It's Over. AI Just Changed Content Forever.

A change is coming. It's been bubbling up among the younger generations. Many older people have not been paying attention, and many of us are going to get trapped like Blockbuster got trapped. The downward spiral and eventually business goes tits up. What we're looking at is the AI content revolution, and I don't know how long it will last. It may actually be somewhat short-lived for now, but I do believe that we're looking at a period where AI content is going to take over, and as much as people don't like this, it doesn't matter what you like or 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 of Blockbuster video. I grew up in the 90s. I was a kid, and I remember those Friday nights where we'd get out of school, go to Blockbuster to rent movies and video games for the weekend, and then you had to return them Sunday night. I'd go to 7-Eleven. I'd pick up. I'd get nachos and candy and drinks, and we'd hang out. Those are the days, and we see these AI-generated 90s videos going massively viral because people reminisce and they love it. The truth is technology changed. Blockbuster went by the wayside, and we used to have family pizza huts, play places at McDonald's, but now it's all just brutalist box stores. They're strip malls, pizza pickup. They're trying to bring it back because people do miss it, but I believe the AI content revolution is here, and there ain't nothing y'all can do about it. Now, for me, I make music. 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, and we've had some tremendous success. 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. In the past few years with AI music content, things have changed dramatically, so I've noticed a handful of things that we're going to break down in this segment talking about what the future holds for all of you, and the first thing is, will AI content slop? It's actually getting demonetized, so there's something that y'all need to understand. For those of you that are looking to get into YouTube content creation, podcasting, music, or any kind of art in general, there's a lot to break down in what we are currently seeing in the changes that are happening and how the machine is actually resisting it. I'll start off by saying this, if YouTube allows this AI content, and so does Spotify, there will be no content anymore. Right now, what we are looking at is what's called model collapse, where these AI systems are regurgitating content within themselves and training off of that same content. Eventually, it'll be too difficult to produce original content, the AI training models will go insane, and then YouTube will cease to function properly, as will Spotify. So what have we seen? Spotify and YouTube are cracking down on AI content, and I can see it in the algorithm, I can see it in the ad rates. Ad rates for content in the space that we occupy, which is news, culture, commentary, politics, etc., has actually gone up a decent amount, and we can see our ad rates, our RPMs, which is money per viewer received, has increased since YouTube began taking down this AI slop content. But, despite the fact we can all agree that slop sucks, something else is coming, and you need to be prepared for it. So I'm going to show you a bit of the future, I know, whether you like it or not. There are a lot of people I've posted AI generated music, and they say, this is terrible music, I hate the style, I hate the genre, and you're allowed to. That was always allowed. The point is not that the genre, the style, the songs are good, but that I can snap my fingers and produce a top-tier Hollywood-level song, 15 minutes. The change is now. We'll start here with YouTube, and then we'll get into the music, Spotify, and what's happening. Important things that y'all need to understand, but also does stretch into governance, with flat cameras and things of that nature. So, before we get started, my friends, make sure you head over to TimCast.com to join our Discord community. We got tens of thousands of people hanging out every single day, and you gotta be the change you wanna see in the world. The conversation around AI is big, and it's not all bad, but it is bad in a lot of ways, and it's in ways that we should have a conversation about. Join us at TimCast.com to support the work that we do, smash the like button, share this video with everyone you know, don't forget to subscribe. Let's start here with Hollywood Reporter from June 13th. Faceless creators take a hit, as YouTube cracks down on AI slop. Just a few years ago, they were raking in clicks and cash, but now that the platform tweaked their algorithm, they're suddenly collateral damage. I saw this right away. A year or so ago, we began to experience what I would describe as an industry-level problem, particularly for those of us that work in podcasting, as well as, we call this VOD-casting, video podcasting, it's weird, neologism, as it were. Ad rates were going down, viewership was going down, and we knew exactly why. In fact, I've talked about it quite a bit. Young people, early 20s, had figured out how to mass-generate YouTube