appiah4 wrote on 2024-02-08, 08:38:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-02-08, 01:52:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-21, 20:16:

I also dislike seeing AI generated "art" in the thumbnail.

Unfortunately I'm seeing this a lot more lately with retro computing YouTubers and Twitter people and not enough backlash against it.

There's plenty of ways to make a thumbnail; we've had Paint since early Windows.

Get with the times.

To show you cant even use paint or gimp and have to use a ai to replace missing creativity (or motivation) is not a sign of creative content.

Sorry, People who think they are great artists for writing 5 words in a textbox are a little bit desillusional... Its just stealing the creativity of others. Not in a good way.

DerBaum wrote on 2024-02-08, 14:10:

To show you cant even use paint or gimp and have to use a ai to replace missing creativity (or motivation) is not a sign of creative content.

Pretty much this. Using AI generated "art", if you can even call it that, just feels low effort and lazy.

As an example, Bits und Bolts, a channel that I generally enjoy, started using crappy AI thumbnails for his recent Tomb Raider video series. The thumbnails depict the new version of Lara Croft (from the 2013 reboot) while his videos are about the original Tomb Raider from 1996, which makes things weird. With a tiny bit of extra effort, he could have made the thumbnails manually, using artwork from the period correct Tomb Raider games, such as this.

EDIT - fixed broken link

appiah4 wrote on 2024-02-08, 08:38:

Get with the times.

No.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-02-08, 08:38:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-02-08, 01:52:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-21, 20:16:

I also dislike seeing AI generated "art" in the thumbnail.

Unfortunately I'm seeing this a lot more lately with retro computing YouTubers and Twitter people and not enough backlash against it.

There's plenty of ways to make a thumbnail; we've had Paint since early Windows.

Get with the times.

You're on a DOS gaming forum, that's a bold statement.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2024-02-08, 02:22:

Just tried searching how to get my external IP address and google basically told me to shove my fingers up my ass…

That's because someone messed up their JSON-LD. You can add a FAQPage element on your website and Google crawls it to display these question/answer boxes in search results.

Still very funny, but not entirely Google's fault. 😁

bobsmith wrote on 2024-02-08, 18:15:

appiah4 wrote on 2024-02-08, 08:38:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-02-08, 01:52:

Unfortunately I'm seeing this a lot more lately with retro computing YouTubers and Twitter people and not enough backlash against it.

There's plenty of ways to make a thumbnail; we've had Paint since early Windows.

Get with the times.

You're on a DOS gaming forum, that's a bold statement.

Not only that but to assume that everyone should be on board with wholesale theft of creativity is extremely disappointing. This AI art garbage is wrong in any time.

schmatzler wrote on 2024-02-08, 19:20:

gaffa2002 wrote on 2024-02-08, 02:22:

Just tried searching how to get my external IP address and google basically told me to shove my fingers up my ass…

That's because someone messed up their JSON-LD. You can add a FAQPage element on your website and Google crawls it to display these question/answer boxes in search results.

Still very funny, but not entirely Google's fault. 😁

They are the ones getting wrong information provided by website owners and showing it in a way that make it look like the info is legit. So this is still 99% google's responsibility.
In my case I got a prostate exam for an answer, but could have been wrong/harmful information being displayed as if it was curated by google.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2024-01-04, 10:33:

Today, after some time of not doing so, I decided to watch latest videos of The 8-Bit Guy and LGR. Instead of interesting content that we all used to see in the past years I wasted about 25 minutes of my life on a quite boring monologue of The 8-Bit Guy about how unfair the world is and that he finally decided to find a job. Another 10 or so minutes was wasted on LGR's review of The Sims 4 For Rent Expansion Pack, some nonsense expansion pack of the most boring game of all times (I know, there are many fans of this game and this is my personal opinion only). It turned out that it was the second review of The Sims in less than two weeks.

I don't know how about you, but I have a feeling that this year will become a year when the era of Retro Computing Youtube channels slowly but surely will start coming to its end.

I do not think it will be the end of Retro/Vintage-channels. It will go on. However I think we will see something happening that we thought were in the past.

The gaming market have fallen from loads of innovation and a sea of different genres and approaches to how a game are put together as well as the various gameplay's.
The gaming industry are heavily relying on the same formula's and only a few genres have survived. Unless we are talking homebrew and indi games. Most are not polished.
We are gearing up to an end of physical media's, and those media's that is left, are more or less just content holders.
Think of the rise of console gaming, when we are talking about "everyone game", and the last real two generations are the 6'th and 7'th. After that, genres have vanished
and AAA games are brewed after the same old recepie. And there are released more and more games, that follow the same pattern.
People are also being fired (or laid off to say it in a more gentle way) left and right in the gaming industry.
The sale of gen 9 consoles have also had a terrible and rough start, with all that chip shortage and scalpers.

At some point, people will get tired of gaming. Nothing fancy, new and exciting. Everything the same..... So my predictions for 2024 are not the end of Retro/Vintage-channels.
No.... That will live on, however we will see a major crash in the gaming industry. One of the big 3 will go away, or at least pull a Sega.
And perhaps MS are planning to do just that. Going from console making to games only. Or perhaps still sell consoles, but all of their games will require login to play.
Perhaps do it in a way, that the console is fully open for devellopment. Though if you plan on gaming so called Xbox games, you need to login exactly like on Steam.
They might even keep offering game pass, or evolve game pass into a pure streaming service of some kind.

