The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites<\/a>, History Before Sleep<\/a>, The Snoozetorian<\/a>, Historian Sleepy<\/a>, and Dreamoria<\/a>. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don\u2019t know much about. Some video titles include \u201cUnusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,\u201d \u201cThe Entire History of the American Frontier,\u201d \u201cWhat It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,\u201d and \u201cWhat GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.\u201d\u00a0One of the channels has even been livestreaming this “history” 24\/7 for weeks<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on \u201cmass produced\u201d videos<\/a>, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s completely shocking to me,\u201d Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel<\/a>, told me in a phone interview. \u201cIt used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I\u2019m fearful because this is everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they\u2019re historically inaccurate,\u201d Kelly added. \u201cSo it worries me because it\u2019s just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. When I\u2019m researching something, I go straight to the academic journals and books and places that are offline, basically. But these AI videos are just sort of repeating things that are on the internet and just because it\u2019s on the internet doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s accurate. You end up with a very simplified version of the past, and we need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from.\u201d<\/p>\n This post is for paid members only<\/p>\n Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n