I have seen “comment auto-reply suggestions” on YouTube studio for quite a while, but last week while pulling comments for the Bandrew Says Podcast, I looked a little bit closer at the suggestions and something caught my attention. In the past the auto replies consisted of generic canned responses such as “Thanks for watching”, “You’re welcome”, “I really appreciate that.”, but now the suggestion was inserting statements about my knowledge level and adding humbling statements.

Here’s the example I pulled:

Upon further review on 15 OCT 2024, YouTube put a blog post about “Testing AI-enhanced comment reply suggestions”, and they outline how the suggestions will start to include the content creators “tone and style”.

I find this to be completely and utterly baffling. I understand that all tech companies are trying to find a way to implement AI in new ways to try to find the trillion dollar idea, but this seems silly to me. The entire purpose of comments is to have interaction with people, and this is attempting to trick someone into thinking they’re having that kind of engagement with minimal input from the creator.

The wildest thing about all of it is that it actually made a statement about my knowledge “I’m just trying to figure out how this YouTube thing works” and then threw in that artificial humbleness “I’m not sure how much help I am, but thanks for watching!” which is incredibly disingenuous.

As soon as I saw this I had to share it because it’s just hilarious and interesting.

Clip from BSP-407: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2dPeR02I-g
Originally Aired: 3 NOV 2024