Exposing a Content Thief Stealing Videos with AI 

Robots are literally trying to run me out of a job, consider supporting me on Patreon or becoming a member here on RU-vid: www.patreon.com/abyssoft

So let me get this straight: people are cheating…at exposing cheaters…and you’re exposing them. Wow what a world

If only RU-vid had a way for users to review and rate content.

as a teacher: Yes, that is EXACTLY how we feel, often followed by "if You copy, then at least don't also copy the spelling errors!"

4:01 Hadrich, habrich, the habrick, hamrik, hedrik, after Hebert, Eric Rick, the Hab. Haa. lmao

That fact that we have two instances of this happening means there's a high chance there are many other AI copycat videos running amuck just waiting to be revealed. Sadly, I don't think RU-vid will do anything about it.

The abuse of synonyms is crazy “Micro-turbos” LMFAOOO

Plagiarism is like cheating, and this dude tried to cheat with as little of the human element as possible.

I just love how the AI just gave up trying to say his name and just went with “Ha”.

As a former teacher, yeah, that's pretty spot on for how it comes across when students copy poorly.

Dude thanks to you for giving me creddits (i'm the artist who have done the toad used in his miniature), hope youtube will be doing something for you and the others creators that have been in similar situations, like, giving you back their vews

AI: throw the script through a thesaurus and call it good.

2:56 bro this is 10 year old me trying to reword a wikipedia article for school lmao

4:53 Wow! I recognize this footage because it is from my own DexDrive save from decades ago, truncated just before I cleared the wall. Karl Jobst used the footage under fair use at 14:37 on one of his vids (linked from one of my playlists.) Obviously you used it under fair use as well, but the AI vid's usage is dubious at best. And this wouldn't be the first time my stuff has been taken. One web site in the 90s took my Mario 64 rabbit glitch and translated it into Spanish word for word. Nintendo Power took my Frappe Snowland lap skip discovery when I posted it on their BBS. These incidents were partially influential in why I made my own site, to help give credit where it is due. But even that didn't stop thieves. One of my Smash Bros. 4 discoveries was stolen in more recent years, among many of the older SMB2 findings but that's a story for another day.

You should definitely mention that people shouldn't brigade the thief's video because posting any comments, even negative ones, and giving downvotes do nothing but increase a video's engagement factor and make it more likely to be recommended to others. All you do is help a video by posting a comment and voting.

God this is the future huh. Endless seas of auto-generated soulless AI sludge. Thanks techbros

My heart goes out to Eric Hamsandwich for the besmirchment of his name.

I've run into a lot of AI as narration on videos. Even if those are made legitimately, it's still very offputting as pronunciations are often wrong and the emotions are flat. It makes the whole thing feel lazy. The video you found is on another level and I hope they get smacked down promptly.

Oh! I know this! So knowing how got works, what they probably did is rip the script using the transcript feature, removed the timestamps, then told ChatGPT to "reword the script" this is why words are swapped around and mini is now micro.

I'd reccomend filing a copyright claim against the video to be honest. Its a longshot dont get me wrong but its probably a good idea since the plaigarism is so blatant

AI is completely overrunning RU-vid. There are channels that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, predominantly just reading manga and showing panels. While this might be a passion project for someone reading a script, it’s blatant plagiarism on top of an obvious cash-grab for AI to be used to do so. Videos read by AI that don’t create original content don’t deserve to be on RU-vid, and at the very least should be demonetized. It doesn’t really matter which method they used, but because of how sloppy and obviously plagiarized it is, they didn’t really give it much thought either. These types of things need a hard stop put in very soon, it is so egregiously boring and lazy.

This is kinda infuriating. On RU-vid nowadays there is a chance that your video gets stolen either by low effort reaction channels who add nothing to the original video and just copy and paste it next to their face cam without crediting nobody or it gets ripped off by AI. Both of these methods of content theft are getting more and more common by the day and RU-vid is doing very little to prevent or reverse theft.

Can we get an AI debunking an AIs video?

I have seen people steal my SpeedRuns and make them into RU-vid shorts. It is basically a regular occurrence to get at least one video stolen at one point

Maybe my humor is broken, but the compilation of the ai's pronunciation of Eric Habrich's name had me rolling.

