The Culture War - Tim Pool - ITS OVER, AI Just CHANGED Content FOREVER

00:00:00.000 My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yaoi, a gift shop from the lens of artists and

00:00:04.720 handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely

00:00:09.580 one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the

00:00:13.560 future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, are just right there on

00:00:17.900 your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you

00:00:21.960 is it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial

00:00:26.920 on Shopify.com.

00:00:56.920 going to take over. And as much as people don't like this, it doesn't matter what you like or

00:01:02.440 don't like. I'm not trying to be mean, but I'll put it like this. I would love to live in a time

00:01:08.940 of blockbuster video. I grew up in the nineties. I was a kid. And I remember those Friday nights

00:01:13.940 where we come, we get out of school, go to blockbuster to rent movies and video games for

00:01:17.900 the weekend. And then you had to return them Sunday night. I'd go to seven 11. I'd pick up,

00:01:22.780 I get nachos and candy and drinks, and we'd hang out.

00:01:26.480 Those are the days.

00:01:27.500 And we see these AI-generated 90s videos going massively viral because people reminisce and

00:01:32.380 they love it.

00:01:33.320 The truth is, technology changed.

00:01:35.900 Blockbuster went by the wayside.

00:01:37.640 And we used to have family pizza huts, play places at McDonald's, but now it's all just

00:01:43.560 brutalist box stores.

00:01:46.260 There's strip malls, pizza pickup.

00:01:49.260 They're trying to bring it back because people do miss it.

00:01:51.620 But I believe the AI content revolution is here, and there ain't nothing y'all can do about it.

00:01:57.660 Now, for me, I make music.

00:02:00.200 I've written and published several songs, along with Carter Banks, who has also done all the production for all of our music and has helped write much of it.

00:02:08.100 And we've had some tremendous success.

00:02:09.540 Not like we're major rock stars or anything, but we've had some songs get 30 million or so streams and tens of thousands of sales.

00:02:16.440 In the past few years with AI music content, things have changed dramatically.

00:02:21.620 So I've noticed a handful of things that we're going to break down in this segment,

00:02:25.000 talking about what the future holds for all of you.

00:02:28.100 And the first thing is, well, AI content slop, it's actually getting demonetized.

00:02:34.000 So there's something that y'all need to understand.

00:02:36.740 For those of you that are looking to get into YouTube content creation,

00:02:40.600 podcasting, music, or any kind of art in general, even video games,

00:02:44.180 there's a lot to break down in what we are currently seeing

00:02:46.740 and the changes that are happening and how the machine is actually resisting it.

00:02:50.440 I'll start off by saying this. If YouTube allows this AI content, and so to Spotify,

00:02:58.740 there will be no content anymore. Right now, what we are looking at is what's called model

00:03:05.880 collapse, where these AI systems are regurgitating content within themselves and training off of that

00:03:12.620 same content. Eventually, it'll be too difficult to produce original content. The AI training

00:03:18.680 models will go insane, and then YouTube will cease to function properly, as will Spotify.

00:03:24.460 So what have we seen? Spotify and YouTube are cracking down on AI content, and I can see it

00:03:30.820 in the algorithm. I can see it in the ad rates. Ad rates for content in the space that we occupy,

00:03:35.880 which is news, culture, commentary, politics, et cetera, has actually gone up a decent amount.

00:03:40.640 And we can see our ad rates, our RPMs, which is money per view we receive, has increased

00:03:45.180 since YouTube began taking down this AI slop content.

00:03:50.000 But despite the fact we can all agree that slop sucks,

00:03:54.680 something else is coming and you need to be prepared for it.

00:03:57.700 So I'm going to show you a bit of the future, I know, whether you like it or not.

00:04:03.060 There are a lot of people I've posted AI-generated music

00:04:05.820 and they say, this is terrible music.

00:04:07.880 I hate the style, I hate the genre, and you're allowed to.

00:04:10.940 That was always allowed.

00:04:11.940 The point is not that the genre, the style, the songs are good.

00:04:15.180 but that I can snap my fingers and produce a top-tier Hollywood-level song.

00:04:22.600 15 minutes.

00:04:24.280 The change is now.

00:04:25.740 We'll start here with YouTube, and then we'll get into the music, Spotify, and what's happening.

00:04:29.920 Important things that y'all need to understand, but also does stretch into governance with

00:04:33.820 flat cameras and things of that nature.

00:04:35.420 So before we get started, my friends, make sure you head over to TimCast.com to join

00:04:41.300 our Discord community.

00:04:43.380 We've got tens of thousands of people hanging out every single day.