content. Now, these videos don't get a lot of views. Sometimes, they'll be a banger, but for the most part, they might get 800 views. Now, you may be thinking, what's 800 views? Well, honestly, it's nothing. If we just round up, let's just do simple math and say 1,000 views, these people might be generating somewhere between $5 and $10 per video, and this is where it gets bad. They were producing hundreds of videos per week, so actually quite simple. If you make 100 videos and you're averaging between 5 and 10, you might actually, within a few days, pull in, I don't know, $500 to $1,000, if not more. Yeah, somewhere around there. By the end of the week, if you've produced somewhere close to 500 to 1,000 videos, you could be looking at six-figure income. Some of these guys that went viral gave interviews where they were generating between $100 and $200,000 per month, auto-generating long-form and short-form content, but it was killing the platform. People aren't returning to watch these videos, and so long as the algorithm promotes them, you're getting content that is not meaningful and doesn't attract an audience to stay on the platform. This is a problem for YouTube, and much to my surprise, YouTube began to demonetize these channels. Surprise, surprise. Many of these channels, not all, have stopped producing content outright. What they would do is, you would see some of these videos. An example would be stick figures explaining some kind of news event or historical event. There are programs, there are companies where you can pay them, and they will auto-generate a video for you. You then get a monetized account, and although you're not going to make a million bucks right away, you pay about $3,000 a week, and you make about $5,000 to $6,000 per week by uploading mass amounts of content. But this means that the average person who has only a finite amount of time during the day cannot watch everything, and so for us, it's quite simple. The front page of YouTube is a raffle. There's about 15 videos that appear on the front page, sometimes less now that they've added shorts, it could be a lot less. And this means that if you're producing long-form content, which by far is the most lucrative, if your subscriber, follower, fan goes to the front page of YouTube, and instead of seeing your content, they see one of 1,000 AI-generated videos, this just means that while they may not actually prefer that content over yours, because the video appears on their front page, they're going to click it. And this is the game. If they produce 1,000 AI-slot videos, and you produce two or three in a single day, well, the way the lottery works is because there's substantially more of these AI videos, the likelier that your video surfaces diminishes. The less your fans click on it, the less they recommend it. It's a downward spiral where volume wins against everything. So YouTube has changed this. They are dealing with this to try and shut it down. And while it has eliminated a lot of these really awful channels, many of them still exist because they cross the bare minimum threshold of original content. And that's the world that we are now going to enter. Let me jump next to Spotify. Spotify removes AI-slot and seeks transparency from musicians who use AI. In short, Spotify is making it easier for listeners to figure out if the music they are listening to is human-made or produced using generative AI. While the audio streaming service says it will not get in the way of artists and producers using AI, it's committed to removing AI-slot. What's next? Musicians are being encouraged to be transparent by using a new beta feature on the app that tells listeners if and how they have used an AI in their music. Which brings me to the question of AI content production. I made this post upon reading these articles. Over the past couple of years, I have been working extensively with various music AI platforms. I write music every single day. One song that I wrote, just warming up my vocal cords in the morning for this show on my acoustic guitar, I then record, upload to Suno, and hit render. And it takes my demo, recorded live in this very chair, and turns it into a fully produced song. So I'm going to give you a couple of musical examples. I'm going to include the link to the AI generated playlist from Suno in the description of this video if you want to check out some of the other songs. And I'll explain the breakdown and how AI content is going to happen. This is going to change the industry, change the landscape. For those that are working in the space, if you don't know this, you need to know this. For those that know this already, thank you for watching. I suppose you don't need to watch this portion. And for anybody else who's interested, this is where it gets real crazy. Let's start here. We have this tweet. I said, fight it all you want, but the AI music world is happening. This song was created by Carter Banks and I. The process started with a fully produced instrumental track by Carter. The original style was more industrial slow rock heavy. I input the song into Suno and generated