Last year I wrote an editorial in which I stated that I block every single advertisement on YouTube. And, despite being a writer whose income depends upon advertising, I was not — and am not — ashamed of these actions. The reasons are many, but basically, YouTube has typified “enshittification.” Making a platform worse, then charging to make it better again, is something everyone resents.
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YouTube is still getting worse
YouTube hasn’t gotten any better in the last year. It’s gotten worse in just about every metric that I can think of, unless you’re Google. Users are inundated with horrible ads, often for products that have been accused of being scams. Shorts is overrun with stolen, effort-free content, much of which is also “AI” slop, much of which is also provided by Google itself. The most frustrated users of YouTube might be its own content creators, who already had to scramble to chase algorithm-driven views and create videos in siloed categories and on grueling upload schedules to remain profitable, when the obtuse and broken administrative element wasn’t actively sabotaging them.
Now they have to contend with an “AI” content filter that’s arbitrarily demolishing their views. That’s on top of censoring themselves with infantile terms like “unalive” and “R-word” when talking about any topic above kindergarten level, which was already happening.
YouTube is, in short, crap, and only becoming more crap with almost every move Google makes. These moves include adding AI filters to videos without creators’ knowledge or permission, and now actively shoveling more AI slop into every aspect of the experience. But like Facebook and Google’s own search engine before it, it is the de facto home of video on the web, so its position is unassailable.
Are you dismayed that YouTube seems to be actively hostile to both its users and the people that provide the content it relies upon? Too bad. YouTube is the platform for video on the web, almost everywhere on Earth outside of China. Simply choosing not to use it is almost impossible if you spend any time online. There are alternatives like Nebula, and many YouTube creators use them. But they still use YouTube too, because declining the platform means going out of business — that’s how a monopoly works.
What would get me to pay?
So the situation hasn’t improved from my perspective. And I’m still blocking every ad, despite working at a company that uses the platform heavily. But Google’s latest shovel-full of AI slop got me wondering: At this point, is there anything that would get me to pay for YouTube in any capacity?
Yes, there is. Google, I will pay for YouTube Premium, and pay it with a minimum of grumbling, if you give me the option to block AI from my feed. Make it a toggle, right up there with the language, appearance, and broken “Restricted Mode” button.
YouTube already requires content created with generative AI to carry a warning label (which, as far as I can tell, is a policy that it doesn’t care to enforce at all). And now it’s giving creators cheap, easy means of inserting AI slop into basically every facet of the experience. So it has, or should have, a method of tagging which videos are using generative AI for video or robotic audio.
Let me turn it off. That’s worth $15 a month for me. Hell, I’d even watch a few ads if it meant I didn’t have to scroll past a sea of uncanny valley thumbnails.
…but it’ll never happen
Google will absolutely not do this, of course. The company is spending seventy-five billion dollars on AI this year, and forcing Gemini and other tools into every product it makes, both user-facing and corporate. Even the implication that some people might not want to constantly dodge slop in one of those products, one that was built on human connection and creativity, would simply be bad optics.
In the best case scenario that it brought in millions of dollars of revenue from curmudgeons like me, Google still could not tolerate the implication that generative AI is less than desirable in any situation. Whether or not all those billions spent on AI tools and data centers is creating a return for the company, I couldn’t say. Though I suspect that trying to force users to pay for Gemini won’t win it many fans.
But I would love to be proven wrong in my cynicism. There’s my carrot, YouTube. I ask for something that’s fairly simple to implement, something that will materially improve the experience for me and many others. I know that Google no longer pretends that it has a problem with being evil, and I’ve accepted that — even after switching away from the search engine and the browser, Google is too big to fail, and too big to avoid for most users.
Give me a way to hide the slop on YouTube, and I’ll happily pay for it. Until then, well, AdGuard and Revanced are still working fine, despite Google’s best efforts to the contrary.