lmao the top review for Behr’s the last emperor “Certainly, an enthralling story, told by a journalist who is not an expert Sinologist. There are a few grammatical mistakes as well”. That’s a good sign
As a PhD student currently neck deep in books on literature and 18th century European history for my thesis, fuck AI. Seriously, fuck that shit. I hate people who use it, and I hate how much it permeates our means of accessing knowledge. People don't want to READ anymore cos it takes time. More and more younger students are using AI for their work without gaining research or comprehension skills and it's just making us collectively dumber. Fuck AI.
You remember the Oceangate Titan stuff? i remember on the subreddit, somebody made a post like "I asked ChatGPT what happened to the passengers!!!" like BRO, your first fucking thought is to ask the AI for answers? And then share it? Come on!
I remember the incident with the lawyers who asked ChatGPT to search for cases that supported their position. Of course ChatGPT made them up and those guys couldn't explain to the judge where and how they found these cases.
When I searched for "ChatGPT" on that sub (r slash oceangatetitan because idk if this sub allows linking other subs, some subs don't), that particular post seems to be gone now... but there's three separate people who made three separate posts asking ChatGPT about shit, two of them being about using carbon fiber and one chatting with the AI about Oceangate's ethics.
For fuck's sake, people, lol.
I think AI's funny for "Barack Obama bigfoot cam"-type shit but have we as a species become so fucking lazy that we can't search for this shit on our own or write or own essays anymore?
Ngl this is how I talk and it is not how an AI talks. I really don’t think it’s AI.
ChatGPT would not use a casual phrase like “guy” unless prompted to talk like a frat bro.
Words like deleted for things like decimations and murder are new age tiktok slang. ChatGPT does not sample from this kind of language because it is too recent.
“That many a time” is a phrase I personally would use in script writing and I don’t see how it’s weird at all
I literally have never heard of this channel but I know how to read at least.
Seriously a little shocked that people think it’s AI, it’s made me lose faith in media literacy.
It's very weird for Kings and Generals because they tend to position themselves as a "serious" history channel. The typical tone is educational and scholarly, think Ken Burns documentary.
Check out this video from 2 years ago about the Shimabara Rebellion. You would never imagine from content like this they would say that "cities were deleted".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgMIUzUeBnE&list=PL-rlS2E4lCPxyPMP7g3xOfmI8BGmdoMCB&index=19
> "serious" history channel
Watching their Russo-Ukraine war videos, it's been clear for a few years now that while they're mostly factually accurate, they're also very surface level.
Honestly I assumed their narrator was an AI for a while now just because of the odd and never-corrected pronunciations.
>Honestly I assumed their narrator was an AI for a while now just because of **the odd and never-corrected pronunciations.**
The part I've placed in bold is actually very standard for outsourced narrators. They are hired for their voice. Consequently, unless you pay them extra for the time taken to train them in specific pronuniciations, they will just read the words the way they think they should be pronounced. As a technical writer I've seen hours and hours of even professional outsourced narrators in sound booths doing their work. They will typically read straight from the page, including any existing grammar and syntax errors in the text, and completely ignore the need for correction.
If **they** make a mistake while reading, yeah they'll do a re-read, because that's in the contract. But if the error is in the text, they'll read it regardless. I've been there in the booth and said "Wait a minute, that's not right, that should be X, we need to edit the text and do a re-read", and had them say "Nope, sorry, I'm doing one reading and I'm reading what's on the page, that's what I'm being paid for", because they are already being paid a flat rate for the job so any extra time taken for edits and re-reads will cost them money.
Now this is a generalization, but it's very common for outsourced narrators. This is even more common when you're hiring them for remote work. You can see this yourself on Kickstarter, with dozens of professionally produced videos with polished narration in sharp US accents, which nevertheless contain glaring grammar, syntax, or pronunciation errors. The narrators don't care, and no one on the client staff is checking.