several alternate styles. We rendered several songs in different styles. In this version, I converted Carter's track to piano jazz, wrote the lyrics, and input them. Suno generated several versions and many were not good. After a few generations, this was the final that I settled on. This song is written by humans. The music was written and produced by humans. But this completed version took that produced music, changed it, and created a generated AI version that I will play for you a little bit. I'm not going to waste your time playing a full song, but I'll give you a demo. I want to clarify this. Instrumentation written by a human. Lyrics written by me with the help of AI. Input into Suno told to become a specific style. It rendered, I would argue, a couple dozen different versions. Maybe less. Maybe it was about a dozen or two dozen. And I settled on this one being the one that I liked. We never trade the truth for a leather chair. We were chasing something bright and uncontainable. Hands up to a sky we thought we'd own. Every promise felt unbreakable. Back when no was just the word we'd never known. That's about enough. I think I don't want to play too much of that. So this is a song that we call Drawing Lines. Carter had produced a short instrumental song that uses this essentially melody and the core underlying structure. I converted it from an industrial sound to a heavy sound. I'm sorry, from industrial heavy sound to a piano jazz. Added these lyrics and we got a hip hop jazz rap modern style song. If you want to check it out, it's available on my axe. Now here's where it gets interesting. That same song, I went into Suno and told it, make a version that is rock. Check this out. On the flashlight, drawing maps in the dark. Every road led to somewhere with a fire and a spark. We said we won't wear the numbers, we won't learn how to blend. We'd be names on the skyline, we swore on scraped knees and summer air. We never trade the truth for a leather chair. We were chasing something bright and uncontainable. Hands up to a sky we thought we'd own. Every promise felt unbreakable. You get the point. It took two seconds to do that. Two seconds. Now again, many of you might say, I don't like the song. I don't like the style. That's completely fine. I don't care if you like the song. You don't have to. Some of you might like death metal or whatever or pop or polka. The point is the production quality. And while the immediate response I get from most people is, yeah, but it's AI. It's got no spirit, no soul. The unfortunate reality is that doesn't matter in terms of cost of production. That is, certainly there's a lot of music with real soul. The tempo might be kind of off. In fact, I've got several songs that change tempo unevenly because they're just spirited, human acoustic music that I've always struggled to convert into a click track song. In fact, maybe you can't. Maybe I should try recording it and we'll see what we can get away with. But the truth is, for most people consuming music, this is good enough. Now you heard that song, right? Now here's where it gets real wild. Here's another song. This one's called Salt. Using the same underlying instrumentation, I told Suno to make a heavier, dark, gothic alt rock track. Wrote lyrics, again, in this instance, with the help of artificial intelligence. What does that mean? For these songs, what I did was I wrote basic premises and a few lines. I then told the AI, using this cadence and structure of syllable and song, write a verse. So it copies the words that I write. So I might write a verse then it will use the same syllable count and write a comparable verse. Usually it's bad. I'll then go in and edit it, ask it to do it again, go in and edit it again. But this back and forth results in a final verse. Sometimes it's been really great because I'm like, I can't think of the right word. And I'm like, give me some words. And it gives me a list of words. So this is not wholly just human lyric writing. It's bouncing it off of AI, but largely human. I put it in this, listen to this song. I'll just skip ahead a little bit. This is the song. So this is where it gets just absolutely insane. The question is what constitutes slop content? And I'll tell you this. Slop, in my opinion, is when you have no experience, you don't know how to make music, you're not going to write anything. And boy, is there a lot. And so what people are doing and what's destroying these platforms is that they're going to an app like Suno and there's a few others. They're saying, write me a song about love. It'll write it and they'll just upload it. They've put no thought into it. Volume is key. That's the same thing with YouTube. 