#like a cartoon character going BOINGBOING

[brevmoment]

don't give quickman too much sugar or he will literally start bouncing off the walls

[omniversalobservations]

YouTube's Bots Are Providing Us With a Glimpse Into Some Bizarre Corners of the Omniverse ...

There is something seriously wrong with kids videos on YouTube. Yesterday, a front-page article in The New York Times shined a spotlight on the service’s inability to keep bizarre, disturbing videos aimed at children out of its YouTube Kids app, which is marketed as a more filtered version of the site containing “tons of fun and educational videos that are just right for kids.” But the videos that slip through onto that particular app, while indicative of the broader exploitation that’s going on, are just the tip of the iceberg. Today, a writer named James Bridle published a piece that goes far deeper into the hellscape of kids YouTube, trying to break down what might be fueling this flood of copyright-infringing, nightmare-inducing nonsense that YouTube’s algorithms are serving up to children.

Basically, it comes down to automation. Whether it’s pregnant Elsa videos or the rambling word salads that Bridle points to, these clips and their titles are constructed to exploit YouTube’s computerized curation. They contain words and phrases that parents might search for or would trigger YouTube’s recommended videos feature, sliding them in alongside innocuous nursery rhymes and legitimate videos from popular kids shows.

The same characters and keywords pop up over and over again—“Spider-Man,” “bad baby,” “finger family,” “education,” “tantrum,” “colors,” “superheroes,” “rhymes,” “Peppa Pig”—and they’re almost always jumbled together into some incomprehensible sentence that must look absolutely scrumptious to a YouTube algorithm. It’s all so finely tuned that it’s impossible to tell where the human element of these operations begins and ends, or if there is one at all. As Bridle writes, “This is content production in the age of algorithmic discovery?—?even if you’re a human, you have to end up impersonating the machine.”

And the videos themselves are just as random, confusing, and potentially disturbing. Sometimes they manifest as shoddy but relatively benign CGI pap like the videos on Videogyan 3D Rhymes, a channel that has nearly 5 million subscribers. Sometimes they’re the strange distortions of popular kids series, like this suicide-laced Paw Patrol ripoff highlighted by The Times ...

And sometimes they take the form of long, surreal batshit that’s been cobbled together from stock character models, animations, and sounds. The results are indescribably strange. These are videos where you’ll see Spider-Man, Elsa, and The Hulk do battle with the Scream killer, then taking shrunken versions of themselves grocery shopping while “Wheels On The Bus” plays in the background ...

Or pregnant superheroes getting magical abortion injections in their asses, then being impregnated again by The Joker’s immaculate conception wand, then giving birth to tiny versions of themselves ...

It’s easy to brush these off as the creations of an animator or studio that’s just looking to abuse a broken system to make a few bucks—and of course internet trolls have gotten in on the action as well—but Bridle argues the end result isn’t just the abuse YouTube’s humanless monetization schemes; these messed up videos are abusing the very young kids at whom they’re aimed, another terrible reality of our algorithm age.

Source: The AV Club

James Bridle takes a deep dive into the weird world of Youtube Kids videos, whose popular (think: millions and millions of views) genres and channels include endless series of videos of children being vomited on by family members and machinima-like music videos in which stock cartoon characters meet gory, violent ends.

As Bridle points out, it's hard to tell exactly what the actual fuck is going on here. Is this algorithmic content being spun by a machine learning system with a copy of Blender, an archive of public domain nursery rhyme songs, and a handful of stock superhero characters? Is it mechanical turks in some dank boiler room being paid to create endless variations on a theme? Is it the latest project from the weird animated Taiwanese animated news recap service?

And while the videos are sometimes funny-ha-ha and always funny-strange, we can't forget that these are targeted at extremely young children, who often watch unattended. What's more, their anodyne soundracks have nothing to alert parents who use audio cues to tell them when it's time to supervise their kids' viewing.

Bridle coined the term New Aesthetic in 2012 to describe pretty much exactly this kind of thing, and has spent the years since cataloging and creating funny, absurd and thought-provoking examples of the genre.

But Youtube Kids has shocked Bridle to his marrow. The mysterious nature of the videos' production cycle and the way they epitomize the "attention economy"'s worst traits makes them a kind of exploitative version of the propaganda machines that haunt Twitter and Facebook, but aimed at tiny children, for the sole purpose (seemingly) of racking up ad-views. The traumatizing nature of these videos seems to be beside the point.

I was a TV junkie growing up and I watched a lot of shitty, ill-conceived, cynically produced animations that were produced to provide very cheap content to fill the very early hours of the morning on broadcast TV. Even by those standards, this stuff is weird, disturbing, and cynical.

Source: BoingBoing

(image via YouTube)