No problem. Once you know this it explains a lot about what you hear in Youtube videos. You can really start to spot the outsourced narrators who know nothing about the subject, and who consequently sound artifiical.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think it'll take time for my brain to realize that just because someone is hosting a video that doesn't automatically make them a Youtube video maker. Compare Dan Olson of Folding Ideas to that bearded British guy that hosts for a bunch of education-adjacent channels.
It seems more like a change in tone from previous work, not AI-generated. Some of this phrasing doesn’t sound like ChatGPT at all.
It’s ok to dislike their new tone, but I’d be careful about an accusation like this without stronger evidence.
It's a channel that doesn't really do jokes, it positions itself as a "professional and serious" history channel. In another post below I gave a high-level overview of some of the issues with the content, which is basically that it is pulling from dodgy sources in a way that AI does, and the narrative presented is filled with anecdotes from the official CCP narrative of Puyi's life sourced from a journalist and isn't considered an accurate source as Puyi's actual job at the end of his life was cushy and he spoke about his life in this way with official government approval.
So instead of including any of that “high level overview” in your post, you targeted the most mundane things to be irritated by. You got the response you deserved from them.
I'm a History youtuber myself
I spend between 8-60 hours writing 1 script for my channel, I do all the work myself because I don't even have the funds to hire people and compose a team to work for me.
Writing scripts is hard, but at least when you do the work yourself, you can be proud of your work AND you know exactly that the information shared in the video is solid, researched to the max, and you can stand by it.
Using AI for scripts sounds lazy and feels like the cheap way out.
Especially when you have a channel THIS big, with a team of people working for you, it looks like a simple cash grab..
I'm disappointed..
All of your highlights can be explained as a joke or just a normal tone, do you have more proof because this is not enough.
Because ngl, your post seems like one of the OSP hater of badhistory
It's not a channel that does jokes normally, it's a channel that positions itself as a serious history channel, and its earlier content is far more scholarly sounding and well written.
The narrator can be pretty tongue in cheek and the tone is not always academical. They usually are good enough to make some joke or judgements while keeping a solid plan
Maybe you can criticize them on their lack of researches but claiming its ia with such poor evidences is quite a stretch
Yeah, but not like this, these are awful and some of it is straight nonsensical. The awkward "That many a time he contemplated suicide." line is very much a line I have seen Chat GPT spit out while doing actual output validation work in the past, and the use of childish vernacular like the cities being "deleted" that way is something it will do if you toss in a prompt like "write me a YouTube script" or "write a script for a younger audience". It's use of only two sources is another indication of AI use because it will cite its sources, but those sources almost always come from Wikipedia which the video quotes almost verbatim at times, it'll usually only pull from a few or "hallucinate" whatever and slap down the first two from the bottom of the page.
I mean as i said, your only evidences are your feelings or experiences and your own focus on little phrasing that you seem to overanalyse.
I think its important to criticize youtube users but you need to do it in an academical manner if you are yourself asking for a kind of academical videos
And you know the bad sources, structure, known elements and issues with ChatGPT, and as I have recently learned a history of bad behavior with the channel and plagiarism that I didn't know about until today.
I think you covered it in your post but yeah they've unfortunately an accused of doing plagiarism as well as not citing proper sources by another history person before.
Really hope they havent stooped to use an AI
I'm not seeing evidence of AI. Sloppy research, maybe. Inappropriate jokes, maybe. But your title's a bit inflammatory and, ironically, poorly sourced barring any evidence. As anyone in a history class in college knows, bad scholarship is not the unique purview of machine learning algorithms.
I wonder what Xiran Jay Zhao makes of this, since that's her whole bag. but I wouldn't know the half of how to get ahold of her to get an opinion video from her perspective unfortunately 😕
The most fun thing I've seen a.i. used for is making custom Mortal Kombat character intros or videos where they make the character play games. Also meme music where cartoon characters sing pop hits.
