Bard Can Now Watch YouTube Videos For You 91
Bard, Google's AI chatbot, has steadily been getting more useful after a lackluster introduction. Now the bot's YouTube integration is getting a handy upgrade so it can analyze individual videos to surface specific information for you -- like key points or recipe ingredients -- without ever pressing play. From a report: That's potentially a hugely useful tool, but could spell more worry about generative AI for creators. To try it out, I turned Bard on a YouTube video I regularly reference for spiritual guidance: America's Test Kitchen's recipe for an Espresso Martini. Seriously, it's really good. I often find myself in my kitchen with half the ingredients in a cocktail shaker trying to remember how much Benedictine I'm supposed to add, then re-watching the video to find out. But with Bard on the case, all I have to do is type a few prompts and viola -- I have the full list of ingredients and some step-by-step instructions.
Good! (Score:3)
I hate youtubes!
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your hate is still small, then. nurture it well and it shall reach the entire internet.
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https://www.gocomics.com/pearl... [gocomics.com]
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I hate youtubes!
Well me too for any technical documentation or recipes as TFS suggests! I vastly prefer text based documentation or recipes. But wait, this new tools does just that (supposedly) and reverts it back to text! Well, maybe documentation and recipes should be produced text based from the start?
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I was just thinking this if the first "AI" feature I could really use every day, having it get information out of a video that would've been more useful as a short text article.
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The best part is that the owners of Youtube have created a tool that demonstrates just how unsuitable youtube is for many types of information. This brings into question Google's insistence in putting youtube links on search results all the bloomin' time, and in fact all the other ways they "push" youtube at you all the time.
Youtube is fine for cat videos, but for anything information-based, this tool is better, and a regular webpage is probably better still. The fact Google's highlighting this with such a
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ctrl+f for videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting video tutorials back to a skimmable text version...
Hell even printed text is better than videos.
also, viola? Contrabass!
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Hell even printed text is better than videos.
Depends. There are some things, such as assembling/disassembing, which are far easier to understand when viewing than reading. Comparison of products can also fall into this category. It's easier to visibly show the difference between two car waxes or buffing compounds than it is to describe them.
Some cooking processes are better viewed than described. Sure, a picture of soft peaks is nice, but watching how they look is better. Also, what does "coating the ba
Re:ctrl+f for videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, reading something is great for many things compared to viewing, but in specific instances viewing is better.
And for those specific instances, feel free to include with your textual instructions an inline video of exactly that thing to be optionally played if the audience is unfamiliar with the concept. Don't force me to sit through redundant information waiting for the one morsel that I actually care about.
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Why not do it yourself? Watch the video, and write a blog post about it for other people.
If the answer is "because I just want the answer", consider that you are asking whoever made the video to do that work for you, for free.
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I agree. The YouTube I watch is primarily for repair, assembly, explanation, and demonstration. Examples are how to set up a new IoT, how to tear something down, physics lectures with experimental examples, and lectures with slide decks.
Sometimes the influencer may say something like, "Now, when you push this (holds up this) into this part (points to this part), be careful that you don't jam this other thing (points to this other thing).
Not sure how text is gonna help.
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Sometimes the influencer may say something like
Do you take your technical info from "influencers"?
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Yes, I do. Your working definition may not be the same as mine. Influencers are the people who make the videos.
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It's spelled "influenza".
These people are a disease.
Re: ctrl+f for videos? (Score:1)
Hardly; they merely influence people to avoid the products made by the company cynical enough to hire shills.
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"Influencers" make physics lectures now?
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Yes. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Walter Lewin, Dirac, Feynman, Susskind, Dawkins, Frey, and others.
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Tutorials benefit greatly from a video, if they are anything practical.
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They benefit even more if that video is a secondary element to the tutorial, allowing optional playback for those that require it, or want it.
For the rest of us that just want textual instructions, please stop wasting our time with a serial linear information stream moving at the speed of your ability to talk clearly, but probably slower than that because people gloss over shit so we have to pause, rewind, and rewatch.
