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There's this brilliant KFC ad. >> Welcome to Chicken Town, home of the imitators. Because when you're on top, everybody wants a piece of you. >> And lately, we've been feeling a lot like KFC. There's this thumbnail, this one, this. What even is this? Every thumbnail we invent, every title we construct, every animation we build, sometimes entire 
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videos, countless AI slop channels relentlessly copy us. And one day we decided enough is enough. So we investigated. We looked into these channels and found who's likely behind them. We joined a Discord community, paid 75 bucks for coaching, and subjected our fact-checking team to an unhealthy amount of AI misinformation spread to hundreds of thousands of people on topics like, well, the Holocaust. Because all of this is endangering educational content on 
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YouTube, it's damaging for everyone in our niche. It undermines trust in journalism. And really, it's just so journalism. And really, it's just so annoying. >> They think that my voice is AI. They even think that my face is AI generated. >> The cost of production has gone down >> The cost of production has gone down tremendously. >> This is a new form of industrialized plagiarism and creative theft. >> True crime, video essays, science. No space is safe. We're in the golden era of soulless slob. 
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>> I think a couple of years ago, a 3D thumbnail was associated to good quality content, but now it's perceived as AI content, but now it's perceived as AI slop. >> There's no wish to make something creative. It's just a get-rich scheme. 
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AI is undoubtedly useful in many aspects of life and it's here to stay. We use AI tools selectively in our own organization. For example, to organize and skim through our research. In rare cases, we use generated imagery as a basis for compositions in Photoshop if no comparable stock images are available. But the rise of specifically generative AI has also made it very easy to mass-roduce content. There's AI music on Spotify. Terrible AI recipes and home decor on Pinterest. Boomers are losing their mind on Facebook. This is another 
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account that I found that posts images like this. It always seems to be a child sculpting something very impressive out of trash. And the people in the comments just eat this stuff up, dude. Great work. Keep it up. Great talent. Nice one. Thanks. >> But one platform especially has become a dumping ground for AI slop. More than 20% of the videos YouTube's algorithm shows to new users may now be algorithm shows to new users may now be slop. >> The cost of production has gone down tremendously. You can have content which 
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is not so good or or or reasonable in quality which is now competing against something which is generated by a human who has spent a lot of time and investment and invested into acquiring this skill. >> This is Dr. Akil Bwash. He's an associate professor at the University of Bath School of Management. >> And then you have this thing which can generate precisely that at a very low cost and they both compete. There's something genuinely frustrating about clicking on a video and then realizing it's just another AI voice reading an AI 
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script feeding you AI visuals. And we reached a full circle moment when we came across this video about the invasion of AI slop made with AI. The only comment reads, "Oh god, this video is AI too. The creator gave it a heart." And it's moments like these that make you believe the internet is really dead. Around 100 people work on Fern, our German channel and our German podcast. A dedicated team of journalists, art directors, producers, 2D and 3D animators, and fact checkers, all to 
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bring you that weekly dose of something to watch during lunch. But now, thanks to the power of AI, you can be Fern, too. You can wear our skin and talk in our voice and walk in our shoes. So, I'll take screenshots from Fern's video, paste them into chat GPT, and simply say, "Regenerate this photo." Most people think you need to be professional 3D designer with years of experience to create videos like this. Well, they're dead wrong. I've cracked 
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the code. He uses a Fern idea generator, a Fern script writer, and a Fern image generator. It's literally identical to what Fern uses. And I would dare to say that ours could be even better than what Fern is using here as an example. And the best part, you don't have to be good at literally anything anymore. >> You see, I don't have that budget available to me. Neither do I have the skills to animate, do academic research, or I have that smooth voice over. But I 
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do know how to use AI. >> Some of it is just outrageous misinformation. You've probably seen channels like Fern on YouTube where everything looks like it came out of Blender. And when you first see it, you probably think that everyone spend weeks building it inside Blender and they actually didn't. Um, we actually did and it just doesn't end. it just doesn't end. Yikes. Imitation is flattery. We get that. We've been inspired by the grades on this platform all our career. But to us, 
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there's a difference between countless hours in After Effects to recreate Vox style maps and asking a machine to just clone something. We get why they choose to copy our work. Edutainment is a good niche to target for slop gods. Channels are often faceless, a version of the animations are now replicable with AI, and people like to learn a little something while binging down a hot pocket. The thumbnails don't rely on the creator's face, so you can fool people into thinking any considerable effort went into whatever your chain of tools spit out. So, of course, we're not the 