I like how Haverick gradually devolved into “Hubert”. XD

I’ve noticed this too. There’s too many videos with voiceovers that just don’t sound right… dialect and mannerisms that don’t sound human.

One way could be to put permanent watermark in your video but change its position over the course. Also place the watermark in such a position that it doesnt disturb the viewer but will cover key information if it was cut out of the video.

Looking forward to the AI video of this video exposing AI duping videos. Inception! 😊

Not only do they steal but they steal in THE laziest way possible holy crap man

"Ha! He wouldn't acknowledge lying on camera, as he wasn't a virgin" 💀

In this case, the use of AI is irrelevant imo. It's strictly a copyright issue, AI was just one of the tools used because it makes it even simpler than ever if you aren't trying to create quality content. You could submit a copyright takedown on the video and hope the YT algorithm lottery is in your favor, though I dunno if it's worth the effort to play whack-a-mole with random content thieves. YT has never cared about stuff like this and likely never will, unfortunately.

Got a laugh out of the AI trying players' names. Best of luck taking this down, man

Could you imagine if an AI ripped off this exact video. So that an AI rips off a video about an AI ripping off a video

Once you start looking closely, you'll notice that there's a LOT of this trash on RU-vid nowadays. And a lot of people seem to be none the wiser.

This is so bizarre to witness, yet absolutely makes sense. People are already copying videos, so using AI to do with 5% of the effort is the logical next step. Fortunately we're still able to discern AI generated stuff from human made, but that is not going to be the case forever. I'm not sure if YT are going to start doing something to address this issue, but I also think it might be too late anyway. Really not looking forward to having YT flooded with more shitty AI slop.

As a content creator, this is extremely scary. Not just because content can get stolen, but eventually made content will lose its credit, for the possibility of it being AI-generated.

The fact there are so many grammatical errors that not even ChatGPT would make is especially telling

And the worst part is that nothing will ever be done about it. And in a couple years this will be accepted as unfortunate reality rather than something we could have stopped and nipped in the bud.

Plagiarism is definitely the copyright rule to use to back your DMCA takedown of the copy . The case you quoted only takes away some of _their_ copyright, not yours . As an all out mangled copy, they will have as little stance as the people who uploaded stolen movies mirrored left to right years ago .

As someone who has known people who dealt with ripping other people's videos for cyberbullying. This is worse and if not more deplorable.

If it's something to assist with a creatively motivated work like Joel Haver that's one thing. It's basically doing the rotoscoping for him, but he's deciding color, doing love acting, compositing, script writing, etc. But AI doing the writing, composition, or illustration process for someone is bullshit, especially if it's trained on other people's art without permission.

I find it kind of amusing going through RU-vid shorts and seeing just how much AI spam content there really is. I'm at the point where 9/10 times I can spot an AI video from presentation alone.

AI-based true crime channels like Mysterious 7 are particularly rampant right now

As a computer programmer AI is coming for all our jobs including mine Same with artists, receptionist and more If we dont regulate this youll find all of our jobs being affected by it in a few years if not sooner

The part with Eric's name took me out 😂 But it's unbelievable that we have reached this point now. Content farms were bad enough already, but this is a new level of bullshit.

We need LegalEagle and other legal RU-vidrs to cover your case and maybe even covering various laws in various legal areas (e.g. US, China, UK) in case of the AI copy being made outside of the US.

Eric Rick, The Hab... Haa. Why is it when machines mess up, its so satisfying.

I think AI should be handled like sponsors in videos - clearly labeled, and noted what it is used for I agree AI can be a fantastic tool for all sorts of things. But people can just be unscrupulous when it comes to try and gain any form of fame

I can definitely agree that it seems someone used AI to rip off your video, and I'm really sorry that happened. Hearing the edited script reminds me of an assignment in high school where we had to paraphrase quotes from a source and read out our examples. Its a shame that they didn't choose to provide their own opinoins or unique telling of events instead of blatantly copying your video. Even if they felt like the technical explanations weren't needed (which I disagree with) they could've found a better way to tell the story rather than just cutting things out. And, of course, they didn't even bother to at least credit their inspiration. Hopefully this doesn't happen again and the RU-vid community finds a reasonable solution.

