Субтитры (176)
0:00Our 12,026 Human Era Calendar just
dropped – and this year is extra special.
0:06Stay tuned until the end for the reveal
or head straight to the shop to get yours.
0:12AI Slop is saturating the internet and
things are becoming dramatic pretty quickly.
0:17In an online world where
money is made with attention,
0:21fake users spread their slop in review sections,
0:23generate fake traffic or poison discourse.
0:26AI has supercharged this and
made slop much harder to spot.
0:30Today about half of internet traffic is bots,
0:33the majority of them are used
for destructive purposes.
0:37It's never been easier to make mediocre content –
from the black hole of meaninglessness that is LinkedIN,
0:42low effort short videos just engaging enough to
hypnotise kids and fry their attention spans,
0:47to endless soullessly rewritten books on amazon.
0:50AI music is invading streaming platforms.
0:53Google AI is summarizing websites
instead of sending traffic to them.
0:58On Youtube, new channels publish long
form videos multiple times a week with
1:02AI generated thumbnails, voices and scripts.
1:06True crime, video essays,
science, no space is safe.
1:11We’re in the golden era of soulless slop.
1:14And sadly, actual creative human work
is used to train these AI models.
1:19Every reddit comment, original YouTube video or
1:22human drawing on deviant art has
been sold out to the AI companies.
1:27Or straight up stolen by them.
1:29Without attribution or payment
to the actual creators.
1:33Creative theft on a scale where it
is impossible to protect against it,
1:37already putting loads of creatives’ work
in danger – so AI companies can get rich.
1:43While this is sad and frustrating,
what’s even worse is that generative
1:47AI truly has the potential to
break the internet irreversibly.
1:51By making it harder and
harder to tell what is true.
1:55At First AI Looked Great!
1:58A kurzgesagt script starts with basic
research that is turned into a script
2:03and then fact checked in depth by 2-3 people.
2:06We try to confirm our info
with what we deem trustworthy,
2:09ideally first hand sources, ideally papers.
2:13Then we get 1-3 experts for input and critique.
2:16Fact checking and compiling our sources
alone takes around 100 hours per video.
2:22Of course we make mistakes or oversimplify,
and you can disagree with our conclusions
2:26– it’s unavoidable, we are only human after all.
2:29But it is fair to say that our process
is extensive and after a decade,
2:33we know what we are doing.
2:35When AI appeared we were very excited.
2:37A mechanical brain able to super
quickly collect information!
2:41So we went to work and it looked amazing!
2:44And then we started fact checking.
2:46We didn’t expect it to be perfect –
but it was way worse than we thought.
2:51Confidently Incorrect – AI is SO Bad at This
2:56We’ll summarize and generalize our experiences
2:59over multiple projects and months
condensed into one fake project.
3:03A video about why Brown Dwarfs are the
worst and should be ashamed of themselves.
3:08So we got all the pro accounts of
all the AI models and got to work.
3:12Using deep research tools to create
a summary and overview of all the
3:16information about the failed stars, brown dwarfs.
3:19And wow it was great!
3:21Dozens of pages of outlines with unique
information nuggets and links to sources!
3:26Then we started to look deeper.
3:28More than 80% of the info and
factoids were pretty solid and
3:33we could reconstruct where they were from.
3:35Wikipedia, papers, legit articles.
3:38What about the rest? It was great stuff,
like the speed of brown dwarf superstorms,
3:43the nature of their insides or
how disappointed their moms are.
3:46But we could not find where
the AI got this info from.
3:49Which is not automatically a bad sign – after all,
3:52the models contain pretty much all
the internet and books ever written.
3:56So we asked experts for input – and
they flagged the exact same facts,
4:01even asking where we found it.
4:02To fulfil its goal, to make us happy,
the AI had invented or extrapolated
4:07information to make brown dwarfs more
interesting than they really are.
4:11Like a bad journalist making up details to
make a story hit harder or fit a narrative.
4:17Now we wanted to know more and dove in deeper,
4:20reading the seemingly more solid
sources the AI had given us in full.
4:25One was an article from a news
site written by a human journalist
4:30It had a very familiar structure
and surely purely coincidentally,
4:34read like what you get if a human
slightly changes AI wording.
4:38An AI essay detection tool gave it a 72% match.
4:42So an AI article without sources, used
as a credible source for AI research.
4:48Which makes sense since in 2025 there
were already well over 1200 confirmed AI
4:54News Websites publishing massive amounts of AI
generated misinformation and false narratives.
5:00This mix of correct, dubiously sourced
and straight up made up information also
5:05leads AI to present really shoddy conclusions that
5:09sound strong or novel but are often
half truths or misrepresentations.
5:14Oh well. We salvaged what we could
and went back to the drawing board.
5:18And after a few weeks it happened.
5:21By pure stupid chance, we saw a brown dwarf
video popping up, by a relatively new channel.
5:26It had hundreds of thousands of views and
was pretty good, nice footage, great editing!
5:31But we had seen the structure and rhythm before.
5:34And would you look at that, it contained all
5:37the brown dwarf facts we had flagged as
unreliable or straight up made up by AI.
5:42This is where the death of the internet begins.
5:46Now there is a proper source of
brown dwarf misinformation online.