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only entertainment channel having to deal with this. So, when I started making videos, I very much built my channel around 3D animations and highquality visuals. And a few years ago, I think that was very unique and there wasn't a lot of that out there. But now, that very style that I based my channel off has become kind of synonymous with AI slop, and that's a challenge for me. What I've noticed is that several people in my audience look at my 3D style of thumbnails and they associate them to loweffort content and 
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my videos take a couple months to research and produce. So, I'm struggling a bit to convey that in the thumbnail uh while keeping it attractive enough to get clicks. I've seen videos take inspiration from my visual style before, which is fine, by the way, but this was very different. These visuals weren't just recreated in some animation software to look like mine. They were literally the same scenes with just a few things changed. There's even math slop which is just oh god. Imagine trying to actually learn something on 
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YouTube like it's 2017. Especially our thumbnails get ripped a lot and slightly changed by slop channels likely using AI. So we thought it would be funny to use AI to find matches. Yanik, our data guy, because we actually have talented humans working here, set up a program to identify cases in which our thumbnails get lifted. And there are so so many. We confronted several of the creators of these tutorials. Some took down their videos afterward. Others explained that they didn't earn money from their tutorials. And others considered the 
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tutorials free marketing for us. One creator stated clearly he just wanted to make money and had only briefly used Fern as an example. With regards to we have Fern at home, one AI channel stands out in particular, Loom. It's part of Loom Studio, a network of three channels. Loom Rocks and Ago. In total, they have more than 300,000 subscribers. Ago and Loom seem to generate quite some revenue. These channels regularly appropriate our thumbnails. They rip them and then likely let AI change or add elements, 
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but sometimes they also seem to simply copy and recreate full videos of ours like this one. Some of their content gets over a million views. They also seem to take from others, like Mr. Beast. In many thumbnails, Mr. Beast gets replaced with a 3D character. In one instance, a video with such a thumbnail got over two million views. That could equate to $11,000 in revenue. Mr. Beast even reacted to it on X. Did they literally just swap me on my thumbnail for a red guy and get 1.8 million views? What the hell, lol? But 
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instead of being embarrassed, Loom Studio seems to be so proud of it, they even put it on their website. Mr. Beast tweeted, "We just kept going." We confronted Loom about this and they told us they've never reused another creator's thumbnail. Their content is supposedly created by their team from scratch. But as if all that wasn't cringe enough, Loom Studio also offers a coaching program. Their VIP course costs a casual $1,499 included a blueprint plus weekly calls 
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with our founders. We review your channel, fix what's wrong, and push you to your first 100K. They seem to be pretty experienced. They say they've built more than 100 faceless channels and generated over 100 million views. And we can see why. This company is run by a team of professionals, a lion, a wolf, and a tiger. Nothing screams men building their AI company more than three predator mammals with sunglasses. The wolf conjures AI pipelines from thin air. The one who makes the machine 
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think, create, and scale so humans don't have to. Oh, how I hate having to be a human that thinks and creates. Finally, the wolf can make it stop. We dug deeper and found that Loom sits at the center of a small network of AI channels supporting each other. Yanni created this map to show how these channels are linked together. Whenever two channels collaborated on a video, a line connects them. True Crime Vault pumps out fictional true crime stories, which is just a fantastic oxymoron. It 
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occasionally collaborates with other channels of the Loom network, so we suspect it could be a client of Loom Studio. We asked the operator via email, but didn't receive a reply. The channels Ago, Loom, Rocks, and Lumicus all linked to the same Instagram account of the lion, Ardom. Just like in nature, the lion seems to be the real king behind this company. On Insta, we find a profile with the same name, Ardom I, which has a link to Loom in his profile. Ardom often posts pictures of his vacations. For example, in Dubai, there 
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are luxury cars, fancy hotels, a big are luxury cars, fancy hotels, a big yard. >> Chad, how do I say something is a fat cliche without saying it? >> You could try something like, "We're wandering straight into a well-worn wandering straight into a well-worn narrative." >> Okay, got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. We're wandering straight into a wellworn narrative here. Our research team found out that Ardm is probably from Ukraine. We found an address in the north of the country. He also seems to run a Ukrainian Telegram channel about AI. In the past, he 
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seemingly used a different last name. Of course, Lum are not the only ones doing business like that. We want to dive deeper into the scene, so we join a Discord channel. YouTube Faceless generally promotes a kind of hustle culture. Not all of it is about AI, but quite a big part. I've tried doing AI generated videos, but I think it's just easier to steal people's content as long as you react to the video, aka using AI voice over. I think you can still get monetized directly under that comment. Another user links our fentinel video. 