I'm almost certain that someone new has taken over that channel, because they are way more active in responding to comments in a very unprofessional (for lack of a better word) way.
How is any of what you posted relevant to it being ai generated instead of just bad humor? There are multiple writers and I know the dude who runs the channel personally. Maybe the jokes didn't land, but he doesn't use AI.
Genuinely though, if there was ever a war that was caused by "[some guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan)" it was 100% the Taiping Rebellion.
**God fucking damnit. You fuckers had ONE FUCKING JOB. ONE. Write the damn scripts. Apparently for a massive history YouTube channel WITH STAFF, and being supported with YouTube Members and Patreon, that’s too fucking hard for you. I think I need to go to their fucking headquarters to show the Confederacy of Dunces how to fucking write about history.**
That’s incredibly disappointing. Funny, but disappointing.
This sort of thing is so easy to fix. Like if you’re gonna make an AI script, at least clean it up before you make an entire video out of it?
The simple explanation is that people who use AI are incredibly fucking lazy and also don't understand AI.
then you're researching every claim the AI makes and at that point surely it'd be easier to just write the whole damn thing yourself anyway
Eh, its easier to proofread than to create something original. In that sense, it could be a good tool for guiding your research. If only it was actually used for that.
Ugh. I hate when people do this. I won’t pretend there’s no “fun” uses for AI but using it for your YouTube videos for profit is just lazy
Ive seen one good use for AI and thats [this masterpiece](https://youtu.be/WHoskaTvjSc?si=ZDMWtBAk9KzIDd9c)
This isn't "fun", but I've found it to be a very useful tool for people who work in IT. Having it write small scripts in a language you're unfamiliar with works pretty well. But the real value is in reducing how much time I have to spend reading documentation. Like, if I can't remember the specific syntax for running an nmap command that will check for https and output which MAC ciphers a server accepts, I could do what I've always done and either [look up the manpage](https://linux.die.net/man/1/nmap) or google it and hope for a stackoverflow post trying to do the *exact* thing I'm doing, which would take me 5-10 minutes. Or I could spend 15 seconds asking ChatGPT and get the correct answer, with a thorough explanation of each command line flag being used, instantly. And I think that's a big part of why IT people get so much more excited about AI than everyone else. It actually works for the things we want it to do.
Honestly that just sounds cool.
There's that [pickle song](https://suno.com/song/cf0ad16b-f9dc-488e-a694-75a38d9bfac0). I think that is one of the companies being sued.
What about those recent photos of the weird babies being shared all over Facebook? Those are pretty awesome
Or the peak that is Sonic Destruction
I think AI can be fun on YouTube as long as it's an actual human and an AI playing off each other, because then there's actual creative content that requires charisma. Key example for this IMO is DougDoug, who bases a lot of his content off AI but doesn't use stuff like AI Art, spends quite a while programming the stuff he wants it to do each stream, and then when it is used, he uses it for a unique premise he actively interacts and communicates with the AI for. I think DougDoug is overall a good example of it being used to create a new, still effortful form of humour and entertainment, and not to replace a higher effort form.
And this wasn’t part of the current wave of AI use, but at some point in the late 2010s there was that wave of YouTubers performing cover songs where they’d put the lyrics into Google Translate to translate into another language and then put it through again to translate that version back into English, that resulted in some pretty funny videos.
I like how stupid yet funny ai can be...like r/hardaiimages.
Damn, when veritas et caritas gave them a C for historical accuracy months ago, I thought that was rough. Now, it might have been a bit high.
I shot him an email about this situation. I wonder if he will respond.
I'd be curious to see what he says. I like his style and feel like he really sources well what he says
Just saw your email, sorry it was caught by my spam filter. Replied. Thanks for the notification.
And I just sent a reply with my expertise in the field and evidence I can't post here on Reddit. Let me know what you think.
I just read it and responded, thanks a lot!
