How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content

Specialized garbage-filled captions are invisible to humans, confounding to AI.

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[you goddamn idiot.]

A few weeks ago, nothing other than power limitations, but those could be solvable. Now? I doubt East Bumfarkistan is on good enough terms with the US to get the GPUs for a training operation over there after Biden announced accelerator export restrictions, but that could be less of an issue with optimizations like what DeepSeek are doing (which actually were partially caused by a US ban on accelerators).

Well, several countries (Singapore and Japan) do have a text and data mining exemption in their copyright laws that read like they allow for training on publicly-available data, even for commercial purposes, and both are not really East of Bumfuck. Japan is in the most-favoured list for AI chips, and Singapore is the second tier.

 

[you goddamn idiot.]

This is nice and all. But what's the point when YouTube publishes a transcript (based on the sound) right along with the video?

That's answered in the video; the uploader has the option to delete the autogenerated captions after they are generated:


View: https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8?t=12m06s

 

[you goddamn idiot.]

A large part of my job is web accessibility. Basically what this person is doing is shitting on people with visual disabilities in order to pwn AI scrapers.

I'm far from being an expert on a11y, so could you expand on how this method would negatively affect people with visual disabilities? As far as I understand, the poison text is not actually displayed on the screen during relevant portions of the video, and as for the letter-scrambling method, visually it renders identically to normal text. The most similar actually-harmful attack on a11y I am aware of is how some "pranksters" put meaningless or extremely long sections of text on the alt-text of still images, but does the analogy carry to this? Do screen readers actually attempt to parse the subtitle tracks on videos as they are playing?