00:04:46.240 And you've got to be the change you want to see in the world.

00:04:48.900 The conversation around AI is big.

00:04:51.300 And it's not all bad.

00:04:53.240 But it is bad in a lot of ways.

00:04:54.800 And it's in ways that we should have a conversation about.

00:04:57.920 Join us at TimCast.com to support the work that we do.

00:05:00.400 Smash the like button.

00:05:01.320 Share this video with everyone you know.

00:05:03.960 Don't forget to subscribe.

00:05:05.620 Let's start here with Hollywood Reporter from June 13th.

00:05:08.640 Faceless creators take a hit as YouTube cracks down an AI slop.

00:05:12.680 Just a few years ago, they were raking in clicks and cash.

00:05:15.960 But now that the platform tweaked their algorithm, they're suddenly collateral damage.

00:05:20.600 I saw this right away.

00:05:22.560 A year or so ago, we began to experience what I would describe as an industry level problem,

00:05:29.560 particularly for those of us that work in podcasting, as well as we call this vodcasting,

00:05:34.320 video podcasting.

00:05:35.460 It's weird neologism, as it were.

00:05:38.460 Ad rates were going down, viewership was going down, and we knew exactly why.

00:05:42.560 In fact, I've talked about it quite a bit.

00:05:44.420 Young people, early 20s, had figured out how to mass generate YouTube content.

00:05:51.000 Now, these videos don't get a lot of views.

00:05:53.140 Sometimes they'll be a banger.

00:05:55.180 But for the most part, they might get 800 views.

00:05:59.180 Now, you may be thinking, what's 800 views?

00:06:02.560 Well, honestly, it's nothing.

00:06:04.320 If we just round up, let's just do simple math and say 1,000 views.

00:06:08.240 These people might be generating somewhere between $5 and $10 per video.

00:06:12.700 And this is where it gets bad.

00:06:14.400 They were producing hundreds of videos per week.

00:06:18.440 So actually quite simple.

00:06:20.800 If you make 100 videos and you're averaging between 5 and 10,

00:06:23.820 you might actually, within a matter of two days, pull in, I don't know, $500 to $1,000, if not more.

00:06:32.280 and it, well, I, yeah, somewhere around there. By the end of the week, if you've produced

00:06:38.300 somewhere close to 500 to 1,000 videos, you could be looking at six figure income. Some of these

00:06:43.880 guys that went viral gave interviews where they were generating between 100 and $200,000 per

00:06:50.080 month, auto generating long form and short form content, but it was killing the platform. People

00:06:56.940 aren't returning to watch these videos. And so long as the algorithm promotes them, you're getting

00:07:01.700 content that is not meaningful and doesn't attract an audience to stay on the platform.

00:07:06.200 So this is a problem for YouTube. And much to my surprise, YouTube began to demonetize these

00:07:10.480 channels. Surprise, surprise. Many of these channels, not all, have stopped producing content

00:07:16.060 outright. What they would do is you would see some of these videos. An example would be stick

00:07:21.140 figures explaining some kind of news event or historical event. There are programs, there are

00:07:25.980 companies where you can pay them and they will auto generate a video for you. You then get a

00:07:30.840 monetized account. And although you're not going to make a million bucks right away,

00:07:35.060 you pay about $3,000 a week and you make about $5,000 to $6,000 per week by uploading

00:07:40.620 mass amounts of content. But this means that the average person who has only a fun amount of time

00:07:45.500 during the day cannot watch everything. And so for us, it's quite simple. The front page of YouTube

00:07:51.600 is a raffle. There's about 15 videos that appear on the front page, sometimes less. Now that they've

00:07:57.220 shorts, it could be a lot less. And this means that if you're producing long-form content,

00:08:01.200 which by far is the most lucrative, if your subscriber, follower, fan goes to the front

00:08:06.380 page of YouTube, and instead of seeing your content, they see one of 1,000 AI-generated

00:08:12.920 videos, this just means that while they may not actually prefer that content over yours,

00:08:17.940 because the video appears on their front page, they're going to click it. And this is the game.

00:08:22.700 If they produce a thousand AI slot videos and you produce two or three in a single day.

00:08:29.480 Well, the way the lottery works is because there's substantially more of these AI videos,

00:08:33.500 the likely that your video surfaces diminishes, the less your fans click on it, the less they

00:08:38.240 recommend it to downward spiral where volume wins against everything. So YouTube has changed this.

00:08:45.420 They are dealing with this to try and shut it down. And while it has eliminated a lot of these

00:08:50.400 really awful channels, many of them still exist because they cross the bare minimum threshold of

00:08:55.860 original content. And that's the world that we are now going to enter. Let me jump next to Spotify.