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Where do you get the vids from? Fern channel. Can someone tell me how to get Fern? Let me know. Cipher AI voice. Hey, anyone here in the Fern disrupt niche? I feel bad for Fern and the Fern animators. Lol. Why is that? Cuz they spend hours animating 10 to 30 seconds of footage and some random kid with AI can replicate the quality. But can they really replicate our quality? We decide to take a course to find out. We aren't ready to spend $15,000 to take the alpha animal coaching. Luckily, AI with Gary's course comes at a bargain price of $75. 
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This video totally using AI generated video and YouTube automation. If you already know, there's a channel called Fern. And this YouTube channel is blowing up with cinematic 3D animations. In their videos, they're using a lot of mannequin figures, and it's really effective for this kind of content. So, if you're a beginner or still stuck on creating highquality YouTube content, you need Gary Studio to speed up your workflow. You also need someone with experience to teach and guide you in detail. Just join my community. So, using a fake identity, we join. First, we receive an email that the payment was 
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successful. A few hours later, we get another email from Gary. He writes that we can now join school with a monthly subscription. We thought the $75 would unlock all materials, but the 75 bucks is for content access. The school community requires a separate subscription, so both payments are required to join. We reluctantly pay another $67 and finally get access. We're in and uncovered a recipe for successful and captivating AI documentaries on YouTube. Multiple shitty exists. 
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On top, AI with Gary provides a basic tutorial on how to produce AI videos. from finding your niche and choosing a style to word for word prompts for writing AI scripts or generating writing AI scripts or generating animations. So far, we just looked at the process, but what about the results? It's a pretty crucial aspect of edutainment after all. How much does it eat you? We bring in our head of facteing, Pascal, because we do have a team of fact checkers who go through every single one of our scripts and look for mistakes. Pascal has years of experience in investigative journalism, but now she 
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faces the ultimate challenge. sit through hours of slop and fact check sit through hours of slop and fact check it. We published this video on Fern in November 2025. We sent a production crew to Scott Payne to let him tell his story. Just boring all human activity. Just weeks later, this video went online on a channel called Black Files. Only seconds into the video, and the opening scene is already misleading. In the scene the video describes, the clansmen did not wear these robes. In this scene, the ropes are incorrect. They feature a 
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red cross within a circle, not just a red cross. And Pascal suspects that this entire scene is just made up by AI. It directly contradicts the detailed sources she could find. She also tried to fact check this video, but just concede. Quote, "The language is so weird, it is hard to fact check. Most sentences are not proper sentences. It's hard to follow." And yeah, yeah, we get it. Opens fire. Six bullets. Head seal sees it coming. puts head down on steering column. Too late, falls dead 
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almost instantly. Velas runs to waiting Buick. This last example might be funny because it's bad, but factual errors and apparent hallucinations and content covering hate groups like the KKK are highly problematic. We reached out to Blackf and they reply the channel defense production process, saying its videos are created by a team using AI alongside in-house technology and are reviewed for accuracy and originality. They deny copying or infringing on third party thumbnails, but acknowledge inaccuracies in the video we referenced and say they have since updated it. Anyways, we can't help but wonder how 
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these AI channels cover the Holocaust. This video by Ago reached more than half a million people. A true historical documentary about courage, moral failure, and one escape that changed history forever. Let's start with a visual highlight. prisoners inexplicably collecting, shoveling, and throwing a mountain of toys into a fireplace. We asked a Holocaust expert about this, and she told us the scene is obviously inaccurate. The victim's belongings, like toys, were taken and collected, but not piled up and burned in the 
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crerematoria. So, someone just made this up. Maybe the creator, maybe the AI, who knows? At one point, the AI voice says, "By 1944, his figure was staggering. 1,750,000 1,750,000 victims and the world did not know. That was the secret of the systems success. Secrecy, lies. No one outside these walls knew the truth. That figure of 1.75 million 
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did circulate for a while, and it did come from Rudolph Verba himself, a man who escaped Avitz and whose story is covered in this true historical documentary. But the video fails to mention that it does not reflect the current historical consensus. Today, historians estimate that around 1.3 million people were deported to Awitz between 1940 and 1945 and around 1.1 million were murdered there. And it's so important to be accurate about this. Holocaust deniers often exploit outdated or imprecise numbers to cast doubt on 
