AI Surfing Videos

I've seen a few stories on AI in surfing, none of which have any real appeal. As AI works on existing knowledge, it may be great for hindcasts but is useless for forecasts. Computer processing power is the key there.

Where surfers will cross paths with AI is online content.

Recently I stumbled on a YouTube channel that is using AI to generate surf content and it was an inkling of what's to come. The channel is called Conversations With Strangers and is from S California and is eight years old. They've posted nearly 6,000 videos, and from what I can gather the majority were uploaded in the past year. It's not unusual to see ten or more videos posted on the same day, and this goes on every single day.

https://www.youtube.com/@MicahLoughman/videos

A few months back they started posting surf content, and it's gussied up like lots of other content on YouTube: bold yellow font on the thumbnail, preoccupations with the longest waves, the largest waves, the most dangerous waves, on each of the continents. Jaws, The Right, Shippies, Chicama yada yada yada.

The thing is, all the content - the accompanying videos and photos, and the info in the narrated text - is all gathered from prior online content. The account holder has either dropped select videos and articles into a language model, or directed the model to make a video by trawling online content.

It doesn't cost anything and is quick to do - hence the ten or more vids per day.

Once you're aware it's AI-generated it becomes laughable, yet judging by comments not that many people realise they're interacting with AI. At present, there ain't that many comments or views but considering ChatGPT launched less than two years ago, and the software capable of creating AI videos was only made public this year, Conversations With Strangers is a harbinger of what's to come.

Already Facebook is flooded with AI content - all those history pages for music, surfing, soccer, or whatever else has latched onto your algo, they're largely AI. The number of likes and comments on those FB pages can go into the tens of thousands. The people engaging are either not aware of the origins, or just happy to distract themselves with machine-made info.

Videos are a bit more complex, as are podcasts where two or more people speak 'scripted lines', but if they can come that far, and fool that many people, in one year, then imagine the social media experience in, say, ten years.