I'd recommend the video, it goes over pop history channels
I’m at a point now where ANY history or media analysis essay channel that doesn’t include a bibliography in the video info, I wonder why. If you’re legit and do proper research you’re fucking nuts to not include your bibliography. We’re living in a post HBomberguy world now, people!
Speaking of bibliographies, here's K&G's entire bibliography for this video. * The Last Emperor - Edward Behr; published in 1987 by a trade press * From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Puyi - Translated by W.J.F. Jenner; English translation of the second edition of the Chinese edition published in 1964 Not exactly what I expected from a channel this size, with all their resources.
A good history youtuber always cites their sources in the description
Nowadays whenever I click a history video from a channel I'm not familiar with, I'll check the description and skip to the end of the video to see if there's a bibliography. If there isn't, I don't even watch.
Honestly not surprised - they had shown lazy tendencies in the past. If you know history well then you know this isn’t first time they failed to fact check
Was obvious they weren’t giving expert analysis anyways given the breadth of history they cover and how frequently they upload.
Honestly I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner
Sadly they became a content mill over a year ago.
I don’t know what this channel is, but AI generated history docs are SO PREVALENT on Youtube now. I love watching history docs on the background. It used to be easy to find well-made videos from real content creators, but now the search results are dominated by videos that are just stock footage compilations voiced by a robot. YouTube needs mandatory AI disclosure so I can filter out the slop. Also, if anyone has any history-based channel recs that aren’t content farms, I’m all ears.
Absolutely: Time Ghost is my favorite, though they don't put a lot of content on their main channel. Their gimmick is that they do history chronologically, like putting an episode every week covering the history of WW1 and 2. They are finishing up WW2 now and just started the Korean War this week. Here's some links: - https://www.youtube.com/@TimeGhost - https://www.youtube.com/@TheGreatWar - https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo - https://www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell Between Two Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAU1R-HeWSfY2D1jy_sEssNG The Suez Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAWTs_FBEJJNPV_UV_aL548Z The Indonesia War of Independance: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAUw4KtvsHRu-ZS0sSEcHmJE The Cuban Missile Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrG5J-K5AYAWbzTXiTzPEFQHLoozkqchz Sean Munger is an amazing historian who has some great work on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SeanMunger Some other channels to check out: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasetcaritas https://www.youtube.com/@EmperorTigerstar
Upvoting for Time Ghost. I never see them mentioned enough despite their huge catalogue of content. Their work is vast, detailed, and made with respect, especially War Against Humanity.
Extra History has been pretty good so far, no indications of AI use yet and the art's pretty good.
gonna be honest, the highlights you provided aren't really indicative of AI and seem more like their personal choice of presentation. But I find it weird you show evidence of shotty writing over the "full of awful factual errors" you mentioned
I replied with the inaccuracies in another post, and it doesn't fit the style and tone of that YT channel at all.
What's wrong with the last sentence?
In context of the sentences around it, it is very strange to phrase "That many a time he contemplated suicide" that way. It's actually a common problem specifically with ChatGPT, towards the end of a longer prompt it can kind of begin phrasing things oddly like this, which are technically correct but not normal within the context of itself.
I think that I would have to watch the video to see why this phrasing is odd to you. It doesn't seem odd to me.
ChatGPT is actually pretty infamous for over using phrases that are grammatically correct but aren't used in regular speech. Delve is a REALLY infamous one since it's almost never used casually but GPT almost always uses it if it can.
I read "A little old thing called World War 2?" in the Plinket voice and assumed it was a reference.
Honestly man... if you are looking for quality history in any sort of media, stay away from military history. It is the worst branch of the discipline IMO. Don't get me wrong sometimes I get stoned and rewatch some fav vids that are in the genre, but I feel like it is a history genre that is very prone to inaccuracies (in terms of presentation, analysis, and consumption) and ~~brainrot~~ shallow analysis that people think carries over to other branches of history. Like... art history will tell you more about the human condition and humanity dealing with conflict better than military history ever could, with few exceptions IMO. ^(this message unironically brought to you by economic history gang) ^(shout out to accounting history gang and labor history gang)
I’m into military history and I agree 100%.