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the Holocaust as a whole. That's why videos covering this should clearly distinguish between historical estimates made at the time and the current academic consensus. The phrase the world did not know is also very misleading. In 1942, Allied nations had already publicly declared that Germany was carrying out Hitler's so-called final solution to the Jewish question, the mass murder of Jews. Historians also believe many Germans had at least a rough idea of what was happening as information and rumors about the crimes circulated. And last but not least, we 
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again reach a full circle AI moment when we stumble across death moment when we stumble across death scene. >> No one had ever escaped from Achvitz to tell the world the truth. >> That's incorrect, but also contradictory to Ago's own content. The channel had already published a video about Vl Pitky, another man who infiltrated and escaped Avitz. We covered that story ourselves. and Pitky as well as multiple of his comrades escaped or bought their freedom before Verba delivering reports 
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about Avitz to the outside world. Maybe we shouldn't let the wolves machines do all the thinking and creating. I think with a lot of these educational AI channels, the visuals are really only half the problem. But a huge concern that I have is the quality of the information in those videos because you can be sure they're also using AI to generate all of their scripts. There's one channel that recently got very popular, Chloe Versus History, about a lady vlogging in the past and people love it. But if you actually look at 
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what she's saying, if you look at the details, if you look at the whole story, almost everything is wrong. And especially with educational content, I think there's this idea that people trust the content and they walk away being informed, but actually they're walking away being less informed about certain topics. And I think that's really bad. >> These AI channels don't seem to care about the quality or accuracy of their content. Their goal seems to be simply to publish as many videos as possible to make as much money as possible. Oh, and 
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I almost forgot. We actually spoke with a person familiar with the production process behind Loom's channels. They told us that they indeed use AI and that two people had to produce one script per day each. We confronted Loom and sent them many questions. In their response, they wrote, "Half of this is totally fictional and 30% wrong." They also told us that their audience doesn't watch Fern, which we are keen to believe. They claimed that 30 people work at their company with AI being used as a tool and lots of manual labor still involved. They were in disbelief of our apparent hate of them. Lastly, life is like a 
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boomerang, okay? There's no wish to make something creative. It's just a get-rich scheme. And it's not just teenagers and Discord channels and cool guys who keep going even when Mr. Beast tweets driving the slop epidemic. Various AI companies seem to know exactly who their target audience is and how their products are used. Hakesfield offers a variety of generative AI tools and recently they uploaded this tutorial on their channel. I use Hakesfield AI and claw to build a I use Hakesfield AI and claw to build a $39,500 a month faceless channel. I just found a 
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faceless YouTube channel that's making almost $40,000 every single month. And it made me wonder, can I completely recreate this channel and build the exact same style of videos using AI? The 40K a month educational channel he found is Bright Side. In case you're not familiar with Bright Side, the incredible irony might be lost on you. Bright Side is one of the OG slop factories before there was AI as we know it. terrible clickbait, unhinged content pumped out every few hours. >> It's just colorful thumbnails, interesting, clickable titles. It's They 
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make things. They make things. That's about it. If you've never heard of Bright Side, good for you. >> Bright Side just straight up lies or just uses these like fear-mongering sensationalist tactics. >> Yet, this is the type of content Hicksfield presents as a great opportunity to make bank with their tools. Educational content appeals to everyone and has huge audience retention, which is exactly what drives you monetization. >> In this brave new world, educational videos obviously aren't made to educate. They're simply the most lucrative niche 
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to make as much money as possible. And we can see how well that logic plays out just a few minutes later when he uses AI to create a video about Pompei. We could spend minutes explaining how much is wrong with these glass jars, but simply put, they just didn't exist in this form in Pompei in 79 AD. Now, you might wonder, who would possibly want to slurp up this type of slop? Well, the people at Hicksfield. >> I think this video is very interesting. This is the kind of stuff I watch right before going to bed. Really puts the old saying that you should make stuff you would want to watch yourself into 
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perspective. Next, the tutorial demonstrates how to make even more videos fully generated with basically no human input. Okay, one video is cool, but we need more. So, I'm just going to type in make me two more videos. This is great news for anyone who wants to get paid by YouTube without actually making the content themselves. Let's launch our content machine that will bring in money. During a gold rush, sell shovels. 11 Labs offers AI voice tools. And they have their very own tutorial on how to make AI B-roll. That's just like Fern. 
