I think we're at the point where trying to identify things as specifically AI-generated is becoming too difficult to be worth it, i'd say just start generally filtering out things that aren't made in good faith.
I've been judiciously telling youtube to not recommend me channels that post sensationalized/inflammatory/etc content whenever they show up in my recommendations, and the algorithm has mostly given up on trying to brainwash me at this point.

My rule of thumb is that anything that isn't borderline fucking boring is probably trying to manipulate me, if a dry wikipedia-style description isn't interesting then i see no reason to bother with it.

Corridor Crew (a small VFX team with a long history on YouTube) have made a couple of videos on identifying AI generated video. Start with this one for example.

The points that I can remember are:

1. AI tools can't generate more than 10-20 seconds, if you see an unbroken shot longer than that, its not AI.
2. Check for consistency between shots, this is pretty hard to do with AI. E.g. if the same person keeps appearing with similar, but still different clothes, its probably AI.
3. Visual artifacts, especially in the background can be a good tell.

I stopped trying new channels that don’t have human presenter, there’s just so much slop. Now I’ve noticed that there are channels where even the presenter is AI. I can spot a few tells (presenter is never on screen for very long, voice pacing doesn’t vary, no ums and ahs, etc) but it’s getting harder and I wish I knew more clues.

Part of the problem is that even human presenters use too many effects so that they look - well, artificial.

Overproduced, as another commenter put it.

Maybe look for channels that don't do that? On its face, that would be an indicator of quality in my book.

I check not only if the channel is recent but also how often they release a video.AI channels churn them out at quantity real creators don't. Still not perfect,need more ways to spot them.

The audio is often a tell. Listen to a few that you know are AI and pay close attention to the "human" voices. They often make sounds that can't come from human anatomy. They also often sound "over produced" or "over compressed" (like poor quality audio).

AI generated anything has been easy for me to identify so far.

Primarily there is nothing "organic" in the generations. Nothing in the texts, nothing in the images, nothing in the videos.

Unfortunately, I can't summarize it in a lemmy post, or a Wikipedia article, or maybe even a textbook.

Essentially, every generation yields something that is not real that triggers in my mind "wait, this isn't real."

Take the voice synthesis LLMs like Gemini. The voice is constantly changing throughout the response. In images, something is usually shaped off, or the lighting is incorrect, or something that should be comepletely parellel isn't. There's too much to describe what I've noticed but there's always something.

Video is even easier - just like how the voice changes throughout the response, the videos "morph" throughout the frames. Sometimes its very obvious, sometimes its more subtle.

Sometimes I wonder if its because my autistic brain is so bad at filtering sensory input that I just catch ALL that stuff.

I find that I can't catch AI more easily if I've seen what it can output.

For example, the older videos used to use generative AI on the images and videos themselves, which made it easier to spot those.

Some newer videos are made with the "agentic" tools that have access to various scripts and animation libraries, which come out looking very polished and visually identical to human produced ones. For those, I find that the AI will put unnecessary "work", into the irrelevant parts of the visualizations. Some of the libraries and fonts are more popular than others, so you might notice a pattern that way too.

For an example to the second category, check out the recent videos from this channel, which has AI generated "music videos": https://m.youtube.com/@degenerativepixels

You ever listened to a radio with the treble turned up too high? AI always sounds like that to me.

I have never seen more slop than on YouTube. If you continue to use it, but don't want to see slop, you're going to become increasingly disappointed. It's already so bad that most things you search for turn up 50%+ slop. I see no reason that won't get much, much worse.