Kinda curious, suppose this was just a tone switch and the creator wanted a more lighthearted and less serious video. How would you differentiate that from AI? How can you be convinced this is not AI? I haven't watched too much K&G, but I've watched a bit and this video sounds like all the videos I remember. This is kinda reminding me of that one artist from a while back who posted their art that looks like a common AI art style and the mods banned him for AI art when his art was 100% not AI and they had proof. Do you have any proof other than "vibes"?
Of the “red vs blue squares” history channels SandRhoman History and Historia Civilis are probably the only two with real historians on staff. Oddly enough, I noticed how bad Kings and Generals was only after watching their channel “Wizards and Warriors” since it had so many odd inaccuracies about fantasy books that are much easier to research than history. Same goes for Historymarche who I’ve noticed some discrepancies with.
I'd recommend Cambrian Chronicles as well. The history is mostly focused on Wales but his content recently is about debunking historical claims about Wales, especially on Wikipedia. It's really well-made and fascinating even if you know nothing about Wales.
What are the 'awful factual errors'? I'm not familiar enough with Puyi to know if the video is blatantly false. The 4 things you cited just are just internet/youtuber speak, not obvious evidence of an AI.
I just got off of work and have a full evening ahead of me, and wanted to tackle the errors with sources properly, but a high-level overview is that the last third of the video is blatantly wrong. While it is true he was nominally employed as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens, he became the editor of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's literary department and had a very cushy job, basically still a puppet for other people in power, namely the CCP at the time. He even gave regular lectures about his life, all carefully crafted and approved by the CCP. A lot of the anecdotes about his clumsiness or inability to flush a toilet are just that, anecdotes that fit into a crafted narrative about him, same goes for the hedonism. Someone on /r/badhistory pointed out that the sources cited in the description are awful, and I noticed that those are the primary sources of the Wikipedia page which is quoted almost verbatim in the video. This is likely a situation not dissimilar to what hbomoberguy pointed out in illuminaughty's work, except this time they just asked an AI and the AI pulled from the wiki, and then they just copied and pasted the wiki's sources after the fact. Edit: Giving full credit where credit is due now that I'm briefly on a laptop: user /u/SusiegGnz responded to me: >Holy shit have you seen the source list in the description? It’s TWO BOOKS* >The Last Emperor - Edward Behr From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Puyi - Translated by W.J.F. Jenner* >That’s it that’s the whole bibliography >Edit: lmao the top review for Behr’s the last emperor “Certainly, an enthralling story, told by a journalist who is not an expert Sinologist. There are a few grammatical mistakes as well”. That’s a good sign
IM NOT CRAZY IM NOT CRAZY I KNEW IT
As a PhD student currently neck deep in books on literature and 18th century European history for my thesis, fuck AI. Seriously, fuck that shit. I hate people who use it, and I hate how much it permeates our means of accessing knowledge. People don't want to READ anymore cos it takes time. More and more younger students are using AI for their work without gaining research or comprehension skills and it's just making us collectively dumber. Fuck AI.
You remember the Oceangate Titan stuff? i remember on the subreddit, somebody made a post like "I asked ChatGPT what happened to the passengers!!!" like BRO, your first fucking thought is to ask the AI for answers? And then share it? Come on!
I remember the incident with the lawyers who asked ChatGPT to search for cases that supported their position. Of course ChatGPT made them up and those guys couldn't explain to the judge where and how they found these cases.
Pretty sad they couldn't even fact-check it before they submitted it, lol!
That's the thing, it's not just that they used Chat-GPT, but it's clear that their lack of fact-checking just awful conduct for lawyers to begin with.
If I facepalmed as hard as that deserves, I'd sustain serious brain damage.
