Weekly Scroll: YouTube's AI Problem
Plus! Vibe Shift Reversal and Dr Pepper Guy
The state of the world in 2025 - you can bet on who’s going to be the next pope, but it might get you excommunicated.1 America’s baldest man and literal paid Russian stooge Tim Pool is now the first voice asking questions in the White House press room. Tesla sales are falling off a cliff as the public decides that, actually, Elon sucks. George Santos’s promising career as America’s Sassy Gay Friend has been tragically interrupted by an 87 month prison sentence, but hopefully he gets to see Sinners before he’s shipped off (it’s good, go see it!).
Let’s jump in to the Weekly Scroll.
YouTube’s AI problem is getting worse
We’ve talked before about how the AI slop problem that originated on Facebook has been spreading to YouTube. While Facebook seems to have embraced AI-generated content, I’d hoped that other social media giants would be more proactive about protecting their platforms. Nobody wants a future where every social media platform is filled with low level slop.
I may have been too optimistic. As YouTube turns 20 years old this week, their slop program is rapidly getting worse. The video below from ChengYuMovies was the second most watched video on all of YouTube over the last month:
I first saw this as pointed out by YouTuber drewdoes, but the problem goes well beyond this one video.
If you look at the top YouTube videos this month, six out of the top twenty are AI-generated slop. I have different theories about how they get so many views. The top videos are all Shorts, and Shorts (even more than YouTube generally) is dominated by children’s content. It may just be that this is the kind of auto-played schlock that finds its way in front of iPad toddlers who watch it on a loop for hours at a time. I also think they’re just bizarre enough that they hold your attention for the 10-15 seconds that are required to complete the video and watch it loop - they’re not good, but they’re the type of train wreck you don’t immediately scroll past. It probably helps that there’s no dialogue, so this video can go viral in every country with no language barrier.
It’s also possible that some of these videos are botted, but actually I don’t think that’s the case. The video above got over 400 million views! If YouTube is letting random slop accounts bot that heavily with no repercussions then it’s even more broken than we realized. No, I think the more likely explanation is that somehow, “Little Pug Saves Baby Plus Jesus SpiderMan Elsa” videos are actually getting millions of views. The ChengYuMovies channel has almost four million followers, and nearly every video gets millions of views and features an AI-generated pug:
There are a ton of these channels, and most of them seem to pick a lane and stick to it. ChengYu went with ‘pugs’ while there are also Spiderman and Squid Game channels pulling similar numbers:
The Spiderman channel has almost nine million subscribers and it was only created six months ago!
I’m not sure how to wrap this up other than with the obvious - it feels pretty dystopian and grim that we invented a way for anyone to watch any kind of content in the world and it turns out the most popular content is literal brainrot. But don’t worry. As slop starts to dominate their platform, YouTube seems to be focusing on the important thing - making UI changes that everyone hates.
Kanye West Has a New Album
Kanye West has a new album releasing soon titled Cuck. The track list is about what you’d expect from Kanye these days:
West created a Twitch account to promote the new album, but was banned only seven minutes into his first stream for homophobic slurs and doing the Sieg Heil. And somehow that none of this is the weirdest thing to happen in the roll out of this album - that would be Kanye’s revelation that he had an incestuous relationship with his cousin until age 14. Adding to all this - there’s controversy as rumors swirl that Kanye didn’t even perform on the album, but instead used AI to replicate his own voice while co-artist Dave Blunts actually rapped the lyrics.
I’m wondering if we’re going to discover a type of guy who’s ok with “Free Diddy”, “Heil Hitler”, and incest, but draws the line at AI-generated music.
The Vibe is Already Shifting Back
One of the major cultural updates after the 2024 election was the idea of the vibe shift - that America was sick of Democrats, wokeness, lecturing, and everything that comes with the general left-leaning cultural package. We got a lot of pieces (some of them by me!) about why the right dominates online media and podcast spaces and a lot of breathless commentary about how Democrats were in deep trouble because of this shift.
We’re now three months into Trump’s presidency, and what some people thought was a permanent vibe shift is already gone. Maybe it’s the wanton destruction of various federal agencies, maybe it’s the stock market crashing, maybe it’s Trump’s contempt for due process and the rule of law, but public sentiment has changed dramatically. Per Silver Bulletin Trump’s popularity has gone from +9 to -8 in just three months, and the decline shows no signs of stopping.
