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Want some recommends?
Type 56: The Story of China’s Army - Dude tells the tale of the Chinese PLA and goes into detail about different aspects of the PLA, their doctrines, historical battles, weapons and such. It’s a cool channel. I haven’t seen a ton of the videos and he doesn’t come off as an insufferable lib and I believe he speaks and reads Mandarin at a scholarly level, so he’s referencing primary sources.
Voices of the Past - First hand accounts of really interesting historical events and aspects of historical life chosen and read by a real human being. This channel is honestly an absolute gem. The raw nature of some of the accounts of these events really make you feel connected to the people who lived at that time and experienced these things. The first hand accounts of the Mongol invasion are harrowing and I recommend finding that video and watching it first.
Told in Stone - Historical architectural content by a real human being. Pretty interesting and really solid “fall asleep to this” content.
The Modern Knight / Modern History - A channel of a guy just out there being a knight and teaching about knight shit in an academic but chill way. Dudes rock.
Esoterica - Dr Justin Sledge (yes, his real name) gives you in-depth looks at historical alchemy, cults, religions, and beliefs. The guy is actually a published PHD on the subject and yes, some of the videos on this channel make it into university classrooms. He’s done cool shit like actually cook up alchemical recipes from ancient books he personally owns and drank them as well as gone in detail over the rituals real ancient practitioners of magic performed. If you are interested in the occult or ancient religion and ancient beliefs this channel is gold and Dr. Sledge is a really chill presenter.
I’d like to add Overly Sarcastic Productions One half of the channel does history videos, mostly Greek and Italian, while the other half does mythology and writing tropes with some other things thrown in every now and again
I didn’t know about this one. Will check it out. Thanks, comrade!
Esoterica and Type 56 are fantastic pulls. Big recommend.
thank you for this post
The semi-joke I saw once was, if a history video is just a voice of a boring sounding guy with middling mic quality and 90% of the video is static images of maps, it’s probably a decent video.
If you couldn’t be bothered to make a video, I can’t be bothered to watch it
The AI sloppification of youtube is so fucking bad, it feels like walking on landmines sometimes when it decides to fill your homepage with that shit
Reject the algorithmic homepage, embrace the subscription feed.
How else am I going to be fed incomprehensible Russian youtube poops though?
I only trust history videos from a very small subset of youtubers who have been around for a long while and are vocally against AI. Subscription feed my beloved
Even before AI, YouTube’s shitty algorithm made it suck for the kind of person who would spend the time doing what is essentially a book report for a video on history
I dont mind AI voice if it wasnt an indicator that the script was written by chatgpt. Some people are good at all the behind the camera stuff and I dont necessarily think they should have to find a voice actor for a video essay. I dunno how much data centre madness is involved in glorified text to speech, any amount is too much there. But I get the accessibility option of text to speech and get not wanting to sound like Stephen Hawking while using it.
There’s a ton of really good programming channels that use AI voice because they don’t want people to be put off by their accents. Core Dumped is great and specifically put out videos explaining how they make/research their stuff and just use AI voice because they’re from South America and have an accent that they feel would be hard for people to parse.
There’s also a bunch that just pump out AI shorts with incorrect info so trying to separate the wheat from the chaff is a pain.
RETVRN to “Unregistered Hypercam 2” on the corner of a screen recording and communicating with the audience through dragging the note pad on and off screen for tech tutorials.
What really gets my goat is that people are intentionally putting chaff in my wheat! Cut it out!
That’s too bad because I love South American accents. I get the reasoning but it’s too bad they resort to AI instead.
I have a friend that wants to get into voice acting and I bet he’d get into doing real overdubs in English for a fairly low rate.
Do you think there would be a good market for people to read scripts in an American accent so that people with other accents don’t have to use AI? I kinda think so because if I encounter a video with AI voice I turn it off immediately. If it’s a non-American accent I will keep listening as long as I can understand it.
Overall I think it’s better to be yourself when you make a video and not take those shortcuts but if someone has good quality research I’ll put up with some amount of AI shit.
Physics by Eugene Khutoryansky is one of my favorites.
They’re probably is, but it depends on how cheaply the video creators want to make their stuff. Or if they even care.
On top of the accent thing, there was also the reasoning that “I can sit at the beach and make my videos, and I don’t need to worry about finding silence” that was a motivation too.
Local offline voice models are pretty good, useful tools that will still work just fine after all the data centers are burnt to the ground.
So you’re saying I should start a youtube history channel and use vocaloids for the voice overs?
Interesting.
Vocaloids are technically different but either way you should make your videos.
Vocaloids are technically different
How dare you
Technologically different. Vocaloids work more like this and never required datacenters or any of the other ethical problems to work. AI Voice generation needed the bad shit as a once off to be made (but don’t need continuous updates forever like other uses of the same tech) but they’re here now so might as well use them.
The Elephant Graveyard special.
nothing is real anymore and everything sucks shit but if you don’t go with it yOu’Ll Be LeFt BeHiNd
They forgot to drop me off a few years ago :(
I had a fun time telling a faculty to find a different introductory video for his class, his choice of AI slop was a mix of really bad ai images, nonsensical symbolic representations of exploration and/or empire and the coup de grace, tank models from video games instead of accurate images of WWII tanks.
Making my work harder lol.
i use to love finding video game music renditions on youtube, but now every single one is ai music slop omfg
I was looking for a nice video about the Dulcinian Heresy - I figured since there is a wiki page on it, there’s probably some obscure longform video on the topic that I could listen to and not have to read anything. I did find one person’s video and they did me the service of expressing their views on peasant revolts very early into their diatribe so I could turn it off without wasting any more time on them.
Unless the history video is from a universities channel its not going to be good.
historia civilis is very good
Tribunate is also really good
90% of everything is a slop, with the exception of history videos, where 100% of them is slop, i prefer books.
there are several good archaeology channels that are not ai
Me with anything programming related. I don’t know if AI slop is that interesting to people but it’s definitely not interesting to me. The writing style is so grating and over-the-top.
Searching on YouTube has definitely gotten worse because of this.
Microsoft sam > ai voice