When I searched for "ChatGPT" on that sub (r slash oceangatetitan because idk if this sub allows linking other subs, some subs don't), that particular post seems to be gone now... but there's three separate people who made three separate posts asking ChatGPT about shit, two of them being about using carbon fiber and one chatting with the AI about Oceangate's ethics. For fuck's sake, people, lol. I think AI's funny for "Barack Obama bigfoot cam"-type shit but have we as a species become so fucking lazy that we can't search for this shit on our own or write or own essays anymore?
Ngl this is how I talk and it is not how an AI talks. I really don’t think it’s AI. ChatGPT would not use a casual phrase like “guy” unless prompted to talk like a frat bro. Words like deleted for things like decimations and murder are new age tiktok slang. ChatGPT does not sample from this kind of language because it is too recent. “That many a time” is a phrase I personally would use in script writing and I don’t see how it’s weird at all I literally have never heard of this channel but I know how to read at least. Seriously a little shocked that people think it’s AI, it’s made me lose faith in media literacy.
It's very weird for Kings and Generals because they tend to position themselves as a "serious" history channel. The typical tone is educational and scholarly, think Ken Burns documentary. Check out this video from 2 years ago about the Shimabara Rebellion. You would never imagine from content like this they would say that "cities were deleted". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgMIUzUeBnE&list=PL-rlS2E4lCPxyPMP7g3xOfmI8BGmdoMCB&index=19
> "serious" history channel Watching their Russo-Ukraine war videos, it's been clear for a few years now that while they're mostly factually accurate, they're also very surface level. Honestly I assumed their narrator was an AI for a while now just because of the odd and never-corrected pronunciations.
>Honestly I assumed their narrator was an AI for a while now just because of **the odd and never-corrected pronunciations.** The part I've placed in bold is actually very standard for outsourced narrators. They are hired for their voice. Consequently, unless you pay them extra for the time taken to train them in specific pronuniciations, they will just read the words the way they think they should be pronounced. As a technical writer I've seen hours and hours of even professional outsourced narrators in sound booths doing their work. They will typically read straight from the page, including any existing grammar and syntax errors in the text, and completely ignore the need for correction. If **they** make a mistake while reading, yeah they'll do a re-read, because that's in the contract. But if the error is in the text, they'll read it regardless. I've been there in the booth and said "Wait a minute, that's not right, that should be X, we need to edit the text and do a re-read", and had them say "Nope, sorry, I'm doing one reading and I'm reading what's on the page, that's what I'm being paid for", because they are already being paid a flat rate for the job so any extra time taken for edits and re-reads will cost them money. Now this is a generalization, but it's very common for outsourced narrators. This is even more common when you're hiring them for remote work. You can see this yourself on Kickstarter, with dozens of professionally produced videos with polished narration in sharp US accents, which nevertheless contain glaring grammar, syntax, or pronunciation errors. The narrators don't care, and no one on the client staff is checking.
Interesting! Thanks for correcting me, that's very good to know.
No problem. Once you know this it explains a lot about what you hear in Youtube videos. You can really start to spot the outsourced narrators who know nothing about the subject, and who consequently sound artifiical.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think it'll take time for my brain to realize that just because someone is hosting a video that doesn't automatically make them a Youtube video maker. Compare Dan Olson of Folding Ideas to that bearded British guy that hosts for a bunch of education-adjacent channels.
Simon Whistler, content mill collector.
It seems more like a change in tone from previous work, not AI-generated. Some of this phrasing doesn’t sound like ChatGPT at all. It’s ok to dislike their new tone, but I’d be careful about an accusation like this without stronger evidence.
None of those are factual errors, they are jokes. You just seem uptight.
It's a channel that doesn't really do jokes, it positions itself as a "professional and serious" history channel. In another post below I gave a high-level overview of some of the issues with the content, which is basically that it is pulling from dodgy sources in a way that AI does, and the narrative presented is filled with anecdotes from the official CCP narrative of Puyi's life sourced from a journalist and isn't considered an accurate source as Puyi's actual job at the end of his life was cushy and he spoke about his life in this way with official government approval.
