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Somewhat related, on YouTube, there's a channel filled with fake police bodycam videos. The most-viewed of these are racially inflammatory, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AkXOkXNd8w

The description of the channel on YouTube claims: "In our channel, we bring you real, unfiltered bodycam footage, offering insight into real-world situations." But then if you go to their site, https://bodycamdeclassified.com/, which is focused on threatening people who steal their IP, they say: "While actual government-produced bodycam footage may have different copyright considerations and may be subject to broader fair use provisions in some contexts, our content is NOT actual bodycam footage. Our videos represent original creative works that we script, film, edit, and produce ourselves." Pretty gross.

> nothing drives engagement on social media like anger and drama

There. It isn’t even a “real” racism, it’s more of a flamebait, where the more outrageous and deranged a take is, the more likely it would captivate attention and possibly even provoke a reaction. Most likely they primarily wanted to earn some buck from viewer engagement, and didn’t care about the ethics of it. Maybe they also had the racist agendas, maybe not - but that’s just not the core of it.

And in the same spirit, the issue is not really racism or AI videos, but perversely incentivized attention economics. It just happened to manifest this way, but it could’ve been anything else - this is merely what happened to hit some journalist mental filters (suggesting that “racism” headlines attract attention those days, and so does “AI”).

And the only low-harm way - that I can think of - how to put this genie back in the bottle is to make sure everyone is well aware about how their attention is the new currency in the modern age, and spend it wisely, being aware about the addictive and self-reinforcing nature of some systems.

This isn't really a problem with video generation or AI in general. Sure, there is an aspect of ragebait to it, but the reality is that racism is extremely widespread. If it were not, this kind of content would not be so popular. The people at the very top of US government right now are white supremacists. I'm sorry that is not an exaggeration. There is another term that encompasses more of their worldviews which is not politically correct but is accurate.

Stop trying to blame technology for longstanding social problems. That's a cop out.

None of the examples shown in the video are passable hoaxes. They are all obvious burlesque-style parodies, albeit made in bad taste. They all also have clear and prominent hallmarks of AI generation. Anyone fooled by these has got bigger, prior problems than any potential belief instilled by these videos.

I really miss the time before generative images and video were a thing. We opened such a can of worms. Really seems like a "the scientists were so occupied with if they could they didn't stop to think if they should" situation. What is the actual utility of these tools again beyond putting artists out of work?

I was skeptical about this, but a quick search for “the usual suspects” pulls up many, many examples for me.

People have to stop watching this trash. And I mean all of TikTok.

Racists? On the internet you say!?

The interesting thing about this is that it is the use case for these video generators. If the point of these tools is to churn out stuff to drive engagement, and the best way to do that is through content that is inflammatory, offensive, or misinformation, then that’s the ideal use case for them. That’s what the tool is for.

Luckily sane US senators just rejected a 10 year ban on state level AI regulation.

The spirit airlines video with the smoke alarm chirp is perfect though.

Just watched Mountainhead about this very topic. The AI videos were good enough to start wars, topple banking systems and countries.

It is very scary because the "tech-bros" in the movie pretty much mimic the actions of the real life ones.

The Tayification of everything

The question is, who is acting in a racist manner here: the LLM that does what it can, or the humans sharing those videos?

I think it's fine to fingerprint AI generated images/videos. It's a massive privacy violation but I just can't see any other way. Too many people have always been and will always be unethical.