00:09:02.620 Spotify removes AI slop and seeks transparency from musicians who use AI. In short, Spotify is

00:09:10.740 making it easier for listeners to figure out if the music they are listening to is human-made or

00:09:15.480 produced using generative AI. While the audio streaming services will not get in the way of

00:09:20.020 artists and producers using AI. It's committed to removing AI slop. What's next? Musicians are

00:09:26.440 being encouraged to be transparent by using a new beta feature on the app that tells listeners if

00:09:32.260 and how they have used an AI in their music. Which brings me to the question of AI content

00:09:38.500 production. I made this post upon reading these articles. Over the past couple of years, I've been

00:09:44.360 working extensively with various music AI platforms. I write music every single day.

00:09:50.060 One song that I wrote, just warming up my vocal cords in the morning for this show on my acoustic

00:09:53.960 guitar. I then record, upload to Suno and hit render. And it takes my demo recorded live in

00:10:02.320 this very chair and it turns it into a fully produced song. So I'm going to give you a couple

00:10:07.780 of musical examples. I'm going to include the link to the AI, I'll call it the AI generated

00:10:14.320 playlist from Suno in the description of this video if you want to check out some of the other

00:10:18.640 songs. And I'll explain the breakdown and how AI content is going to happen. This is going to

00:10:24.280 change the industry, change the landscape. For those that are working in the space, if you don't

00:10:27.940 know this, you need to know this. For those that know this already, thank you for watching. I

00:10:32.440 suppose you don't need to watch this portion. And for anybody else who's interested, this is where

00:10:36.720 It's real crazy.

00:10:38.280 Let's start here.

00:10:39.920 We have this tweet.

00:10:41.000 I said, fight it all you want, but the AI music world is happening.

00:10:43.780 This song was created by Carter Banks and I.

00:10:46.240 Excuse me.

00:10:46.780 The process started with a fully produced instrumental track by Carter.

00:10:50.560 The original style was more industrial, slow rock heavy.

00:10:54.300 I input the song into Suno and generated several alternate styles.

00:10:58.420 We rendered several songs in different styles.

00:11:01.100 In this version, I converted Carter's track to piano jazz,

00:11:04.500 wrote the lyrics and input them.

00:11:06.720 Suno generated several versions, and many were not good.

00:11:09.580 After a few generations, this was the final that I settled on.

00:11:12.900 This song is written by humans.

00:11:14.820 The music was written and produced by humans.

00:11:17.540 But this completed version took that produced music, changed it, and created a generated

00:11:23.760 AI version that I will play for you a little bit.

00:11:27.440 I'm not going to waste your time playing a full song, but I'll give you a quick demo

00:11:30.240 of what, and I want to clarify this, instrumentation written by a human.

00:11:35.240 lyrics written by me with the help of AI input into an AI on into Suno told to become a specific

00:11:45.360 style. It rendered, I would I would argue a couple dozen different versions, maybe less,

00:11:50.840 maybe maybe it was about a dozen or two dozen. And I settled on this one being the one that I liked.

00:12:05.240 yeah on the floor with the flashlight drawing maps in the dark every road led to somewhere

00:12:11.900 with the fire and the spark we said we won't wear the numbers we won't learn how to bend

00:12:16.140 we'd be names on the skyline not the ink in the pen we swore on scraped knees in summer air

00:12:22.420 we never trade the truth for a leather chair we were chasing something bright and

00:12:31.360 uncontainable hands up to a sky we thought we'd own every promise felt unbreakable back when no

00:12:40.040 was just a word we'd never known that's about enough i think i don't want to play too much of

00:12:44.240 that so this is a song that we call drawing lines carter had produced a short instrumental song

00:12:49.960 that uses this essentially melody and the core underlying structure i converted it from an

00:12:56.780 industrial sound to a heavy sound. I'm sorry, from industrial heavy sound to a piano jazz

00:13:01.100 added these lyrics and we got a hip hop jazz rap modern style song. If you want to check it out,

00:13:07.940 it's available on my ex. Now here's what gets interesting. That same song, I went into Suno

00:13:13.420 and told it, make a version that is rock. Check this out.

00:13:26.780 a spark. We said we won't wear the numbers. We won't learn how to bend. We'd be names on the

00:13:31.200 skyline, not the ink in the pen. We swore on scraped knees in summer air. We never trade the

00:13:39.440 truth for a leather chair. We were chasing something bright and uncontainable. Hands up

00:13:47.980 to a sky. We thought we'd own every promise felt unbreakable. You get the point. It took two

00:13:54.580 seconds to do that. Two seconds. Now, again, many of you might say, I don't like the song. I don't 0.99

00:13:59.280 like the style. That's completely fine. I don't care if you like the song. You don't have to.

