I check not only if the channel is recent but also how often they release a video.AI channels churn them out at quantity real creators don’t. Still not perfect,need more ways to spot them.

I find that I can’t catch AI more easily if I’ve seen what it can output.

For example, the older videos used to use generative AI on the images and videos themselves, which made it easier to spot those.

Some newer videos are made with the “agentic” tools that have access to various scripts and animation libraries, which come out looking very polished and visually identical to human produced ones. For those, I find that the AI will put unnecessary “work”, into the irrelevant parts of the visualizations. Some of the libraries and fonts are more popular than others, so you might notice a pattern that way too.

For an example to the second category, check out the recent videos from this channel, which has AI generated “music videos”: https://m.youtube.com/@degenerativepixels

The audio is often a tell. Listen to a few that you know are AI and pay close attention to the “human” voices. They often make sounds that can’t come from human anatomy. They also often sound “over produced” or “over compressed” (like poor quality audio).

You ever listened to a radio with the treble turned up too high? AI always sounds like that to me.

I think we’re at the point where trying to identify things as specifically AI-generated is becoming too difficult to be worth it, i’d say just start generally filtering out things that aren’t made in good faith.
I’ve been judiciously telling youtube to not recommend me channels that post sensationalized/inflammatory/etc content whenever they show up in my recommendations, and the algorithm has mostly given up on trying to brainwash me at this point.

My rule of thumb is that anything that isn’t borderline fucking boring is probably trying to manipulate me, if a dry wikipedia-style description isn’t interesting then i see no reason to bother with it.

Don’t have any recommendations you haven’t mentioned. As a blind person I listen to synthesized speech nearly all day long, so I’m pretty good at catching AI voices. I think the ones trained on IRL people have a “choppy” or “quavering” quality. I’m not an audiophile or computational linguist so I’m sure there’s a term for this I’m missing, but the overall audio has a particular tell to it.

It’s getting harder, though. Now I listen for things like odd prosidy, stuff like odd pauses or inflections or inconsistent pronunciations.

For example, the phrase “So I went to the store” could have a number of inflections that encode info about the ongoing conversation, whether I intend to continue speaking or whether I’m yielding the floor, whether I’m asking a question, indicating surprise, etc. AI is getting better at this but it’s not perfect.

Pronunciation of proper nouns or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts is a good indicator. Just the other day my mom was watching some AI-generated listicle and the voiceover mispronounced the name of a city after correctly pronouncing it every time before.

I stopped trying new channels that don’t have human presenter, there’s just so much slop. Now I’ve noticed that there are channels where even the presenter is AI. I can spot a few tells (presenter is never on screen for very long, voice pacing doesn’t vary, no ums and ahs, etc) but it’s getting harder and I wish I knew more clues.

Part of the problem is that even human presenters use too many effects so that they look - well, artificial.

Overproduced, as another commenter put it.

Maybe look for channels that don’t do that? On its face, that would be an indicator of quality in my book.