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. There's an article that I want to pull up that, let me see if I can, here we go, from Citywide. AI bots stole my music. And this is where it gets real crazy. One West Philly musician's surreal unsettling journey into the world of fake artists. To put it simply, and I'll give full credit to this guy, his band Makeshift Hammer. Someone said they found an album on Spotify that sounds just as if someone stole your ish and distorted it. What we are now seeing on Instagram, on TikTok and even YouTube, people will take a video like mine, use what's called AI replacement, take a woman, because it's always a woman, and then have a woman remake my exact video. They don't really do it to me because the way I structure the video and frame it makes it very difficult for them to do that. But there are many people, you know, I saw the funniest thing. Have you guys ever seen that dude who goes real fast? That's his whole thing. He has a keyboard, he has a laptop with a timer on it, and he'll like, he'll drop a bill, a dollar bill, and then he'll hold his hand up, drop the bill, he'll, what does he do? He drops the bill, hits the timer, grabs the bill and hits the timer again, and then he looks at you and he People have begun to AI replace him with busty, beautiful women doing the exact same thing, because it's going to get views. Tons of OnlyFans creators are just AI generated women. In fact, men will do gross poses and then AI render themselves to be women and sell that to other men. This is the problem of slop that needs to be dealt with. However, dealing with this will not change the fact that we are looking at a new generation of AI content. This means on YouTube, they can eliminate the slop, but you will still be competing with low cost, easy entry, high quality content. Same is true for music. Again, you may not like the genre of music I produce, but the fact is, guys, we've run the experiments. So for the past several months, what we do is, before TimCast IRL, I will play a song and I'll just run my playlist. Now, these songs are written by me, for the most part, a couple written by Carter. I want to clarify, just, you know, for the sake of Carter, make sure he gets the credit that he deserves. Those songs I showed, those were his underlying instrumentation, and he generally does all the production for the songs we produce. A handful of the songs I wrote personally, uploaded, rendered, that's it. Here's the funny thing. We play the songs without saying what they are. The guests, almost invariably, oh, who is this? And then I, oh yeah, I don't know, it's just a playlist. They go, oh. And they'll try and Shazam it, or Google song identification, right, the app. And I'll be like, oh no, this is my song, I wrote it. I wrote it, uploaded it to Suno, and hit render. And this is what you get. You get a bunch of different types of music. Now, the playlist that I have right here, I wonder if I can pull up anything that is not, most of the stuff I have rendered right now, I would consider to be like modern pop. But I do have some that I think are rock-y. I have a ton of songs in here. I don't know exactly which one, some of them are not particularly good, to be honest. Take a listen to this one, and I'm only going to play a very short moment of it. This is intentionally meant to be glitchy, ambient, lo-fi, for the purpose of just one of these background relaxing tracks. I'll jump ahead and just play a little bit from the middle. By all means. Again, I know a lot of people are going to say it's not my style of music, and again, to clarify, I understand that. It's more so about how easy it was for me to make that song. That song you just played, the reason I highlight it is that that one is purely generative. I did not perform, I didn't play any instruments. I didn't write any lyrics. I went into Suno, and I said, make me a song that fits this vibe. I wrote maybe, I don't know, a hundred words, if that, describing the kind of song that I wanted it to be. Had it generate probably 30 different versions, and settled upon that, and I thought it was absolutely amazing. Let me show you, let's see if I can, uh, let's see if I can play this one. No, that's not what I want. Let's, let's, let's, uh, let me play this one for you, because this might be a genre that people like. Well, that some of you like, compared to the music. I hear the warning from every echo in the distance, but I keep moving just to get to you. I found salvation, as the fire's raging around me, and people scream out for the rain again. Staring down the ashes and the world's defeat, looking out at the stars you can't quite see, I'll be with you until the ending comes. Somewhere, somehow, we will find ourselves a way. Somewhere, somehow, we will find ourselves a way. Now that song, I wrote, played on my acoustic guitar, and I ain't, certainly don't got a voice like that robot man, nor do I play that twangy old southern guitar that way. I wrote this on my acoustic, I sang it and played it just as kind of like an acoustic rock folk song, told it to render just that recording back to me as an old country blues song. And that's what it made. And I heard that and I said, damn, that's a good song. Now look, I like the song that I wrote, obviously. You don't have to like it. You can, by all means, tell me my song sucked. You're allowed to think that. I'll say it a million times. I'm just thinking like in terms of being able to generate music, never before. I mean, I can crank out songs in my mind. I've