5:50When the next AI repeats the same research,
5:52it will find a transcript from
a video with a lot of views.
5:56The misinformation is now true.
5:59Even before AI it was pretty hard to
find the origin of facts that sound
6:03great but are not true – just watch
our video about a 100 year old lie.
6:07As AI use goes on it may become
impossible to know what is true or not.
6:13The Most Corrosive Lie
6:15The problem with AI is how trustworthy it
seems. How it is correct enough to seem
6:20super smart and how incredibly
confidently incorrect it is.
6:24Casually lying to your face, often very subtly.
6:27When you catch it lying, it immediately
admits it, vows to never do it again.
6:31And then it does it again.
6:33As eloquent as current language
models feel, there is nobody home.
6:38No greater intelligence or
consciousness is talking back to you.
6:42Current AI is a very complex hammer that does not
understand what it is doing or what nails are.
6:48But we are letting it add new shelves
to the library of human knowledge.
6:51AI is changing quickly, so this may get
better, but right now it's pretty grim.
6:58Way too many people blindly trust AI.
7:02Studies looked into the language
of millions of scientific papers
7:05published before and after the rise of LLMs.
7:09They found an abrupt and sharp increase in
the frequency of words that AIs like to use.
7:15So it seems clear that now a significant portion
of papers have been at least assisted by AI,
7:21usually without acknowledgement.
7:23And just in July 2025 it was
discovered that a number of
7:27researchers had started to sneak
hidden messages into their papers.
7:30In white text or too small for
the human eye they prompted AIs
7:34to review them positively and not point out flaws.
7:38As more and more people are using AI carelessly,
7:41the library of human knowledge is
getting less and less reliable.
7:45Which brings us the last
part: How are we using AI?
7:49And will kurzgesagt survive the AI slop age?
7:53Will AI Slop Kill Kurzgesagt And Artists?
7:58On the internet there is only one truly
valuable resource: human attention.
8:02If current trends continue it is not
that far fetched that cheap slop content,
8:06stuff just good enough, will soak
up the majority of human attention.
8:10It could make us dumber, less informed,
our attention spans even worse,
8:15increase political divides and make
us neglect real human interaction.
8:19If AI eats the majority of the attention pie,
channels like ours will become unfeasible.
8:24Or forced to downsize or use AI themselves to be
able to compete. We don’t want to play this game.
8:34Like the align tool in adobe illustrator.
8:37If you have a bunch of boxes and
you want them to line them up,
8:40you can do this manually, one by one.
8:42Or you can just select them, click “align”
and have them perfectly aligned in an instant.
8:47It’s the same with AI programing tools for
8:49animation or using it as a
faster google alternative.
8:53AI is a helpful tool, but the
creativity and integrity is still ours.
8:59So dear internet, here is
what we are offering to you:
9:02kurzgesagt is made by humans, for
humans and it will remain that way.
9:07We will produce well researched content and invest
9:10a lot of time and our human creativity
into our illustrations and animations.
9:16Put in our creative soul into our work.
9:19We will continue to fact check
and discuss our research with
9:22human experts, to give you the most
trustworthy information that we can.
9:26When we make mistakes, they will be our mistakes.
9:29We would rather quit than make AI slop.
9:33But to go on we need your support.
9:36kurzgesagt is almost 70 full time
people and a lot of freelancers on top.
9:41This is a lot of salaries, software
licences, laptops, rent and coffee.
9:48There is a way you can help us
keep this human-made project alive!
9:53It’s the 12,026 Human Era Calendar
– designed to fill your home with
9:58a year's worth of kurzgesagt art
– but it’s much more than that.
10:02It’s an ode to humanity and human ingenuity.
10:06This calendar reframes time
itself by starting not 2,000,
10:10but 12,000 years ago – at the
dawn of human civilization.
10:15This way 10,000 more years of
our shared past and incredible
10:18achievements of our ancestors
become part of our timeline.
10:22You can use it just like a regular
calendar – but it could change how
10:26you see your place in history, and
how far we’ve all come as a species.
10:30This time we’ve collected 12 inspiring
stories about our special connection to
10:36the stars – from the first creature
to ever glance up at the night sky,
10:39to ancient models of our cosmos, way
into humanity's future among the stars.
10:45Each vibrant illustration is printed
on high-quality paper with plenty of
10:49space to plan your days or record
your adventures in the year 12,026.
10:54And because this is our 10-year calendar
anniversary, we’ve gone all out.
10:59We created the first-ever kurzgesagt artbook:
11:02a vibrant, jam-packed collection of every
calendar illustration we’ve ever made.
11:08That’s 120 pages, and 10 years of
kurzgesagt art in one giant book.
11:14It’s also packed with behind-the-scenes sketches,
stories, and fun facts from the kurzgesagt team.
11:21Just like our videos, our products aren’t
churned out by a soulless algorithm.
11:25They’re made with love by real humans,
who spend countless hours researching,
11:30illustrating and designing
things that we hope you’ll love.
11:34So if you value real, human-made content over
AI Slop: Join us and our global community of
11:41Birbs who get the calendar every year
and help us keep kurzgesagt afloat.
11:46Together we’ll ride out the slop wave.
11:49The calendar and artbook are available
now, only while supplies last.
