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THE STORMERS WEREN’T the only ones looking to exploit Leinster’s injury crisis this week.
On Tuesday, a Pakistani YouTube channel called Every Moment Updates reported that the Irish provincial rugby side were monitoring the fitness of seven players ahead of their URC semi-final.
“This Leinster versus Stormers clash? It isn’t just a game of strategy any more,” an American voice in the video said over a simple animation of a crutch and rugby ball.
“We are talking about an absolute battle of attrition between two heavyweights. Because, you know, when you hit the knockout stages of professional rugby, the physical demands just go entirely off the charts.”
It may not have been immediately obvious to anyone who saw it, but when you see the script written out like that, it’s probably easier to recognise that the content was pure unadulterated AI slop.
The video was recommended by YouTube’s algorithm to a colleague, who immediately clocked another giveaway: none of the players shown in the preview thumbnail were actually Leinster players – they were seemingly generated by artificial intelligence as well.
The channel where the video was hosted posts a miasma of synthetic filler like this every day, sharing previews, analysis and reports on sporting events from around the world.
All the videos have views ranging from a couple of dozen to the low hundreds, despite being recommended to people by YouTube’s algorithms.
One might wonder why someone would go to the bother of creating so much material like this, even if they could do so quickly and cheaply using AI, for such little return.
The reason is down to how YouTube pays content creators: channels with a certain amount of subscribers and watch-hours (i.e. how long people collectively spend looking at videos) can receive a certain cut of the ads that appear before and during clips.
Artificial intelligence allows channels like this to gamify that system by throwing enough slop at YouTube users and seeing what sticks.
The more uploads a channel produces, the more chances it has to catch the algorithm, the more people are likely to watch them – especially when YouTube promotes them to unwitting viewers around the world – and the more they’re likely to subscribe.
The videos on Every Moment Updates all run ads, so they are monetised and presumably whoever is making them in Pakistan is getting a cut.
The situation is becoming a serious problem for YouTube, because it’s threatening to turn the platform into an enshittified mess that drowns out genuine creators and is raising concerns among advertisers.
Repeating the meaningless clichés of sports reporting may seem innocuous, but it’s a parasitic regurgitation of the work of actual journalists and creators, including those who spend time creating clips of their own on the platform.
The same issue is affecting everyone from historians to children’s TV creators, and it’s now estimated that up to 20% of new videos shown to users on the platform are AI-generated.
And the problem is even enabling those who spread misinformation and extreme narratives to make money.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in this column about how Irish groups were starting to use AI slop on YouTube to further their own agendas by masquerading as documentarians.
Since then, I’ve been told about a similar channel called IENEWS-e8g that’s been producing generative AI news content for about a year – at a rate of about one video a day – based around narratives promoted by Ireland’s far-right movement.
The videos are a lot more slick than those on the Every Moment Updates channel, and are a lot less obviously generated by artificial intelligence.
The page also promotes a Chinese doorbell camera made by TP-Link because it appears to have a revenue-sharing arrangement with Amazon – a grim example of the disinformation economy at work.
YouTube pledged last year to crack down on the ability of creators to profit from “inauthentic” videos, but that hasn’t stopped the deluge of AI-generated content from taking over.
A spokesperson told me that the company has “a long history of successfully dealing with low quality content” including by making labels for AI-generated content more prominent.
“We want YouTube to remain a place where people feel good about spending their time and want to come back over time,” the company added.
But the toxic combination of generative AI and weak enforcement mean that the platform is increasingly becoming a wasteland where slop merchants thrive, while genuine creators are pushed further down the feed.
It wouldn’t be the first time that consumers suffer because financial incentive takes precedence over quality, but one would worry about YouTube’s ability to tackle the problem now that it’s happening at such a scale.
As the anonymous narrator in the Leinster injury crisis update video put it: “What happens when sheer survival becomes just as important as the tactical game plan?”
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