Tutorials should be text, with inline screenshots / photos / videos of the step in questio
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For most programming tasks, I disagree. I have been working on a game using Unreal Engine, and the written documentation is quite sparse, leaving me to mostly have to use video tutorials on how do stuff. MAny of those tutorials include steps such as setting up a basic game or other things that I already know. Even playing at 1.75x speed, which is about as fast I can manage while still understanding it, it takes far too long to get to the meat of a video to find the information I want. I can read at 750-1000
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If I want to change a lightbulb on my car, yes, video helps, even if is annoying to skip to the useful part. If I want to configure a server, video is useless, even if Google search results try to push me toward that.
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I would love to agree, but most tutorial videos consist first of about half a minute of some elaborate intro, then some greeting nobody cares about, the ever popular "like, subscribe, ring the bell, jump some more hoops" sing and dance, the inevitable word from the sponsor and about 3-5 minutes in, the actual tutorial begins, usually with a description of what the topic at hand is (something you already know because, guess what, you searched for that damn video!), followed by a demonstration of all the thin
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Just like how articles on the web often have pointless intros and ads, you need something to block them. Sponsor Block is the tool of choice.
Re: ctrl+f for videos? (Score:2)
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Just watch any other video on Youtube.
Quite seriously, I've made it a policy that if you badger me to like, push the bell and blow the whistle, I unsub. The net result was that the only channels I'm still subscribed to are channels that didn't produce anything in the past 5 years...
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Being without a google account, my sub mechanism is an RSS reader. The feed url is still in the channel page HTML.
YouTube transcript site (Score:2)
Getting video tutorials back to a skimmable text version...
If that's all you want, there's a website that'll make a transcript of any video on YouTube that has captions: youtubetranscript.com [youtubetranscript.com]. The one drawback is that the transcript of automatically captioned videos lacks punctuation.
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And I guess it will skip everything not audio, like graphs and other images, right?
But I agree that for quickly looking up info in a video it definitely is a useful tool. Saving for later. Thanks.
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Click a line of the transcript, and it'll show that part of the video.
"Hello Google, please watch The Ring for me." (Score:3)
*project discontinued*
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Within a week...
Does Bard have to watch ads too? (Score:4, Interesting)
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came here to ask this as well. Maybe being subjected to constant, bullshit, intrusive and obnoxious advertising might be the lit fuse to leads to Skynet.
(in which case I would wholeheartedly welcome our new robotic overlords as long as they punish google and other ad companies, with extreme vigor.)
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Well, my guess is that ...
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Or does it get a special AI ad blocker.
Probably not. Just what we need, another reason for AI to be annoyed with us. ...
Forcing AIs to watch YouTube ads -- This will be why SkyNet comes after humanity
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Bard willwatch the ads, I will watch the videos. :)
Good deal
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I hope not. After all, that's what I'd want the AI for, AI watches the ads so I don't have to, isn't AI supposed to make our lives easier and more productive?
It can do EVERYTHING (Score:3)
Just not remove ads.
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My brother used Bard to remove ads, kinda. The school had the photographers round to take some photos and sell them to the parents. They sent through samples with a watermark, and Bard happily removed said watermark for him. It did an excellent job too.
Stock image companies have been introducing more intrusive, non-transparent watermarks to combat AI.
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So it cannot do the one thing it would be useful for? Color me unimpressed...
Full Circle (Score:4, Insightful)
When the internet was young these things were posted as text in the first place.
Then a bunch of people afraid of written words insisted everything was better as sound and video. Which, incidentally, is stupidly difficult to search for that one tidbit you vaguely remember and want to clarify.
And now we're going to spend tons of AI resources and power consumption to turn those sounds and video back into raw text. Such amazing progress.
Next from Google: AI-assisted scanning of your printed photo to fax to your home computer so you can email it to your friend.
Blame advertisers for the pivot to video (Score:2)
Then a bunch of people afraid of written words insisted everything was better as sound and video.
As I understand the "pivot to video" trend [niemanlab.org] of the past seven years or so, the only grown-ups in developed countries who prefer video to text are marketing departments of big brands. They pay more for a video ad than for a text ad.
