Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel

• ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I mean there’s been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven’t followed them since so not sure what the state is now.

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  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    everything has controversy. I really do not care

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    In the video you’re literally commenting on they explain how they fact check their videos and how they work with professionals in the field at matter.

    You can always complain that something wasn’t as good as you personally wanted it to be but that may very well be bias. The people making the accusations may have a bias. All we can do is take the totality of their output and cast judgement on that.

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    • ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The point was that they haven’t always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).

      I should mention this isn’t bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn’t even up to their own standards by their own admission.

      There’s a wikipedia entry listing some of the controversies: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt#%3A~%3Atext=Whil….

      Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.

      When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.

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