I just saw Johnny2Cellos complaining about a similar problem happening to him a couple days ago. Seems like low effort plagiarism is becoming more easy for people to pull off on RU-vid.

I remember Kyle Hill discussing about this as well, more specifically the space related channels, he also mentioned they tend to copy the channel icon style (which in this case was black and white colored theme). The most scary part is: You may not even know if it's AI generated or not, as they tend to be better at creating/ripping off stuff.

I'm getting so sick of these fake AI videos, they ruin everything...

Ai, when it comes to art, is roundabout piracy legally speaking. It is legal to make "parodies" that mix and match the content, but the content must show that it is a parody and not the original product which the ai normally fails to mention.

literally a minute in and the thumbnail alone gives it away lmfao

So I watched this yesterday and today I found an ENTIRE CHANNEL full of these stolen IA videos, I can't believe it how uncanny this feels

Part of the issue is that video essay style videos are much easier to rip off than other types, since what makes a video essay unique is the "essay", and we all know that AI is good a writing essays at this point. For other forms of content, like animation (especially 3D animation), complex edits, and vlogs, it is much more difficult to rip someone off, as the work needed to produce a ripoff would be almost as hard, if not harder, than the work it took to make the original video. The problem with these AI video essays is it is super simple to just feed the script to a program and have it pump something out that is similar and then make an AI voice for it, and the edits for a lot of video essays tend to be more simple and use footage that is publicly available and easy to obtain, making it harder for RU-vid to recognize that content as "yours".

I wonder if RU-vid was never not dystopian

This crap is why I avoid everything that uses machine voices.

In the Transcript Menu you can click on the three dots and turn off the timestamps, so it's even easier to copy and paste video scripts. It's really sad to see that people abuse this feature.. hope youtube will do something against this

I can't get over the fact that they used a fucking _Dennis Prager_ AI voice.

Y'see what happened was they told a high-school student to write about the topic "in their own words" and then used that (The student's essay got an A- btw)

this is reminding me of a Folding Ideas video (i believe the one about the mikkelsen twins?) in which he details a scheme some people do where they hire someone to ghost write a book for them, hire someone else to narrate it as an audiobook, all for dirt cheap, & then post it on amazon. they flood the market with complete trash. this is like if those assholes used AI and plagiarism for every step of the process, so now it’s stolen and completely incomprehensible trash! gotta love innovation :)

"we have a focus on showing content that's high quality" I searched for an image of a screaming cat and got an AI generated one that had a human mouth....

The scary part is AI is going to keep getting better, and harder to tell genuine content, from generated. I don't like AI. I usually watch ymfah's challenge runs, but his last upload was an AI discussion between some tv personalities. I couldn't tell they were generated voices, already. I don't like the idea of just typing into a prompt and out pops infinite content. All you need is an idea, and bam, you have what you want. I think it can be a great idea iterator: show me pictures of a house made of pasta, and then you go off that to make your own, on your own. I really don't like how it just samples and smooths between things it picks out. It seems like plagiarism. "But artists do that, too!" No, they look at someone else's art, and find their own understanding of it.

AI's been trained to do so much cool shit but it still can't give a little more enthusiasm in the voice over 🤣

Let’s get this to the front page. I for one am appalled that someone would do this. Let’s get RU-vid to see this clear theft of honest work.

That voice is either TTS, or perfectly mimics the style used by the "10 surprising facts about cats (#7 will destroy your understanding of reality)" types of creators. I swear I've heard that voice talk about cats before.

4:43 Imagine revealing that you cheated and you happened to be a virgin too! Seriously, what does that have to do with anything? 🤣

So much wrong with what they're doing, but worst of all is that they did almost nothing that actually runs afoul of creators' only effective offensive tool-- copyright laws. If they were more careful about which assets they lifted - avoiding yours & others' edits and graphics - it would just be a lazy knock-off of your idea. RU-vid needs to get on top of this new tier of garbage ASAP. As usual, low-effort bottom-feeding remains profitable because the video hosting sites don't have appropriate or adequate policies and tools to discourage it.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised the guy stealing everything with AI wouldn't proofread a single thing it made.