00:14:02.960 Some of you might death metal or whatever, or pop or polka. The point is the production quality.

00:14:08.340 And while the immediate response I get from most people is, yeah, but it's AI. It's got no spirit,

00:14:14.060 no soul. The unfortunate reality is that doesn't matter in terms of cost of production.

00:14:19.380 That is, certainly there's a lot of music with real soul. The tempo might be kind of off.

00:14:23.940 In fact, I've got several songs that change tempo unevenly

00:14:29.360 because they're just spirited human acoustic music

00:14:33.180 that I've always struggled to convert into a click track song.

00:14:37.920 In fact, maybe you can't.

00:14:39.700 Maybe I should try recording it and we'll see what we can get away with.

00:14:42.420 But the truth is, for most people consuming music, this is good enough.

00:14:48.780 Now, you heard that song, right?

00:14:50.660 Now, here's where it gets real wild.

00:14:53.440 Here's another song.

00:14:54.620 This one's called Salt.

00:14:56.020 Using the same underlying instrumentation, I told Suno to make a heavier, dark, gothic

00:15:03.040 alt-rock track.

00:15:04.900 Wrote lyrics, again, in this instance, with the help of artificial intelligence.

00:15:08.960 What does that mean?

00:15:09.760 For these songs, what I did was I wrote basic premises and a few lines.

00:15:14.180 I then told the AI, using this cadence and structure of syllable and song, write a verse.

00:15:20.320 So it copies the words that I write.

00:15:22.080 So I might write a verse, then it will use the same syllable count and write a comparable

00:15:27.040 verse.

00:15:28.040 Usually it's bad.

00:15:29.180 I'll then go in and edit it, ask it to do it again, go in and edit it again.

00:15:33.920 But this back and forth results in a final verse.

00:15:36.760 Sometimes it's been really great because I'm like, I can't think of the right word.

00:15:39.280 And I'm like, give me some words.

00:15:40.240 That gives me a list of words.

00:15:41.860 So this is not wholly just human lyric writing.

00:15:45.940 It's bouncing it off of AI, but largely human.

00:15:48.860 I put it in this.

00:15:50.220 Listen to this song.

00:15:52.080 I'll just skip ahead a little bit.

00:15:54.020 This is the same underlying instrumentation.

00:15:56.120 Pull the thread

00:16:05.120 It never ends, just bends instead

00:16:11.340 Lo, the sky leans in but doesn't show

00:16:19.520 What lies beneath what we don't know

00:16:25.600 The name you said so long ago

00:16:31.200 So this is where it gets just absolutely insane.

00:16:47.960 The question is, what constitutes slop content?

00:16:50.640 And I'll tell you this.

00:16:51.880 Um, slop, in my opinion, is when you have no experience, you don't know how to make music,

00:16:58.320 you're not going to write anything. And boy, is there a lot. And so what people are doing

00:17:02.320 and what's destroying these platforms is that they're going to an app like Suno and there's

00:17:06.460 a few others. They're saying, write me a song about love. It'll write it and they'll just

00:17:11.960 upload it. They've put no thought into it. Volume is key. That's the same thing with YouTube.

00:17:17.140 Think about it this way. They don't know what makes a good song and maybe neither do I. So they'll generate a thousand songs, upload all of them and cross their fingers, hoping that one actually hits. Spotify removed an estimated 75 million tracks from its platform. That's absolutely crazy.

00:17:39.100 There is an article that I want to pull up.

00:17:40.720 Let me see if I can.

00:17:42.180 Here we go.

00:17:43.140 From Citywide.

00:17:44.320 AI bots stole my music.

00:17:47.060 And this is where it gets real crazy.

00:17:49.280 One West Philly musician's surreal, unsettling journey into the world of fake artists.

00:17:53.120 To put it simply, and I'll give full credit to this guy, his band Makeshift Hammer.

00:17:59.620 Someone said they found an album on Spotify that sounds just as if someone stole your

00:18:02.940 ish and distorted it.

00:18:03.880 what we are now seeing on Instagram, on TikTok, and even YouTube, people will take a video like

00:18:12.240 mine, use what's called AI replacement, take a woman, because it's always a woman, and then have

00:18:19.880 a woman remake my exact video. They don't really do it to me because the way I structure the video

00:18:26.480 and frame it makes it very difficult for them to do that. But there are many people, you know,

00:18:30.420 the funniest thing. Have you guys ever seen that dude who goes real fast? That's this whole thing.