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I have asked a specific 'content creator' for a small game I play to please put his guides in text form instead of video. He refuses because video is far superior, according to him. It's not just big brands, I assure you.
Videos that should be text content, now useful? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously. What The Actual Fork.
Someone just said:
You mean like a written recipe list, that's been around for as long as writing and recipes?
Thousands of years?
I don't get it anymore, I seriously am dumbfounded at the level of dumb we've reached.
That there's a generation out there instructed purely by video content, that they are amazed that some LLM can extract some text out of a video, a video that would probably have been better of as text in the first instance.
FFS. I give up. I'm old now. I'm 55. Fuck this.
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I don't get it anymore, I seriously am dumbfounded at the level of dumb we've reached.
That there's a generation out there instructed purely by video content, that they are amazed that some LLM can extract some text out of a video, a video that would probably have been better of as text in the first instance.
All videos that don't involve music or drama or other entertainment content would be better as text. The problem is, the Internet evolved without any sort of micropayment system, and text ads don't pay enough, but video ads do, so to extract the most revenue, companies and individuals tend to create video content as the default, resulting in huge amounts of time wasted wading through the crap.
And don't get me started on the YouTube videos that try to "educate" people about some controversial issue that peo
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All videos that don't involve music or drama or other entertainment content would be better as text.
I watch a lot of how-to videos on woodworking, metalworking, boatbuilding, plumbing, tiling, etc., and they would be approximately useless as text. Basically any instruction on how to do a manual task is better with video, and many of them require it. Of course, many of those videos also include specific factual elements (tool types and configurations, chemical choices, etc.) that could be usefully extracted as text for reference after the basic skill is learned.
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All videos that don't involve music or drama or other entertainment content would be better as text.
I watch a lot of how-to videos on woodworking, metalworking, boatbuilding, plumbing, tiling, etc., and they would be approximately useless as text.
I should have been more clear. I was thinking specifically about long-form videos when I said that, not short clips. For entertainment (think "This Old House"), long-form video is fine, but for actually transferring information, it's entirely the wrong medium, because the information density is too low.
For every one person who is just starting out and prefers to watch a long-form video over reading similar content in text form, there are a hundred or more who are watching the video to unblock themselves a
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I should have been more clear. I was thinking specifically about long-form videos when I said that, not short clips.
Most of the videos I'm talking about are 20-30 minutes. Are those "short clips"?
People were learning things from books for centuries before we even had video.
Nah, hands-on trades were learned from other humans, in person. It wasn't really even until the 20th century that anyone really tried to write books about the kind of stuff I'm talking about, and I bought and tried to use a bunch of those books before YouTube became a thing... and the videos are dramatically better. Not as good as in-person training, of course, but much cheaper and easier to schedule.
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I watch videos on how to work on my truck, last was how to disassemble my dash to change the bulbs. I have the Haynes manual but it is shit for a lot of stuff compared to watching a couple of videos of someone doing it. The manual is great for things like looking up torque when you know what you are doing, crap for a lot of things. The forums, which are mostly text with some pictures are also good but only go so far with some of this crap.
And no, people have not been learning from books for hundreds of year
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Nothing requires video to learn except maybe cinematography (and arguably not even that). The problem is that at some point, we stopped teaching people how to explain things, how to create good, unambiguous diagrams, etc., so now folks use video as a shortcut for explaining things properly. But a good diagram or series of diagrams beats video pretty much every time.
I disagree. All the diagrams in the world are no substitute for video of someone using power tools, or welding, or performing a complex physical activity, or any of a zillion other things that a diagram can't capture.
I agree that diagrams and directions are often also necessary, and a lot of YouTubers in the tech and hobby fields provide those as supplements to the vids. But no diagram takes the place of, for example, watching someone build and then use a cross-cut sled. And no number of diagrams could subs
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Anytime you're tempted to blame the children, take a look at their parents.
Video ads pay more than still ads, and the longer the video the more ads you can squeeze into it. So if you've got a recipe you'd like to make money off of, you don't make a web page, you make a video. If you can get someone to watch that video more than once, even better. Even the recipes on regular web pages now put a couple pages of blah blah before the actual recipe in order to make more space for ads.