8:48 there are (technically though barely illegal) tools to download a video, and they generally include subtitles in text form as a setting. The consistency is to be doubted, as I only know this from docs and haven’T tried it, but I can reasonably assume it’s just polling subtitles

This is just absurd at this point AI already steals art but videos now too?! we seriously need to set boundaries for AI

A.I. Would not have anything to rip-off, if it was’nt for human talent and imagination. What Will happen when there are no more human content creators?.

"as I'm literally competing with robots for my livelihood" welcome to the future, homeboy

“the hab” is killing me

It's illuminating to see what happens when AI is trained on a small number of sources. Usually the people behind these things get a lot of plausible deniability because they scrape enough content that it's hard to prove who they're stealing from at any given time, but to me, this proves that AI is not capable of original work. We anthropomorphize AI because it's called AI, but it's just a fancy search engine. It interprets your keywords and spits out snippets of other people's content it thinks is relevant. The only difference is it doesn't list its sources. The fact that people are trying to pass this stuff off as their own work is baffling to me.

I know RU-vid doesn't have any policies, but I reported the bot's account, and the video, for impersonation. It is impersonating the concept of 'being the source of that video'. There wasn't anything relevant under the Report button, and I was afraid that just clicking "Other" wouldn't let me explain why the video is contentious (something that Google is often guilty of, if you try to report something on Google Discover). If RU-vid doesn't like the report system being used in that way, they should suck less at moderation. They should give more of a shit about what Fair Use is (and is not), and look beyond the surface of transparent grifts like this.

only creators can understand this....editing and creating original contents is very time consuming and a huge effort, there is passion on every video, the thinking process, the script, etc....being stolen like this is not acceptable

I can't get over the change from "He Fooled Everyone" to "He Dodged Everybody!" He dodged them? What, like a ninja?

also remember this is something someone from the general public has done with ai. just imagine what has been going on behind closed doors with ai..

When are people gonna start taking action against this AI bullshit? Its already become extremely problematic, and has brought us nothing but mildly amusing dialogue re-writes. Theres a reason stories about AI taking over have been told for ages. Someone needs to put a stop to this nonsense by all means necessary.

This is ridiculous! I hate the idea of people working hard to make a video only to have it stolen by someone

This is starting to feel like an SCP or creepypasta with how things that are very much not human are pretending to be human and getting small pieces wrong.

I agree creators having to disclose uses of AI for content creation is probably a good first step, at least until something more effective is found/made/implemented.

I'm reminded of Mother's Basement. Five years ago, a Brazillian RU-vidr took his videos (among others) and translated them. The same issues happened here. They were translations without taking into account whether the sentences made sense. And that's likely because Google Translate was used compared to ChatGPT. The bigger issue is Plagiarism, though we can't entirely divorce this plagiarism from the fact that AI was used to automate the processes that the accused didn't have to do.

This not just an AI problem, it's just blatant plagiarism. I definitely agree that AI is fine when used appropriately. There are people using AI in interesting and entertaining ways. Like an AI streamer (I've only seen one example of this so far, but there are bound to be more in the future) people using ChatGPT for video ideas (one of my favorite examples is a video by Valefisk who made a board game in Tabletop simulator with all the rules being generated by ChatGPT), and even people using AI for text to speech on livestream donations and redeems.

I'm a lawyer. Fair use analysis doesn't have a failure state, each prong is analyzed and given whatever subjected weight the fact finder wants attribute it. What the party needs to do is make their best argument for each prong. Here it would probably go something similar to this: 1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is for commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; Here, I'll make the assumption that the AI video had ads (I can't verify because I can't find it) so I'd argue that it served a commercial purpose and does not fall into any of the exceptions to fair use. 2. The nature of the copyrighted work; Here, you'd argue that the nature of your original work was educational for entertainment purposes. That it was in video format, etc. (Here a dispute could be argued that the new work was different because it was in a different medium. Think Book vs Visual Media vs Audio vs Live Performance). 3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole. Here, this is the easy one. Basically what your comparison portion of your video. 4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Here, you'd argue that the copyrighted work being available syphons off views from your original video, essentially stealing revenue and confusing the audience. This would be enough to get the other side to settle (civil) or plea (federal crime) to a lesser charge for sure. Its a slam dunk. Its so blatant that this would be a motion for summary judgment in a heart beat. DISCLAIMER: This is not legal advice. Consult an attorney in your own jurisdiction if you decide to pursue this.

could be really worth reaching out to leonard french as he is a copyright attorney on youtube that may look into it!