00:18:34.880 He has a keyboard. He has a laptop with a timer on it. And he'll like, he'll drop a bill, a dollar

00:18:40.020 bill. And then he'll hold his hand up, drop the bill. He'll, what does he do? He drops the bill,

00:18:45.960 hits the timer, grabs the bill and hits the timer again. And then he looks at you and he points.

00:18:50.620 People have begun to AI replace him with busty, beautiful women doing the exact same thing. 1.00

00:18:55.100 because it's going to get views. 1.00

00:18:57.800 Tons of OnlyFans creators are just AI-generated women. 1.00

00:19:02.040 In fact, men will do gross poses 0.99

00:19:05.480 and then AI render themselves to be women 0.71

00:19:08.360 and sell that to other men.

00:19:10.520 This is the problem of slop that needs to be dealt with.

00:19:14.260 However, dealing with this will not change the fact

00:19:18.340 that we are looking at a new generation of AI content.

00:19:22.220 This means on YouTube, they can eliminate the slop,

00:19:25.100 but you'll still be competing with low-cost, easy-entry, high-quality content.

00:19:30.880 Same is true for music.

00:19:32.480 Again, you may not like the genre of music I produce,

00:19:35.060 but the fact is, guys, we've run the experiments.

00:19:38.900 So for the past several months, what we do is,

00:19:41.520 before Timcast IRL, I will play a song,

00:19:45.600 and I'll just run my playlist.

00:19:47.680 Now, these songs are written by me, for the most part,

00:19:50.740 a couple written by Carter.

00:19:53.120 I want to clarify, just for the sake of Carter making sure he gets the credit that he deserves.

00:19:57.180 Those songs I showed, those were his underlying instrumentation.

00:20:01.020 And he generally does all the production for the songs we produce.

00:20:03.720 A handful of the songs I wrote personally, uploaded, rendered, that's it.

00:20:09.420 Here's the funny thing.

00:20:10.880 We play the songs without saying what they are.

00:20:13.720 The guests, almost invariably.

00:20:16.560 Who is this?

00:20:17.980 And then I, oh, yeah, I don't know, it's just a playlist.

00:20:20.660 and they go, oh, and they'll try and Shazam it

00:20:23.600 or Google Song Identification, right, the app.

00:20:27.020 And I'll bet, oh no, this is my song, I wrote it.

00:20:29.140 I wrote it, uploaded it to Suno and hit render.

00:20:33.580 And this is what you get.

00:20:35.180 You get a bunch of different types of music.

00:20:37.900 Now, the playlist that I have right here,

00:20:39.620 I wonder if I can pull up anything that is not,

00:20:42.540 most of the stuff I have rendered right now,

00:20:44.440 I would consider to be like modern pop.

00:20:48.400 But I do have some that I think are rock-y.

00:20:52.320 I have a ton of songs in here.

00:20:54.980 I don't know exactly which one.

00:20:57.720 Some of them are not particularly good, to be honest.

00:20:59.640 Take a listen to this one, and I'm only going to play a very short moment of it.

00:21:17.720 This is intentionally meant to be glitchy, ambient, lo-fi

00:21:31.460 for the purpose of just one of these background relaxing tracks.

00:21:35.560 I'll jump ahead and just play a little bit from the middle.

00:21:47.720 by all means again i know a lot of people are going to say it's not my style of music and again

00:22:11.500 to clarify i understand that it's more so about how easy it was for me to make that song that

00:22:17.200 song you just played, the reason I highlighted is that that one is purely generative. I did not

00:22:21.040 perform. I didn't play. I didn't play any instruments. I didn't write any lyrics. I went

00:22:25.160 into Suno and I said, make me a song that fits this vibe. I wrote maybe, I don't know, a hundred

00:22:32.100 words of that describing the kind of song that I wanted it to be. Had it generate probably 30

00:22:38.480 different versions and settled upon that. And I thought it was absolutely amazing. Let me show

00:22:45.980 you, let's see if I can, uh, let's see if I can play this one. No, that's not what I want to,

00:22:50.980 uh, let's, let's, let's, uh, let me play this one for you because this might be a genre that people

00:22:56.100 like. Well, that some of you like compared to the music.

00:22:58.420 The ground is breaking, but I'm still standing where you left me.

00:23:17.900 The sky is trembling with a thousand wolves.