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And that's the problem. Everyone is trying to squeeze that fraction of a cent out of everything they do instead of just doing it as a labor of love, as a display of a hobby.
So you have this recipe. There are probably a gazillion ones kinda like it, but this one is the one your grandma used when you came to visit as a kid, so it holds sentimental value for you. You can over the next two decades earn ten dollars tops from posting it as a video, drowned and unsearchable in the sea of recipes kinda like it, or
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Yeah - if you've ever visited a recipe web site, they're the same thing - maximizing engagement time. You have to scroll through 3 pages of your Grandma's life story before you'll ever get to a recipe.
People don't want to host their own web site just to share it - whether in text or video form, so the content gets handed off to a bottom-feeder site.
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And that's the problem. Everyone is trying to squeeze that fraction of a cent out of everything they do instead of just doing it as a labor of love, as a display of a hobby.
It generally started as "a labor of love, a display of a hobby". Those who did it well gradually saw their (free) work being copied, appropriated, outright stolen by third parties who were dead set on making as much money as possible.
When your original content channel takes you, say, 30 work hours per video, has 15K followers and brings you zero bucks, while someone else rips your content off (e.g. most, ahem, "reaction" videos), has 2 million followers and makes money hand over fist while spending half an
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Lots of people share it for free. You don't come across it easily because it's on a shitty blogspot page or something and the search engine you're using, run by the world's biggest advertising agency, shows you the pages that have ads on them.
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Even the recipes on regular web pages now put a couple pages of blah blah before the actual recipe in order to make more space for ads.
This, in particular, infuriates me.
I don't need the genesis story of your recipe. I don't give a single fuck about how much your family gushed over how good the recipe is. I don't care if the anyone up to (and including) the King of England said it's the best pie he's ever had.
This is what I want from your recipe:
1. a meaningful title. And it had better not be "world's best X" because that's hyperbolic horseshit and you know it. If it's good, I want to be able to search for it and find it again, even if
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While I agree with you, it looks like it's easy to miss information even when presented in text format, which might be the reason nobody commented on misusing "viola" instead of "voila" in TFS, TFA and even your quoted excerpt.
Re: Videos that should be text content, now useful (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, even printed recipes on the internet are being intentionally obfuscated, thanks to those jackasses selling "SEO". Ever search for a recipe? Invariably it's on a page where you'll first have to scroll through a few hundred lines of filler (with headings along the lines of "Why Meatloaf is Great", "The History of Meatloaf", "Let's Talk About Ground Meat", etc. etc.) before you finally get to the actual list of ingredients and instructions!
Video content (Score:2)
I have a very real and well thought out reason for why I do not like video instruction. Your delivery will never match my uptake.
The key thing of videography is that it removes your control of time. This hackadoodle runs the full circle around it and makes it static again. Which is a problem made up for a solution that's sketchy and click-baity and also great since there's so much locked up in video these days, (thanks facebook's pivot to video? whatever)
I prefer to control my time also, when I can.
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On the other hand if it can extra the 10 seconds of video I want, that might well be worth something.
Doublechecking how to properly pronounce "Laphroaig" and "Glen Garioch" should not require a 30 second to 2 minute video and that's AFTER the adblocker.
An AI that could pull that out and play the 5 seconds of audio I need might actually be worth something.
Likewise, while I agree that for the vast majority of talks and instructive content, and interviews, I'd prefer to skim a transcript, but sometimes if some
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An AI that could pull that out and play the 5 seconds of audio I need might actually be worth something.
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Doublechecking how to properly pronounce "Laphroaig" and "Glen Garioch" should not require a 30 second to 2 minute video and that's AFTER the adblocker.
Ask and receive! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I originally saw this as a single video (instead of a bunch of 3 second ones) and it was so much fun to watch!
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There are a lot of "news articles" that are just a few sentences with a video attached. Often I would rather skim the article than watch a shitty video filled with ads. Now Bard can do that for me! It's not a bad feature when you consider how broken new reporting is, but I don't see this being heavily promoted once Google realizes that people can just read the summaries instead of watch the ads...