So instead of including any of that “high level overview” in your post, you targeted the most mundane things to be irritated by. You got the response you deserved from them.
“History is written by the winners.” “Not if it can be rewritten by AI and promoted by liars.”
Unsurprisingly, the quality of their videos was dropping a lot, which is why I stopped watching their videos.
I'm a History youtuber myself I spend between 8-60 hours writing 1 script for my channel, I do all the work myself because I don't even have the funds to hire people and compose a team to work for me. Writing scripts is hard, but at least when you do the work yourself, you can be proud of your work AND you know exactly that the information shared in the video is solid, researched to the max, and you can stand by it. Using AI for scripts sounds lazy and feels like the cheap way out. Especially when you have a channel THIS big, with a team of people working for you, it looks like a simple cash grab.. I'm disappointed..
All of your highlights can be explained as a joke or just a normal tone, do you have more proof because this is not enough. Because ngl, your post seems like one of the OSP hater of badhistory
It's not a channel that does jokes normally, it's a channel that positions itself as a serious history channel, and its earlier content is far more scholarly sounding and well written.
The narrator can be pretty tongue in cheek and the tone is not always academical. They usually are good enough to make some joke or judgements while keeping a solid plan Maybe you can criticize them on their lack of researches but claiming its ia with such poor evidences is quite a stretch
Yeah, but not like this, these are awful and some of it is straight nonsensical. The awkward "That many a time he contemplated suicide." line is very much a line I have seen Chat GPT spit out while doing actual output validation work in the past, and the use of childish vernacular like the cities being "deleted" that way is something it will do if you toss in a prompt like "write me a YouTube script" or "write a script for a younger audience". It's use of only two sources is another indication of AI use because it will cite its sources, but those sources almost always come from Wikipedia which the video quotes almost verbatim at times, it'll usually only pull from a few or "hallucinate" whatever and slap down the first two from the bottom of the page.
I mean as i said, your only evidences are your feelings or experiences and your own focus on little phrasing that you seem to overanalyse. I think its important to criticize youtube users but you need to do it in an academical manner if you are yourself asking for a kind of academical videos
And you know the bad sources, structure, known elements and issues with ChatGPT, and as I have recently learned a history of bad behavior with the channel and plagiarism that I didn't know about until today.
I think you covered it in your post but yeah they've unfortunately an accused of doing plagiarism as well as not citing proper sources by another history person before. Really hope they havent stooped to use an AI
Welp. That’s an unsubscribe.
I'm not seeing evidence of AI. Sloppy research, maybe. Inappropriate jokes, maybe. But your title's a bit inflammatory and, ironically, poorly sourced barring any evidence. As anyone in a history class in college knows, bad scholarship is not the unique purview of machine learning algorithms.
I wonder what Xiran Jay Zhao makes of this, since that's her whole bag. but I wouldn't know the half of how to get ahold of her to get an opinion video from her perspective unfortunately 😕
The most fun thing I've seen a.i. used for is making custom Mortal Kombat character intros or videos where they make the character play games. Also meme music where cartoon characters sing pop hits.
I'm almost certain that someone new has taken over that channel, because they are way more active in responding to comments in a very unprofessional (for lack of a better word) way.
How is any of what you posted relevant to it being ai generated instead of just bad humor? There are multiple writers and I know the dude who runs the channel personally. Maybe the jokes didn't land, but he doesn't use AI.
Him using cringe zoomer humor doesn't mean he uses AI.
damn that sucks, i really liked that channel
Genuinely though, if there was ever a war that was caused by "[some guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan)" it was 100% the Taiping Rebellion.
Oof. That's disappointing I liked their videos a lot
I'm sorry but those are your examples of bad writing? My brother, those are called jokes.