YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deadline: YouTube has terminated two prominent channels that used artificial intelligence to create fake movie trailers, Deadline can reveal. The Google-owned video giant has switched off Screen Culture and KH Studio, which together boasted well over 2 million subscribers and more than a billion views. The channels have been replaced with the message: "This page isn't available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else."

Earlier this year, YouTube suspended ads on Screen Culture and KH Studio following a Deadline investigation into fake movie trailers plaguing the platform since the rise of generative AI. The channels later returned to monetization when they started adding "fan trailer," "parody" and "concept trailer" to their video titles. But those caveats disappeared In recent months, prompting concern in the fan-made trailer community. YouTube's position is that the channels' decision to revert to their previous behavior violated its spam and misleading-metadata policies. This resulted in their termination. "The monster was defeated," one YouTuber told Deadline following the enforcement action.

Deadline's investigation revealed that Screen Culture spliced together official footage with AI images to create franchise trailers that duped many YouTube viewers. Screen Culture founder Nikhil P. Chaudhari said his team of a dozen editors exploited YouTube's algorithm by being early with fake trailers and constantly iterating with videos. [...] Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on these videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction.

Youtube is now an AI cesspool

[BrendaEM]

Apparently, youtube doesn't mind all the AI, just any that they might have to fend off an MPA legal attack. Meanwhile, it's beginning to be difficult to wade through the AI slop.

Re: Youtube is now an AI cesspool

[liqu1d]

It's painful isn't it. I instinctively click back as soon as it becomes apparent it's an AI video. I'm sure there's some quality AI stuff out there but I'm not willing to sort through the shite. There was enough rubbish on YouTube long before it was automatically produced.

Re:

[smooth wombat]

It's not just videos. Trying to listen to music has been thrown into the same cesspool. I was listening to a song last night and about a third of the way in the music stopped. I saw there were an additional 6 - 8 scripts which needed run to have the music play, even after I already enabled 6- 8.

I closed out of the song and did something else.

If you have to enable over a dozen scripts to play a 4 minute song, you suck.

Re:

[allo]

Why should they mind. They are a platform for publishers. If you want a curated list of videos (without ai), create a site containing curated lists of videos. They can be hosted at youtube, it's not like the ai videos there would infect others.

Youtube is ridiculous

[Slashythenkilly]

I dont understand the logic in banning when all you have to do is label it so anyone watching will know.

Re:

[Z00L00K]

I agree, as long as it's labeled or satire and clearly not trying to be "real" then I don't have any problems with it and it could be pretty amusing.

Re:

[PsychoSlashDot]

I agree, as long as it's labeled or satire and clearly not trying to be "real" then I don't have any problems with it and it could be pretty amusing.

The problem is the content creators are specifically doing it to troll people. They were suspended for doing this, complied for a while, then went back to pretending to be legitimate. If the UK's ASBO (Anti-social behaviour order... look it up, it's an amusing idea) was still a thing, these guys would be prime candidates.

Re:

[sinij]

These are extremely annoying when you don't want AI slop in your recommendations and just looking for movie trailers or reviews. Hope they target fake AI car reviews in the same way.

Re:Youtube is ridiculous

[PsychoSlashDot]

You are so fucking old the only "slop" around is in your adult diaper old man. Get with the times!

1} You are incorrect; the person you are replying to is neither fucking, nor old.
2} You are incorrect; slop has an accepted applicable definition - needing no quotation marks - to the point that it is "word of the year".
3} You are incorrect; there is AI slop around.
4} You are incorrect; the person you are replying to is neither wearing a diaper - adult or otherwise, nor a man.

But most importantly...
5} You are incorrect; getting with the times is not an admirable goal when the times are bad. Which they are, in all ways contextually applicable to this discussion.

Come back when your trolling skills evolve beyond the "call them a poopy-head" level.

Re: Youtube is ridiculous

[dj245]

I worry this will result in a "This product may cause cancer in California" sort of outcome. Label it as AI just in case. I've already seen the AI tag on a few videos which were arguably edited only using conventional methods. One of them had only been sped up.

It was deliberately deceptive practices

[Bahumat]

The issue became that those automatic labels aren't always communicated to other services -- so you'd end up with, for example and most aggravatingly, your newsreel on your mobile device passing you a link for a new trailer and discover only after clicking it that it wasn't the official trailer but an AI fake.

I had already had to ask my phone to stop showing me content from Screen Culture because of this problem. It is deliberately deceptive practices that Screen Culture was engaging in.

Re:

[PsychoSlashDot]

I don't understand the logic in banning when all you have to do is label it so anyone watching will know.

"All you have to do". The moment that phrase comes up, you've given yourself a clue what to investigate.

YouTube doesn't know the content is AI-generated except because these two (2) channels were known for uploading deliberately misleading content. To do what you suggest, they would have to produce and implement AI-detection code, plus pay to run it against every upload. Further, they'd have to analyze the description the uploader picks, to determine if it is misleading or not. They'd have to deal wit

Kurzgesagt

[TwistedGreen]

This is why I only watch Kurzgesagt

Some AI-Generated Trailers Are Interesting

[organgtool]

I'm not sure if either of these channels were involved, but I saw some interesting AI-generated trailers of fairly modern popular movies and TV shows portrayed in the style of the 1950s. I found it to be full of interesting anachronisms and I especially enjoyed the way it portrayed female aesthetics and seductive behavior (and judging by the comments, so did many others).

Celebrate Public Domain Day

[davidwr]

Create AI-generated "fake" movie trailers for movies entering the public domain this January 1 [duke.edu]. Just be sure the AI is only trained on public-domain materials.

Here's some previous /. coverage of Public Domain Day [slashdot.org].

banning fun

[SumDog]

YouTube just likes to ban anything fun, or anything they don't like. When I scanned through my collection of downloaded videos, nearly 20% of them had disappeared: https://battlepenguin.com/tech... [battlepenguin.com]

I wish more people would hunt out rarer media on various PeerTube instances, in the bowels of the Internet. It was a lot more fun in the 1990s when people "Surfed the Web." Now it's all sanitized and you can't find anything cool.

Good. Screen Culture was a plague.

[DesScorp]

Screen Culture in particular was spamming YT with fake trailers years before AI really blew up, and labeled them very, very deceptively ("Official Trailer Release", and such). YouTube should have banned them years ago, and the studios should have sued. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Re:

[thegarbz]

This! A lot of people are calling this a war against AI slop, but it's not, it was a win against deceptive bullshit. AI slop is very much allowed and still a staple part of Youtube.

Re:

[sabbede]

Absolutely! I frikkin hate it when I'm looking for a trailer and instead find some garbage "fan trailer". I don't understand why anyone would make such a thing to begin with, and I absolutely don't want to see them.

"Oh, Disney announced a series about Obi Wan? Let's cut a bunch of scenes from the movies together and call it a trailer! That won't be a massive and deceptive waste of time!!"

Bye bye bad rubbish.

Fucking finally

[reanjr]

I've been reporting this shit as spam for like 4 years now.

Personally...

[wwphx]

I'd love to see trailers for fake movies, if it were done well. Like for that Orson Wells(?) movie that never got made, I think there was also a gangster movie trailer that circulated, I don't remember the details. I think that could be a lot of fun. But I doubt they'd ever get that creative.

The TRUE threat : YouTube

[Micah NC]

YouTube decides what you can and cannot watch.

Those AI makers are tiny ants compared to that.