Are you as tired as I am of misleading headlines and photos advertising a video? I saw one where the melting of a glacier appeared to be disclosing a lost civilization. The title read, “Discovery Behind Melting Glacier Shocked Archeologists.” Horse patooey! The video was just about a large glacier melting. No lost civilization there at all. Click bait! This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Then there are the impossible looking monsters littering Reels on FaceBook (No one calls it Meta) and YouTube shorts. Humongous snakes wrestle with lions and elephants. Weird looking beings appear out of nowhere. The aliens must have landed. Get the shotgun, Harry. Click bait!
I have, in the past, been partial to those clips featuring beautiful, scantily clad young women who pose or walk shaking their booties and other prominent parts. At one time they littered my feed, bidding me to click on them. I don’t fall for these anymore as it takes time away from my yelling at elected officials for not doing what they promised. Besides, some of them aren’t real. Click bait!
One clip caught my eye. There was a little dog that looked just like my little dog (was this a coincidence?) near a crocodile. I couldn’t help myself. I clicked. The croc opened its mouth, and the little dog climbed in and started licking the croc’s teeth and inside its mouth. “Get out of there, BJ!” Right at the end it appeared that the croc was going to close its mouth. Holy cow! Leave me hanging will ya! Click bait!
Next up on the feed was the same situation with a baby instead of a dog climbing around inside the croc mouth. Adults were a few yards away watching and none of them appeared upset in any way. The baby seemed as unconcerned as the adults and the croc barely moved its mouth at the end, sending a shiver down my spine. Definitely click bait.
The video that put the crushed nuts on top of the ice cream sundae showed a young woman with a baby standing on a path overlooking a long drop to the ocean. She throws the baby into the ocean. A turtle (not a Mutant Ninja) sees the baby plop in the water and swims to it. The baby grabs hold of a flipper while the turtle swims. Cut to a small beach where a group of adults are standing. The turtle pulls itself up on the beach, the baby jumps off the back of the turtle and stands smiling and cheering. The people smile and cheer and the turtle smiles. WTH? It looked real but was cartoonish in its presentation and plot.
What is the point? Well, you click on it and someone makes money.
Where do these things come from? AI assists in headline selection of videos you have made. AI can enhance your video or it can take your idea and turn it into a realistic looking video. Here is where we might get the woo-woos. We soon won’t know what is real on our computers and what is not. With the advances in robotics, this confusion will soon bleed over into real life so that you won’t know if you are talking to a real person or a robot. A lot of mischief can be done with a toolbox like this.
There is a deeper problem with these short videos. To start with, they are short, and the result is that our attention span diminishes. The second problem is that they are designed to appeal to our basic drives but deliver very little if anything for intellectual stimulation. Their purpose is for you to be compelled to click on the link. There is nothing else they want or have designed the clip to do. As a result, we are dumbed down with one more lost opportunity to stimulate our brains.
Entertainment in the past was more stimulating. We had great authors such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Harper Lee, and Jane Austin who wrote entrancing stories that lit up our neural noggins like a Christmas tree. We also had great poets such as Shakespeare, William Blake, Anne Bradstreet, and Emily Dickinson who wrote beautiful poetry that also made us think. Later, with the advent of film, there were wonderful movies produced that did the same. Now we have click bait that does little to stimulate or inform and leaves us empty and wanting. We don’t know what we want, so we forward this stuff to our friends hoping they will see how discerning we are with what we watch and will give us a like or a thumbs up.
I don’t know about you, but those pretty girls and AI constructions can parade up and down my feed shaking their water balloons and wiggling their booties all they want. I’m not buying! Not being suckered by the impossible monsters either. I hope you feel the same after reading this.