That is my predictions for 2024. I might gravely mistaken. As what I wrote, are just based on a feeling I have. Just a feeling.....

Or you might see the sea of so called “mobile gaming” fill the space (just as they have said would happen the last 20 years)

Embrace the mediocrity

Most of the issues mentioned in this thread basically boil down to the new term "enshittification." There are lots of videos on the subject, but Cory Doctorow's talk at DEF CON 31 lays out what it is pretty succinctly.

megatog615 wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:29:

Most of the issues mentioned in this thread basically boil down to the new term "enshittification." There are lots of videos on the subject, but Cory Doctorow's talk at DEF CON 31 lays out what it is pretty succinctly.

Thanks for the video, really enjoyed it. "The Great Enshitening" is the perfect term for this moment in History.

There's a conflict of interest between writers of search algorithms and the users. The users search for what they want to see. The writers want to you see what they want you to see, regardless of what you search for. With some of these algorithms we're approaching the situation where the search results have literally nothing to do with the search string.

Errius wrote on 2024-02-09, 17:05:

There's a conflict of interest between writers of search algorithms and the users. The users search for what they want to see. The writers want to you see what they want you to see, regardless of what you search for. With some of these algorithms we're approaching the situation where the search results have literally nothing to do with the search string.

Reminds me of when people would put a bunch of commonly searched for words at the bottom of a webpage. I've seen some people put those in the description of YouTube videos as well, so it's not just the algorithm programmers either. Even if I like the video, if they put any unrelated keywords in the description, I'll consider unsubscribing.

A very weird algorithm thing happened to me the other day. I spelled a word correctly, no results, deleted it, then though oh I'll try it with another word, on the re-type I misspelled it, boom, results, which had original word in title, not the second word I added. Deleting the second word and researching the misspell gave pretty much same set of results again.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-09, 18:50:

A very weird algorithm thing happened to me the other day. I spelled a word correctly, no results, deleted it, then though oh I'll try it with another word, on the re-type I misspelled it, boom, results, which had original word in title, not the second word I added. Deleting the second word and researching the misspell gave pretty much same set of results again.

Certain seemingly innocent words, phrases and images are on watch lists for one reason or another. Occasionally due to right to be forgotten legislation, other times due to draconian Eurozone restrictions on fair use.

Usually when you run into something strange that doesn’t make sense there is a whole backstory to it.

Man, what is this trash? Why can't they just use screenshots or photos from the things they're talking about instead of creating this garbage? Most egregious in my opinion is the 386 Ram Drive one where it could have just been a photo of a 386 board's RAM section. Or the Amiga video about CGI... could have just been a screenshot of the software in question.

megatog615 wrote on 2024-03-09, 02:15:

Man, what is this trash? Why can't they just use screenshots or photos from the things they're talking about instead of creating this garbage? Most egregious in my opinion is the 386 Ram Drive one where it could have just been a photo of a 386 board's RAM section. Or the Amiga video about CGI... could have just been a screenshot of the software in question.

I don't get being mad about these. They are topical and don't have some goofball soyfacing into the camera, which makes them better than 90% of the other thumbnails out there

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-03-09, 03:01:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-03-09, 02:15:

Man, what is this trash? Why can't they just use screenshots or photos from the things they're talking about instead of creating this garbage? Most egregious in my opinion is the 386 Ram Drive one where it could have just been a photo of a 386 board's RAM section. Or the Amiga video about CGI... could have just been a screenshot of the software in question.

I don't get being mad about these. They are topical and don't have some goofball soyfacing into the camera, which makes them better than 90% of the other thumbnails out there

The reasons have already been hashed out. The standard anti-generative AI art stance, being against generative AI art because it relies on theft of art created by humans is the reason why these thumbnails suck. It's not about whether or not they're good at depicting what the video is about it's about the morality of stealing someone else's work.

megatog615 wrote on 2024-03-09, 03:08:

The standard anti-generative AI art stance, being against generative AI art because it relies on theft of art created by humans is the reason why these thumbnails suck. It's not about whether or not they're good at depicting what the video is about it's about the morality of stealing someone else's work.

"Generative", "non-generative" or whatever degenerative so called "ai" is all based on human work (including creation and populating of "ai"'s databases). These "intelligent" algorithms can't create a sh*t out of nothing, so that's the biggest copyright infringement, identity/personal data theft, etc. all rolled into one.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-03-09, 03:01:

I don't get being mad about these. They are topical and don't have some goofball soyfacing into the camera, which makes them better than 90% of the other thumbnails out there

While I agree with you that "shocked face staring into camera" is the worst thumbnail style ever, I similarly dislike AI generated crap.

Aside from the ethical reasons mentioned above, using that trash just screams that the YouTuber has gotten lazy. If someone can't be bothered to spend 10-15 minutes in photoshop to create a thumbnail from an actual image, and uses a half-assed AI prompt instead, I immediately get the impression that the content of the video was half-assed as well.