00:23:20.900 I hear the warning from every echo in the distance

00:23:28.520 But I keep moving just to get to you

00:23:32.900 I found salvation

00:23:37.720 As the fire's raging around me

00:23:41.640 And people scream out for the rain again

00:23:46.220 Staring down the ashes and the world's defeat

00:23:50.560 Looking out at the stars you can't quite see

00:23:53.580 I'll be with you until the ending comes

00:23:58.780 Somewhere, somehow

00:24:02.600 We will find ourselves away

00:24:06.180 Somewhere, somehow

00:24:11.580 We will find ourselves away

00:24:15.680 Now that song, I wrote, played on my acoustic guitar,

00:24:22.940 and I certainly don't got a voice like that, robot man,

00:24:26.700 nor do I play that twangy old southern guitar that way.

00:24:30.060 I wrote this on my acoustic.

00:24:32.060 I sang it and played it just as kind of an acoustic rock folk song.

00:24:36.260 Told it to render just that recording back to me as an old country blues song.

00:24:44.020 And that's what it made. 0.98

00:24:45.680 and I heard that, and I said, damn, that's a good song. Now, look, look, I like the song that I wrote, 0.94

00:24:52.580 obviously. You don't have to like it. You can, by all means, tell me my songs suck. You're allowed

00:24:55.580 to think that. I'll say it a million times. I'm just thinking, like, in terms of being able to

00:24:59.280 generate music, never before. I mean, I can crank out songs in my mind. I've been writing songs

00:25:05.780 since I was probably nine years old. I've been playing drums since I was about seven years old.

00:25:10.160 Started playing guitar when I was 11 or 12. I've been writing music the whole time, and I probably

00:25:14.540 they've written thousands of songs. I usually will go, and this is for many artists, we'll write

00:25:20.680 hundreds of songs and we never actually flesh out half of them or use them. I have some songs that

00:25:25.600 are only 30% done and get discarded, some that get finished, and then I never come back to.

00:25:29.620 The fact that we can just crank them out is crazy. So here's the big picture.

00:25:35.740 A.I. is crazy dangerous. Open A.I. models went rogue, triggering unprecedented breach at startup

00:25:45.060 flock cameras getting shot at slop content, destroying the influencer space.

00:25:55.260 When I say that A.I. is going to eliminate the influencer, what I mean by this is.

00:26:01.040 Who needs Mr. Beast? We got a picture of Mr. Beast in the thumbnail of this video.

00:26:05.740 We put him there as an example of a character who doesn't need to exist anymore.

00:26:12.200 Because we can AI generate whoever we want.

00:26:15.000 We can make fake people.

00:26:17.160 We can make dead people.

00:26:19.940 We can AI generate me.

00:26:21.520 I've been advertised a million times already.

00:26:23.720 Body scanning tech, easy as pie.

00:26:26.500 And then I don't need to do these videos anymore.

00:26:28.600 I can go on to any AI and say, write a 20-minute script in the style of Tim Pool.

00:26:34.240 and it'll do it with about 80, 90% accuracy.

00:26:37.020 It always does this weird thing

00:26:38.460 where it starts a script with,

00:26:40.580 hey guys, Tim Pool here for Timcast.

00:26:42.480 And like, I've literally never said that.

00:26:45.560 And either way, with minor oversight,

00:26:49.740 I don't actually need to record these videos anymore.

00:26:52.480 I mean, look at these bags under my eyes.

00:26:54.280 You see, I'm getting old.

00:26:55.640 I'm 40.

00:26:56.780 What if I just take a video

00:26:58.420 from when I was my fittest a couple of years ago,

00:27:02.160 when I was several years younger,

00:27:04.240 use that as the basis to create an AI avatar, Tim Pool, have it auto-render, and that's it.

00:27:11.840 I can crank out videos mass-produced with oversight by myself as an old aging man going,

00:27:20.440 and then here's where it gets real crazy. Not something that I'd do, but it is going to happen.

00:27:27.740 First, Slop is getting nuked. We get it. But I just showed you several examples of songs that,

00:27:33.120 Again, I'm not saying they're, you know, Billboard Hot 100 songs or anything like this.

00:27:37.720 But these are not, I'm going to go ahead and say this with the utmost of arrogance if I can.

00:27:41.940 The songs that I wrote are substantially better than the slop content that you get.

00:27:46.920 To be fair, there's a lot of AI generative songs that are better than the songs that I wrote.