been writing songs since I was probably nine years old. I've been playing drums since I was about seven years old. Started playing guitar when I was 11 or 12. I've been writing music the whole time, and I probably have written thousands of songs. I usually will go, and this is for many artists, we'll write hundreds of songs and we never actually flesh out half of them or use them. I have some songs that are only 30% done and get discarded, some that get finished, and then I never come back to. The fact that we can just crank them out is crazy. So here's the big picture. AI is crazy dangerous. Open AI models went rogue, triggering unprecedented breach at startup. Flock cameras getting shot at. Slop content destroying the influencer space. When I say that AI is going to eliminate the influencer, what I mean by this is who needs Mr. Beast? We got a picture of Mr. Beast in the thumbnail of this video. We put him there as an example of a character who doesn't need to exist anymore because we can AI generate whoever we want. We can make fake people. We can make dead people. Can AI generate me? I've been advertised a million times already. Body scanning tech, easy as pie. And then I don't need to do these videos anymore. I can go onto any AI and say, write a 20 minute script in the style of Tim Pool, and it'll do it with about 80, 90% accuracy. It always does this weird thing where it starts a script with, hey guys, Tim Pool here for Timcast. And like, I've literally never said that. And either way, with minor oversight, I don't actually need to record these videos anymore. I mean, look at these bags under my eyes. You see, I'm getting old. I'm 40. What if I just take a video from when I was my fittest a couple of years ago, when I was several years younger, use that as the basis to create an AI avatar, Tim Pool, have it auto render, and that's it. I can crank out videos mass produced with oversight by myself as an old aging man. And then here's where it gets real crazy. Not something that I'd do, but it is going to happen. First, slop is getting nuked. We get it. But I just showed you several examples of songs that, again, I'm not saying they're, you know, billboard hot 100 songs or anything like this, but these are not, I'm going to go ahead and say this with the utmost of arrogance if I can. The songs that I wrote are substantially better than the slop content that you get. To be fair, there's a lot of AI generative songs that are better than the songs that I wrote. Typically, though, of the 75 million that are getting removed, it's because they're generic slop songs, meaning an individual with no experience, no passion tells the AI to generate 100 songs and just uploads them all without checking them. And you'll get errors and garbage, and that pollutes the system. But what happens when you get an actual musician who wrote a real song and then asks an AI to render it in real time into a high production? Now you're getting good songs. And I don't mean good as in you're going to like them, everyone's going to like them. I'm saying as in they follow a basic musical structure with proper time and with human oversight. A lot of the times when you ask the AI to make a song, the lyrics are just abysmally bad. That's why I'm always like, I do the lyrics because they're bad. And I'm not saying I have the best lyrics in the world, but the AI lyrics are bad. I don't know where Suno's at right now, but the funny thing is, if I go on Suno and tell it to make a song, just with no prompting, it'll always make a song about the neon city lights. Don't know why, but it does. Maybe it has something to do with the weekend, I guess. Where we're going, you're going to be watching live streams from AI-generated personalities. 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. 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? 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. I didn't do that in front of these songs. Not really my style, but people will. We are well beyond the era of physical talent. Let's say in your heart, you have a melody in your head, but you can't sing. If you were to try to sing it, you'd hit about 80% of the notes. Good news for you, the AI will fix it. If you have a questionable voice, or if your voice just sounds nasally and awful, and you sing a song, but nobody wants to hear it, you can take that clip I just nasally fake sang, upload it to Suno, and say, make it a beautiful young woman, and it will. This means that there are many people who in their minds have a creative body, a creative work they cannot express, and through these machines, it will be refined and amplified. That is going to happen, and you can fight it all you want, but that's why I the Blockbuster video stuff. Sure, I love the era of Blockbuster video. It'd be nice to be able to go back. There's one left that's basically a nostalgia store. There are a lot of people that like vinyl. There are a lot of people that prefer living in their nostalgia. The times change, and the younger generations are going to adapt to new means of producing content. So long as the slop is removed, you