Lazily-placed text in an otherwise blank word document that gets printed and stapled haphazardly to a posterboard is infinitely preferable.
I feel similar about LLM-generated text, though that's even more egregious. If I have to get one more claude-written email from the company CEO I'm going postal. You have a slight excuse with art as most people couldn't draw to save their lives (including myself), but to write is literally to think. And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
Generative art and text-slop have lots of surface features which lead us to expect quality or effort, and then we're betrayed when we look closer. Our natural reaction to betrayal is to shun the actors behind it.
Weren't executives always outsourcing writing to their (human) assistants?
https://theslingsandarrows.com/my-new-filing-technique-is-un...
Got a lot of laughs from the bizarre humor and clip art usage
Once the internet filled that niche with more and better pictures, shipping a fixed database of images with your software didn’t make sense anymore.
It’s a good video, worth a watch on 1.5x.
I'm not the one who asked for the summary. I just don't want to constantly watch video clips for statements worth a few lines of text. And I try to avoid BigTech. So what I'll definitely not do is clicking arbitrary random YouTube links that flood the web. So far I can definitely continue living absolutely fine without all the wisdom entrenched in all these clips.
... but if someone or something is able to give me a quick textual summary, even better.
here is the answer to your question: https://share.knowstash.ai/s/s549aa4c281c349389c757a10183be4...
I'm still working on it, if you want to test it out I'd be glad to give you some credits in exchange for some feedback
That's absolute a great service. I think I've seen a similar one (or exactly this one??) in the past already.
Some minor pitfalls that I personally see:
- There is AI involved, so you can never actually be sure how accurate it is. For the typical YouTube clip that flies by (we had supersonic trebuchets and whatnot), that's absolutely fine. Of course it is, because so far, not consuming them at all was also absolutely fine for me.
- If this is an online service, privacy-wise the solution is still not perfect. Admittedly: It's an improvement anyways, because it's then not Google anymore but just fbunau who builds a profile of my habits. At least assuming that you do not eventually sell me to Google.
Things that I could imagine for some version 2 or 3:
- Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff like "did the video clip mention ...?" or "did in go deeper in ...?" or maybe just "what do you think how old is that influencer and how competent does [s]he feel? Does it even make sense to read the recap or should I move on right away?" or whatever comes to mind.
Admittedly, that'd absolutely be just nice-to-have. If that's not aligned to your big plan, just forget it.
- Have a browser add-on that automatically replaces inline YT players with the recap text. (I've seen you have a Chrome add-on, but I haven't tried whether it actually does that or not, admittedly (it WOULD work on Firefox as well, I guess?))
In general, please don't count on my as a potential future customer. Constantly checking whether I still have enough coins inserted and constantly inserting new ones would already be too much of a hassle for me, I guess. And I wouldn't want that automated either.
I'm just not good as a customer. Last time my bank invited me in order to "upgrade" my bank account to a more comfortable one with higher fees, I left the bank with a cheaper one instead. :D They've never invited me again...
Personally I'd also need to get used to the term "YouTube companion". I don't like BigTech and I try to avoid it. I don't want a "YouTube companion", but a "YouTube displacement", or a "cure for a disease called YouTube that polluted the www". :) But, yeah, in the end, that's just wording.
I really like the basic idea of that service, though! And I wouldn't say so if it wouldn't be true.
Ideally, you would find lots and lots of customers in the first place, so articles on websites will become actual articles again, and not just a trap that teases you to some inline YT player in the bottom. And then we all don't need such summaries anymore. The web is cured again at that point. Ideally you've earned enough money until then! ;)
If you don’t want to watch the full video, how will you know whether the summary is accurate or not?
One option is you could extract the transcript from the video (using AI, since the author-provided transcripts aren’t necessarily accurate) and read it. The technology for this already exists.
> Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff
This is going to use AI as well.
Yes. That's just what I said, right? In the end, you have no clue what energy drink, shaver, VPN or whatever they were going to sell you. ^^
But for random topics like 'Clip Art' or 'Supersonic Trebuchets', I think I don't want to read the full transcript either. :) It's going to be a lot of text, and most of it is drivel and padding.
In that regard the knowstash.ai summary was indeed exactly what I wanted!
>> Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff > This is going to use AI as well.
Well, sure it does. But you are trying to connect two considerations together here that weren't meant to have any connection. I don't want the text box as a mitigation against inaccuracy.
Maybe (particularly for larger videos), I have some questions that are not answered by the summary (that's the point of a summary). And maybe the model can give me some helpful answers.
And it will have the same dangers of being inaccurate when AI has a bad day. And that's still fine for me for random YT clips passing by.
The video also addresses the roll of tech in shaping what kind of images can circulate and the stylistic dependencies that result.
If you are interested in thoughtful media criticism (as I am, as I currently finish my PhD specifically investigating similar questions) I recommend this video. It went beyond my expectations for what I recognize as an under-considered element of visual culture (IMO).
To be clear, I am also criticizing myself, I was an avid Microsoft Word user back then.
In the late 90s, I was at a party and the DJs were playing really cool techno styles I hadnt heard before. (back then it was about Sample-CD & soundsets, Gigasampler etc., all that stuff)
Curious as I am, I asked him what sets he used for his samples - he said: I can highly recommend all these Office-Clip-Art CD samples, because they are not used by a lot of people :-D
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Utopian_Scholastic
It’s just nostalgic for me