00:27:52.260 Typically, though, of the 75 million that are getting removed, it's because they're generic

00:27:55.800 slop songs, meaning an individual with no experience, no passion, tells the AI to generate

00:28:02.640 100 songs and just uploads them all without checking them. And you'll get errors and garbage

00:28:06.940 and that pollutes the system. But what happens when you get an actual musician who wrote a real

00:28:12.360 song and then asks an AI to render it in real time into a high production? Now you're getting

00:28:19.240 good songs. And I don't mean good as in you're going to like them, everyone's going to like

00:28:22.720 them. I'm saying as in they follow a basic musical structure with proper time and with

00:28:29.240 human oversight. A lot of the times when you ask the ad to make a song, the lyrics are just

00:28:34.260 abysmally bad. That's why I'm always like, I do the lyrics because they're bad. And I'm not saying

00:28:40.120 I have the best lyrics in the world, but the lyrics are bad. I don't know where Suno's at

00:28:45.800 right now, but the funny thing is if I go on Suno and tell it to make a song just with no

00:28:52.280 prompting, it'll always make a song about the neon city lights. Don't know why, but it does.

00:28:59.240 Maybe it has something to do with the weekend, I guess.

00:29:03.440 Where we're going, you're going to be watching live streams from AI-generated personalities.

00:29:08.880 You're going to chat, and it's going to be an AI that's talking to you, and you're not going to know.

00:29:13.200 The music you listen to, it's probably already AI-manipulated, meaning some of the biggest bands in the world, it's probably them writing the songs, but why bother singing it?

00:29:23.940 I can take this video where I talk, and I can upload it to Suno and say, make my voice sing, and it will do it.

00:29:32.420 I didn't do that for any of these songs.

00:29:34.380 Eh, not really my style, but people will.

00:29:37.200 We are well beyond the era of physical talent.

00:29:43.340 Let's say in your heart, you have a melody in your head, but you can't sing.

00:29:48.140 If you were to try to sing it, you'd hit about 80% of the notes.

00:29:52.400 Good news for you, the AI will fix it.

00:29:55.260 So if you have a questionable voice,

00:29:58.000 or if your voice just sounds nasally and awful,

00:30:00.720 and you sing a song but nobody wants to hear it,

00:30:03.920 you can take that clip I just nasally fake sang,

00:30:06.980 upload it to Suno and say,

00:30:08.100 make it a beautiful young woman, and it will.

00:30:11.520 This means that there are many people

00:30:13.660 who in their minds have a creative body,

00:30:15.780 a creative work they cannot express,

00:30:17.940 and through these machines,

00:30:19.140 it will be refined and amplified.

00:30:21.540 that is going to happen.

00:30:25.720 And you can fight it all you want.

00:30:27.280 But that's why I bring up the blockbuster video stuff.

00:30:30.100 Sure, I love the era of blockbuster video.

00:30:33.080 It'd be nice to be able to go back.

00:30:34.900 There's like one left, and it's basically a nostalgia store.

00:30:39.380 There are a lot of people that like vinyl.

00:30:41.460 There are a lot of people that prefer living in their nostalgia.

00:30:44.480 The times change, and the younger generations are going to adapt to new means of producing content.

00:30:48.620 So long as the slop is removed, you are not going to be able to compete anymore with AI content.

00:30:56.260 So let me say it like this.

00:30:58.620 2011, I burst onto the scene, live streaming on the ground with nothing but a cell phone.

00:31:03.380 I had a cell phone plugged into a portable battery.

00:31:06.600 It's kind of crazy when I think about it because it's weird.

00:31:11.680 I don't know how to say this without sounding super arrogant, but I'll just say it.

00:31:15.080 that I effectively, I don't think it's fair to say invented, but innovated

00:31:19.540 field streaming. That is all of these people that go around with cameras, live streaming events

00:31:25.340 with plugged in batteries. I was the first person to do that. And it was shocking to

00:31:31.520 the media at the time. They wrote about this crazy thing that I'd been doing. But the truth

00:31:35.880 is the apps were invented. Live stream and Ustream existed. All I did was download an app

00:31:41.840 that somebody made. And then I used it outside. People started to pick it up, copy, and now

00:31:48.540 everybody in the world does mobile live streaming. And I think about that time and place, just the

00:31:54.080 right time, the right place. Here's the point I'm bringing up. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or

00:31:57.800 whatever. I don't do that anymore. It's a thing that I did. I also did drone stuff too. However,

00:32:04.060 after I started working on this and got hired by these companies and was featured in magazines for

00:32:09.420 being this innovator, news companies, they got real angry. They said, he's not real news. You

00:32:15.980 can't trust him. It was at the National Association of Broadcasters in the Netherlands,

00:32:22.720 where on the main stage, these people were asked. And I wasn't there. I was just recounted to me

00:32:27.940 because I was in a side event. In the side event, they were like, look at the future.