are not going to be able to compete anymore with AI content. Let me say it like this. In 2011, I burst onto the scene live streaming on the ground with nothing but a cell phone. I had a cell phone plugged into a portable battery. It's kind of crazy when I think about it because it's weird. I don't know how to say this without sounding super arrogant, but I'll just say it. I effectively, I don't think it's fair to say invented, but innovated field streaming. That is, all of these people that go around with cameras live streaming events with plugged-in batteries. I was the first person to do that, and it was shocking to the media at the time. They wrote about this crazy thing that I'd been doing, but the truth is the apps were invented. Live streaming, Ustream existed. All I did was download an app that somebody made, and then I used it outside. People started to pick it up, copy, and now everybody in the world does mobile live streaming. And I think about that time and place, just the right time, the right place. Here's the point I'm bringing up. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or whatever. I don't do that anymore. It's a thing that I did. I also did drone stuff too. However, after I started working on this and got hired by these companies and was featured in magazines for being this innovator, news companies, they got real angry. They said, he's not real news. You can't trust him. It was at the National Association of Broadcasters in the Netherlands, where on the main stage, these people were asked. And I wasn't there. I was just recounted to me because I was in a side event. In the side event, they were like, look at the future. At the time, I think I might have been like 28 years old. I was doing this thing that nobody was doing, that none of the news agencies were doing, that didn't know how to do it. And they said, this is the future because what he's doing costs 1% of what the networks have to spend on those big cameras and sat trucks and all that stuff. This was before we had the live view pack, multi-bonding streaming, and all of these things. And on the main stage were broadcasters who were questioned, why should we come to you when you have smaller independent individuals who can now produce this for pennies on the dollar? And they said, trust. You can't trust them. That was the only thing they had. Well, trust can be earned or given to anybody. It's not a good argument. So the reality is this. It doesn't cost me that much to make this podcast. Relative to where it used to be. To be fair, we're in a really nice studio and we spend the money to make it nice. But anybody can just put up a cell phone in their bedroom and record themselves talk. And if they have the talent, if they have the authenticity and the trust, they'll build an audience. It's hard for me to compete with mass ubiquity of content in that degree. But you also now have commentary upon commentary. How do I compete with people taking my videos and just commenting on them? That's the way it is. And finally, it is substantially cheaper to AI generate a video than even record it yourself. So I say, good luck, internauts trying to figure out how to be an influencer in this day and age, because if you're a guy, people are less inclined to look at you, men and women combined. It's just true. Beautiful women. Everybody wants to stare at them. That's why on the cover of a woman's magazine is a woman on the cover of a man's magazine is a woman. That's just true. Don't get me wrong. There are guys that people like to look at. It's lesser than women. So people are doing female content, AI generated, because they know it's going to get more views. So what's the future going to look like? Attractive women are going to be doing all sorts of content, AI generated, mass produced. Those that have the talent and the skill to oversee and make sure the content works will succeed and make a lot of money. And legitimate raw podcasts will be a vintage item. I say unto you, then, best of luck. How you monetize something like this and turn it into long-term investment is, well, up to you, I suppose. Getting it on the ground floor with an app like Suno would have been fantastic. Something like that. But the future is going to happen, whether you like the AI content or not. I will leave it there, my friends. And check the link in the description below to my Suno publish account. I actually probably have thousands of songs, but I've only published a small handful. If you want to check out this music that is available, and I would say that I wrote most of it. Like I mentioned, a couple of the songs, music was produced by Carter, converted. I wrote lyrics. I would say about like 80% of the songs I actually just wrote on my acoustic guitar. One song I actually wrote and played on piano. And then from the piano, I uploaded it, wrote the lyrics and made a song. Check it out. You're not going to like it. You're allowed to like the things that you like, but the content, the AI stuff, it's taking over. Smash that like button, share the show. Thank you so much for hanging out and we'll see you all next time.