You can see evidence of this shift everywhere. The official Democratic handle @TheDemocrats has changed tone, going after Republicans aggressively (and getting in some incredible dunks). Joe Rogan is now criticizing the president and his guests are starting to call him out on-air for having on Nazi-sympathizing guests. Meanwhile Pete Buttigieg appeared on the Rogan-sphere podcast Flagrant and gave a three hour tour-de-force of libbing out and winning over Andrew Schulz and company:
“Cut that, that’s fire” says the podcast bro after Pete describes basic liberalism.2
The fundamental nature of media today makes it much easier to win communications battles when you’re in opposition as opposed to being in power. It was always premature to imagine the MAGA/manosphere vibe shift was going to last indefinitely. People tend to hate change, so any time you get elected and start doing stuff your popularity is probably going to drop. But this seems especially true when you’re Trump and your media strategy is ‘be dumb as hell’ and ‘flood the zone multiple giant scandals every week’.
The Mystery of Dr Pepper Guy
One of the fastest growing types of livestreaming is IRL streaming, where streamers venture out into the real world to eat/shop/game/etc. But streaming in public runs the risk of stream sniping - when fans find out where you are and interrupt you. Stream sniping is typically considered rude at best, and can often lead to dangerous situations like female streamers being stalked/harassed. But I think we should make one exception: Dr Pepper Guy.
Nobody knows who Dr Pepper Guy is, where he’s from, or what he’s trying to accomplish. But he seemingly has one goal in life - find streamers who are visiting Tokyo, and hand them cans of Dr Pepper. He doesn’t say a word in any of the encounters. We don’t know anything about him at all. He just walks up, makes eye contact, hands the streamer a Dr Pepper, and leaves. He’s done this to a number of big name streamers and at this point, he’s developed his own fan base. He’s also freakishly good at locating people even when they’re just streaming from the inside of anonymous restaurants:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
There’s now an entire TikTok page dedicated to documenting all of his encounters. Look, stream sniping sucks in general. It’s bad practice. Don’t do it. Don’t go to hunt down people in public, streamers are not your IRL friends. But maybe, just maybe, we let this one guy have a pass.
Links
Business Insider founder Henry Blodget joined Substack to create an all AI newsroom and it’s as bizarre as it sounds. He starts out by essentially doing what I can only describe as Corporate Dungeons and Dragons (“I want a tough, smart
paladinexecutive to help me run our team, so I created Tess with ChatGPT”) for various ‘workers’. The post devolves from there into Blodget sexually harassing one of his new AI employees and getting his ass roasted in the comments.Trump is hosting a dinner where the largest holders of his $TRUMP meme coin get to have a private dinner with him. I should really stop being shocked at this stuff, but it’s an astonishingly shameless bribery scheme. It’s not even a scheme! It’s just open bribery, democratized on the blockchain.
Conservative commentators say that their engagement on X plummets as soon as they start to publicly disagree with Elon Musk. Leopards, faces, etc.
Menswear guru Derek Guy has a fantastic article on the evolution of ‘alpha male’ style.
The NYTimes has figured out several years after the rest of us that Dropout TV is a really good streaming service.
The kid who got kicked out of Columbia after using AI to cheat on interviews has launched an AI startup designed to help you ‘cheat on everything’.
Posts
For a terrible but very funny bet, I recommend wagering on the Italian cardinal whose actual name is ‘Pizzaballa’
I am going to have the opposite take here; I consider it every upstanding American's god-given right—nay, DUTY—to snipe the stream of every goddamned streamer you see in public, every time you see it.
This is like when you move to the suburbs and start seeing deer everywhere; first they are a cute oddity, but then very soon you start to realize they are an invasive species that jumps in front of your car, eats your plants, and stops you in the street to ask "smash or pass", pop a balloon, or god-knows-what.
These people shouldn't be assaulted or anything, of course, but anything we can do to cut down on this epidemic must be done.
In the immortal words of Bob Barker: "For fuck's sake people, spay and neuter your streamers."
I imagine the origin story of Dr Pepper Guy involves a highly-trained government assassin, haunted by years of morally-questionable missions, now using his skills -- a very particular set of skills, skills acquired over a very long career -- to track down live streamers and bring smiles to the world.