I don't like AI content because it's soulless. I prefer when a creator puts their heart into what they create. That's the same reason I don't like list based channels, there's no heart and soul to it.

This is nuts ! And it will take years to get laws passed against it … just awful what ppl will do for a quick buck !

I had somebody in my group at uni working on a group essay. I had volunteered to assimilate all 6 people's works before handing in the final product. I noticed that, in addition to his part being far shorter than what we were expecting, it didn't answer the question. The way was based around a UK supermarket and, when I Googled the first sentence of his part, up came a page from that supermarket's own website which was almost identical, even down to word order. I copied the website text into Word and right-clicked any word that was different from his essay and, sure enough, the first synonym was always exactly what he put. I couldn't let the rest of the group suffer for his actions, so I reported the evidence privately but also told him what I'd noticed and gave him a chance to rewrite it. He refused, so I stayed up the night before the due date and write his part myself. He was out of the university 3 weeks later. Also, I have a law degree and studied intellectual property and the way people will steal entire videos, repost them and quote text straight from the statue about fair use, claiming that it's "commentary" is absurd. I even saw someone do this with a music video - nothing contributed by them, just the video, citing the US copyright statue (despite the original video being by a Scottish band) and claiming that they were"commenting" on the work.

You've made it fam. The robots are jealous of your video making prowess.

This is exactly what I meant, everyone was laughing at artists and making fun of them because ai art! devs, musicians, youtubers, voice actors. Now talentless hacks are stealing whole youtube videos 🤣 I hate that this is happening but hopefully it'll raise awareness that we're all getting f*cked, ai isn't a "tool" it's a "cheat" and embracing it ruins everything for everyone, it's like bringing a gun to a fist fight

Man that’s so bad. I hate it. I don’t really know what kind of policy would work to prevent this kind of thing but I hope google are taking this stuff seriously

The chad HE FOOLED EVERYONE vs the virgin HE DODGED EVERYBODY

I feel like what you suggested at the end would be a good first step. We already have to check boxes for stuff like "is this made for kids" and what category the video belongs to, adding a "was ai used in a major part of creation of this video" or something like that would be almost necessary considering stuff like this happens. Now I doubt people would be honest about it and that I dont necessarily know what you could do about it. In my opinion I'm watching a video to learn of someones opinion on the matter, not just a list of facts, and taking out the human element takes out the reason to watch the video almost entirely for me. However ai tools can be helpful in terms of non creative uses. I use ai upscaling on low resolution images all the time for thumbnails and stuff, its better than stretching out a 240p image and its not replacing anything creative or opinion based. That has to be frustrating to see your video pretty much copied like that.

I would not take this personally. This is most likely being done on a broad and automated scale, to see if any high view count video can be copied by AI to have a similar views. These are low effort and clearly have little human oversight to make them make sense. You have stumbled upon a giant spider's web. Some mad genius is out there copying a lot of niche and high view count videos as an experiment, to find if content automation is profitable. I suspect there are a lot of new channels with AI content "inspired" from popular videos. With the recent very low cost of online AI tools, this could be surprisingly easy. Also, dodging the youtube content ID would be easy for an AI video tool. I understand this is scary and uncharted waters but the internet has been where society recently advances from. This is the evolution of content creation. When views equal money, somebody will try to automate the process. I think in the short term these AI videos clearly lack cohesion and style, but when they get so good and indistinguishable, the game begins.

This seems like they put the entire script through an online paraphrasing tool. And yes, those exist and have since before ChatGPT was made public.

This reminds me of a meme where a student stole an essay and replaced the words with synonyms. The teacher ended up seeing "unused york city" on that student's paper