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And what do you do once you have your slop visuals in place? Add a slop voice. >> As he began his speech, there was a shift in the room. You could feel it like the start of something important. During a gold rush, sell shovels. We sent both Hicksfield and 11 Labs a request for comment, but didn't receive a reply. Let's zoom out. In the best case scenario, these AI productions just result in a few ridiculous visual mistakes. Worst case, they lead to misinformation about some of humanity's darkest times. And how would viewers 
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possibly know that what they're watching is wrong? Pascal, seasoned investigative journalist and our head of factchecking, wrote this after reviewing some of the videos. It is incredibly hard to verify things that never actually existed. Real people usually leave some kind of trace or reference point, but AI can just completely make things up. If it's already difficult for me, I don't think average users can realistically deal with this. After just checking half a video, my head was genuinely spinning. Luckily, many people instinctively 
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distrust AI content, but that leads to a loss of trust in real creators, too. I get comments on my videos all the time where people think that the 3D animations are made using AI. They think that my voice is AI. They even think that my face is AI generated. People get so anxious about slop they start to suspect it everywhere. If YouTube lets this kind of content go unchecked and allows its creators to profit from it, in the long run, it could damage the platform's reputation and value proposition. So, what is YouTube doing 
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about it? Already in 2025, the platform updated its channel monetization policies. They renamed repetitious content to inauthentic content. Loweffort mass-produced uploads shouldn't make money anymore. And in 2026, they updated them again with their unsatisfying or off-putting content policy. YouTube now targets content that feels interchangeable, emotionally manipulative, or mimics existing formats. Great news for us. Hopefully, YouTube also pushed towards disclosure and labeling. Synth ID is Google 
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DeepMind's watermarking system. It embeds invisible, irreovable markers into AI generated content. Major generative AI companies such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Cacao, and 11 Labs have adopted the watermark. With 11 Labs on board, more AI generated voices can now be automatically detected by YouTube. In May, the platform announced they would start automatically tagging AI generated or AI edited videos. The labels will be clearly visible on their videos or on shorts. The goal is to make AI content easier to spot, even if creators don't 
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disclose it. But of course, slop factories will try to get around the tech and demonetization. Hicksfield has them covered. And for those of you who are worried about AI content getting demonetized, YouTube has no problem with AI. It just blocks people who use it to make lazy, lowquality spam. This is an unironic statement in a video demonstrating how to automatically pump out Bright Side style content within 20 out Bright Side style content within 20 minutes. We also asked YouTube about slop directly and shared our concerns and 
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they actually got back to us saying that tackling slop is a key priority for them. They also said this YouTube's approach to information quality has always focused on promoting highquality content rather than fact-checking individual videos at scale. But under our misinformation policies, we remove misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm. We do believe YouTube understands what's at stake and that the platform needs to crank up the heat even further. Many years ago, at the start of our career, YouTube was drowning in clickbait videos 
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full of stock footage. That changed over time as the platform managed to measure and reward retention and watch time. Deceiving viewers didn't work that well anymore because YouTube would punish videos when people would click off fast. Optimizing for retention leads to its own problems, but generative AI feels far more threatening to overall content quality. At least for enterainment, this is the next thing harming the longevity of our ecosystem. Personally, I increasingly find myself scrolling through my recommendations, irritated at every piece of slop served 
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to me. It makes me want to open the app less, and that can't be good. Contrary to some channels on YouTube, our 3D animations are made by humans. This is one of the artists who regularly puts in countless hours in creating them for you. Hi, I'm Leonard. When I'm creating scenes, I can easily spend the whole day sitting at my computer. So, shout out to Flexisport for sponsoring this video and sending me this. One button and I can 
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switch from sitting to standing. Creating a scene like this roughly comes down to three steps. Step one, modeling. It's similar to the real thing. I stack simple cubes to block out the desk. Then dress the set with a plant computer and the display. The usual clutter. Step two, animating. This desk actually moves, so I have to animate the legs sliding into each other with a little ease out so it doesn't feel robotic. It's a three-stage frame, so it adjusts to you no matter if you're 5'2 or 6'5. Step three, shading. It looks a bit 
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bland still. I've got the white oak. But if you want something even more premium, they have great options for 100% solid wood desktops. And it's not just a work desk. It can be a gaming station, a dining table, or where all your stuff ends up living. Mine's basically all three. And even when I completely load it up, it's still really solid and stable. If you want to upgrade your setup, use code Fern50 for $50 off the E7 Pro. And if you're not sure, Flexispot offers 30-day risk-free returns and a 15-year warranty. Link is 
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in the description.