Okay, I admit it. I’ve been using YouTube’s built-in AI (or SI, if you prefer) to generate thumbnails for the award-winning* Shooting News Weekly channel. It’s better at it than I am, it’s much easier than making one manually, it automatically generates three or four different thumbs that I can A/B test, and, when it works, it creates a few of ’em far faster than I can make just one.
The when it works part is the crux of the issue here.
Sometimes I click “generate thumbnail” and it just does it. Boom, three or four options. Usually it tells me there was a problem and I should try again. I’ll click it a few times and see if it does anything. Maybe after a few attempts it’ll generate one image plus a few more written concepts, but it won’t generate the images for those concepts. Often I’ll leave and come back later to give it another shot.
Recently, after using this service to generate thumbnails for a few months now, the YouTube AI told me that actual image generation isn’t a function it’s capable of and it can only generate text-based ideas for me. Written concepts. I’m on my own again for actually creating images.
Obviously that wasn’t accurate, so I called the chatbot out and began a conversation asking it to do some diagnostics to figure out whether a service outage was happening or something else on the back end was broken and causing image generation to be unavailable.
Eventually, I got to [what I believe is] the truth:
Yep. It’s guns. It’s the ammo. It’s shooting sports. All of that now triggers restrictions in the AI, from content moderation blocks to backend timeouts.
In fact, up until this chat where I tried a handful of different angles to “trick” the chatbot into finding the actual error and disclosing it to me, every single time over the last few months when thumbnail generation wasn’t working, it was getting “timeout” and “service temporarily not available” sorts of notices. The proffered excuse was that the system was, in effect, too busy and simply couldn’t generate a thumbnail for me at that particular time. That’s why I would try repeatedly rather than giving up.
For whatever reason, the system will — usually — generate thumbnails for Shooting News Weekly content. So this isn’t a no-exceptions sort of filter, apparently. It most definitely gives us a hard time, though.
We ain’t on the right side of YouTube’s preferred politics, y’all. But you already knew that.
* My mom said we’re the #1 YouTube channel on earth.