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The Death of Educational Content on YouTube
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Losing Varitasium has sucked. It was gradual and I wanted to give the new videos a fair shake but that shit has gotten so artless.
That "self-driving" stan? 😂
same reason i dumped cgpgrey years and years ago. the guy just started shilling for tesla for several videos in a row.
I didn't mean what when I wrote the comment but yeah, that was pretty indefensible. They've clearly gone to bat for some businesses
I’m a big fan of Veritasium. I don’t think I’ve seen an AI video by them yet though. Are the AI ones still with Derek and Casper and the people?
Perhaps I just haven’t gotten to the AI ones yet. Last one I watched was about the billion heart beats in mammals and metabolic rates.
Personally, I found that they used to be a "follow the passion" channel. They were interested in a topic and shared what they found out. You could tell they cared.
Slowly, even before the private equity thing, you could tell that they were making videos for business reasons. Either cause they thought it was going to be a popular topic, or because it was going to make them money from a partnership.
Both types of content results in educational videos. The problem is that when you start with a conclusion and work backwards to the content, instead of working from curiosity, it really shows.
There continues to be content out there that starts with passion and works towards an organic conclusion. I'll continue spending my time watching those instead of channels run by the financial end of the business.
That’s a good explanation. Mind sharing some of your other channels/creators that you enjoy more? I’d be keen to see.
They're private equity. Have been for a while now.
I jumped ship when I found out.
Can you explain how that has impacted the quality? Personally I still enjoy the channel and learn a lot from it. Does private equity bring the risk that their content will be too tightly controlled?
No, i can't because i quit watching. I don't support private equity.
Different guy, but to me while quality hasn't really fallen they are starting to feel "less organic". The stories feel more biased and sensationalised, in general I see more focus on entertainment than education. The "value" is still mostly there for me, but its purpose has changed from teaching to making line go up and it shows a little bit
Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining. I think I agree with you.
You're right. I think maybe I'm just having bad days where I get hypercritical of things and then I see a video that's just less focused and I make assumptions.
I had assumed earlier on that they were using ai assets for visual aids but had no evidence for that. I didn't examine any further because that just wouldn't bother me. But the most recent video on filming solar eclipse has cuts and interactions that were probably just clumsily edited but for some reason I hyper fixated on. The previous one I felt off about was the one about EMV chips. Things like cutting to team members having conversations that recap the thing that was just shown or explained. It's not proof at all but I thought, hey that's how generative ai writes.
Op's video addresses this issue where we're getting so hypervigilant about ai that I thought I saw it in places where I had no evidence to think it was happening. so I guess that phenomenon is real
I guess we won’t know fully. I saw in a recent video right at the beginning it said “all the animations in this video were made by humans”. But that’s just one video. I still like the channel but yes if it gets Sloppy I would be very sad.