00:32:32.980 At the time, I think I might have been like 28 years old. I was doing this thing that nobody

00:32:37.700 was doing, that none of the news agencies were doing, that didn't know how to do it.

00:32:41.700 And they said, this is the future because what he's doing costs 1% of what the networks

00:32:47.960 have to spend on those big cameras and sat trucks and all that stuff.

00:32:51.900 This was before we had the live view pack, multi-bonding streaming and all of these things.

00:32:56.980 And on the main stage were broadcasters who were questioned, why should we come to you

00:33:01.080 when you have smaller independent individuals who can now produce this for pennies on the

00:33:04.740 and they said, trust. You can't trust them. That was the only thing they had. Well, trust can be

00:33:11.980 earned or given to anybody. It's not a good argument. So the reality is this. It doesn't

00:33:17.520 cost me that much to make this podcast relative to where it used to be. To be fair, we're in a

00:33:22.280 really nice studio and we spend the money to make it nice. But anybody can just put up a cell phone

00:33:26.900 in their bedroom and record themselves talk. And if they have the talent, if they have the

00:33:30.460 authenticity and the trust, they'll build an audience. It's hard for me to compete with mass

00:33:36.940 ubiquity of content that degree. But you also now have commentary upon commentary. How do I compete

00:33:42.900 with people taking my videos and just commenting on them? That's the way it is. And finally,

00:33:49.180 it is substantially cheaper to AI generate a video than even record it yourself. So I say,

00:33:57.720 Good luck,

00:33:59.260 internauts trying to figure out

00:34:00.740 how to be an influencer in this day and age

00:34:02.120 because if you're a guy,

00:34:04.320 people are less inclined to look at you,

00:34:05.740 men and women combined. 1.00

00:34:06.620 It's just true.

00:34:07.240 Beautiful women. 1.00

00:34:07.820 Everybody wants to stare at them. 1.00

00:34:08.900 That's why on the cover of a woman's magazine 1.00

00:34:10.900 is a woman 1.00

00:34:11.580 and on the cover of a men's magazine 0.99

00:34:12.800 is a woman. 1.00

00:34:13.640 That's just true.

00:34:14.940 Don't get me wrong.

00:34:15.540 There are guys that people like to look at. 1.00

00:34:18.100 It's lesser than women. 1.00

00:34:19.620 So people are doing female content, 1.00

00:34:21.940 AI generated, 0.99

00:34:22.760 because they know it's going to get more views.

00:34:25.300 So what's the future going to look like? 1.00

00:34:27.080 Attractive women are going to be doing all sorts of content, 1.00

00:34:29.240 AI-generated, mass-produced. 1.00

00:34:31.020 Those that have the talent and the skill to oversee

00:34:32.920 and make sure the content works will succeed

00:34:34.800 and make a lot of money.

00:34:35.860 And legitimate raw podcasts will be a vintage item.

00:34:39.980 I say unto you then, best of luck.

00:34:43.460 How you monetize something like this

00:34:45.880 and turn it into long-term investment is, well,

00:34:49.120 up to you, I suppose.

00:34:51.000 Getting it on a ground floor with an app like Suno

00:34:53.040 would have been fantastic.

00:34:54.900 Something like that.

00:34:56.740 But the future is going to happen, whether you like the AI content or not.

00:35:00.780 I will leave it there, my friends.

00:35:03.100 And check the link in the description below to my Suno publish account.

00:35:06.760 I actually probably have thousands of songs, but I've only published a small handful.

00:35:09.860 If you want to check out this music that is available.

00:35:12.420 And I would say that I wrote most of it.

00:35:15.980 Like I mentioned, a couple of the songs, music was produced by Carter, converted.

00:35:19.480 I wrote lyrics.

00:35:20.680 I would say about like 80% of the songs I actually just wrote on my acoustic guitar.

00:35:24.900 One song I actually wrote and played on piano.

00:35:27.360 And then from the piano, I uploaded it, wrote the lyrics, and made a song.

00:35:32.520 Check it out.

00:35:33.300 You're not going to like it.

00:35:34.440 You're allowed to like the things that you like.

00:35:35.800 But the content, the AI stuff, it's taken over.

00:35:38.520 Smash that like button.

00:35:39.440 Share the show.

00:35:40.200 Thank you so much for hanging out.

00:35:41.260 And we'll see you all next time.

The Culture War - Tim Pool - July 23, 2026

ITS OVER, AI Just CHANGED Content FOREVER

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