Sometimes, the gap between AI and reality can be very hard to spot - and one YouTuber put that to the test in a sneaky experiment.
YouTuber Sambuca slowly turned his content into AI to see if any of his nine million subscribers would catch on.
"It's basically gonna be a litmus test for how much we can get away with until my audience notices that I'm replacing myself with AI," he explained.
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He started off small by just using OpenAI's ChatGPT as a tool to generate video content ideas.
He prompted the chatbot for 60-second YouTube Short ideas that matched his usual 'fun' and 'educational' style videos.
Sambucha then filmed ChatGPT's suggestion of "The Most Rigged Game in the World," while keeping all other parts of the video unchanged.
With such a minute change, no one seems to notice a difference in the comments section of his YouTube Short.
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Then, the YouTuber upped his game by picking an old video that's 'gotten only one view in the last 24 hours' and changed the thumbnail to an AI-generated image.
"[I will] put it into the hands of basically a single person to see if they'll call out that the thumbnail on one of these videos is going to be AI-generated," he described. Again, no reaction from his audience.
Later on, Sambucha used AI to generate a full voiceover for a YouTube Short, choosing one from Character.AI that closely resembled his own and sounded the least robotic.
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Surprisingly, out of 1,200 comments, not a single person caught on. He even confirmed this by searching for the term AI in the comment section.
For his next step, he combined an AI-generated avatar to go with his AI voice.
"Not only are we going to have an AI voice say that line but it's also going to be an AI-generated avatar of me," he said.
He tested it out to one of his friends on Discord, who noticed an extreme 'lack of blinking' and slightly robotic tone of voice.
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Finally, Sambucha slipped in an obvious AI-generated segment into one of his long-form content videos.
It's clear that his voice doesn't sync with his avatar's mouth, but with the clip being such a small part of the video, it's quite hard to spot and goes majorly unnoticed by the masses. One comment with two thumbs up read: "Bro is not slick with the A.I".
Laughing to himself, Sambucha thought only three people out of 1,600 to catch on was pretty impressive. "It looks like not that many people catch on if you just start slipping AI into the content," he stated, adding that adding the technology didn't really have an effect on his video performance metrics.
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After the discovery, people were utterly shocked at how they missed all the clues.
"The amount of sambucha vids i watched and didn’t even notice," one viewer wrote.
"Me realising all these shorts are ones I watched and I didn't notice," added another.