If you need another reason to fucking hate AI, the insane amount of ambient misogyny it propagates on YouTube Shorts is astounding.

If you're a normal person and therefore do not spend most of your day running shorts or autoplay in the background for noise, you might not know that YouTube Shorts (and I imagine TikTok as well, but I don't go there, so I can't say for sure) is inundated with text to speech videos of AI written stories.

It all began as voiceovers of reddit and Tumblr posts. Which got popular enough to get money, so the AI copycats moved in. To the point where human creators doing narration work had to add video of themselves to prove they're not AI. (Sidenote, if you don't think reading reddit and Tumblr posts out loud for a video is creative work, you will not survive the copyright wars. It is transformative work and protected by fair use. And if you like fanfic and fandom related activities, you damn better be ready to defend any and all transformative work under fair use. An attack on them is an attack on us, and if you don't get it, please fucking educate yourself on the matter, we're living in dire times.)

The AI boom has made it easy for people to throw together slop channels with AI generated stories and text to speech voice overs that get chopped into short videos with flashy, random, often stolen background video.

And if that was it, that would be one thing. But the thing is, the content of these stories is appalling. These are stories steeped deep in misogyny: evil, controlling mothers, entitled sisters, ungrateful daughters. It is always about hard working sons and husbands and fathers who are constantly financially, emotionally and spiritually abused by their families and eventually break free.

On the surface, these are feel good stories: plucky protagonist overcomes evil family and is free! Often karma gets the evil family, though more often than not it's just the consequences of their actions. Over and over again, but the themes start piling up. The language starts getting conspicuous.

And the comments.

Oh, the comments.

Surely, as I've described it, you understand all these stories to be STORIES. Fiction. Made up. Pure fabrication. But because they evolved from reddit/Tumblr voice overs, these AI monstrosities have a patina of verisimilitude that unsavvy, media illiterate people cannot parse properly.

So yes, the comments. The comments are bombarded with people getting emotionally worked up about these stories and asking for updates the way people do for reddit confessions. There is a good chunk of people who are interacting with media like this without realizing it's media, and eating up the underlying misogyny without a second thought.

And because these are deeply misogynistic stories, steeped in the most harmful tropes and cliches imaginable, you have people sincerely believing and reshaping their understanding of the world through the lens of AI slop. The worst part is that I don't think this is ideologically motivated: I don't there's a big, sprawling conspiracy to propagate this content and rise the level of ambient misogyny. But it sure as fuck is doing it, as an end result, and I keep not seeing people talking about it. Only about the fact younger people, who are more susceptible to short form content spam, are suddenly displaying astounding levels of misogyny on par with fucking Boomers.

It's the ambient, unquestioned bigotry in their AI slop. It's the normalization of fiction as reality and confirmation bias because Those People Are Like That. It's fucking horrifying, is what I'm trying to say.

(Note: I know the stories are fiction. This isn't a fiction reshapes reality tirade in the usual sense. The problem is that people are consuming this fiction as if it were reality and pushing back when pointed out because "what does it matter?" A lot! Actually! The way you engage with fiction and the way you engage with reality should be very different and if they aren't for you, you have big, big problems waiting to eat you whole, my dude.)

So anyway, check up on your parents and your kids and maybe try to have a conversation about what is and isn't real, because... Yeah, we're living in dire times.