Two of the 12 channels posting what appear to be AI-generated fake news videos about Black celebrities reviewed by NBC News started as technology review channels, posting videos that don’t appear to feature any AI-generated content. After they posted several videos that each received under 1,000 views, the two channels pivoted to covering salacious, fake stories about Black celebrities. One of the channels now has over 20 million combined views, and the other has over 5 million. YouTube terminated one of them.
Two other channels of the 12 reviewed by NBC News had email addresses connected to Crealon Entertainment, a digital publishing company based in Sweden that has operated numerous other YouTube accounts with the work of freelancers. According to Crealon’s LinkedIn page, it is hiring a “Rap Writer” freelancer based in the U.S. and a “Video Editor for Rap related YouTube Channel” freelancer based in India.
Those type of channels are so easy to identify but YouTube is incredibly slow at removing them. I remember seeing thumbnails of an angry looking Will Smith and Chris Rock and the title would be "Will and Chris have heated argument" with 600,000 views. People are idiots for clicking but the fact that those channels aren't demonetized or deleted before those views piled up is ridiculous. I have channels I subscribe to that do movie reviews and they'll get flagged or a strike within a few hours of uploading because they showed a few more seconds of footage than is allowed by fair use.
Someone famous is going to have to sue YouTube to get them to react quicker.
With the numbers Kat did on Club Shay Shay this is only going to get worse.