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Let's just say a lot of information isn't in text form, or sometimes needs to be demonstrated
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Seriously. What The Actual Fork.
Someone just said:
You mean like a written recipe list, that's been around for as long as writing and recipes? Thousands of years?
Came to say exactly this. Outsourcing fact-finding is one thing - outsourcing your memory and your ability to think and take notes is quite another. A high-tech prosthetic for a recipe you've already used several times? Gimme a break! By this point a serious amount of drool is part of that guy's recipe, whether he realizes it or not.
FFS. I give up. I'm old now. I'm 55. Fuck this.
Youngster, I WISH I was only 55! ;-)
Tutorials go full circle (Score:3)
They are thinking too small (Score:4, Funny)
They should follow Douglas Adams idea of creating an Electric Monk who will believe things for you.
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Thank you so much. This is the reason I came to this thread.
Great (Score:2)
Can it do my job and collect my paycheck for me too. Oh yeah and splurge it on Amazon and a vacation.
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Can it do my job
It can!
and collect my paycheck for me too.
That's the downside.
Transcript (Score:3)
YouTube has the Transcript feature, which shows the pre-recognized text found in the video, along with the timestamps of that text. So there's no "watching" of any videos, the data is there already.
Irony, thy name is Bard. (Score:2)
So I've been grumbling recently about why everyone feels they need to post a 12 minute video about how to do something that would take 3 minutes to read, and have a nice detailed list of steps in order to accomplish something for reference. It is a massive waste of time for most "how do I do X" tasks.
I don't fucking care who sponsors your YouTube videos, and I'm definitely not buying anything from them. I want to know how to make Windows 11 stop sucking a slight increment less.
I don't fucking care about o
Nice! (Score:2)
does it skip ad's? or did Google code it to force (Score:2)
does it skip ad's? or did Google code it to force them on you?
More Slashdot Hyperbole (Score:4, Insightful)
"Your video doesn't have a captions file that I can read."
"So you don't watch the video at all then? just read the captions?"
"Yes, that’s correct. I can’t watch videos like humans do. I can only process and understand visual information if it is in the form of captions or other text-based descriptions."
Some days Slashdot just wastes my time.
Is it analyzing the video or a transcript? (Score:2)
I gave Google Bard a Youtube video of multiple speakers engaged in a discussion, and it gave me back an indistinct collection of viewpoints. I then asked it how many speakers are talking, and it responded "one". So.. is this actually analyzing the video, or is it analyzing a transcript of the video, that doesn't retain clear indication of who actually says what?
Could be useful (Score:2)
Have it watch it, cut out all the ads and the sponsored crap, cut away all the "like, subscribe, hit the bell" shit and render a useful video.
Videos have become a sickness... (Score:2)
The fact that somebody posts a 3 minute video with a splash screen, a preamble, a restatement of the problem, an ad or two, and 5 seconds that answer a question like, "Where is the WPS button hidden on this router?" pisses me off. "It's just above the power switch" in text is an answer. The need to wrap things in video when a handful of words would suffice is... just awful. Really, truly pitiful.
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Check the comments under the video, some kind soul usually already posted it.
Don't forget to upvote that comment, too, so it stays at the top.
So how to game that AI... (Score:2)
I have to wonder, if YouTube detects an AI is watching can they present it ads that will have the AI pass along the ads in some way in the text? mMaybe by product placement? Maybe by the ad triggering some kind of command mode for the AI to instruct it to wind in references?
Read between the lines (Score:2)
Lately YouTube has been making sure autogenerated captions are available for all videos, so rest assured, it's not "watching the videos," it's processing autogenerated transcript. Admittedly it's pretty good, provided the presenter doesn't have a weird accent or a lot of background noise.
AI can really only do a couple things well, and summaries is one of them. So this is just another implementation of that, and as usual, garbage in, garbage out.
/o\ (Score:1)
If the video is ten hours long with ads every minute, do we get the ads inserted into the Bard output? :-)
If not, why not dammit?!?
Useful (Score:2)
"Bard, generate me a version of this YouTube video without the ads, paid product placements and remove the presenter's spiel of subscribing and hitting the like button."
This is what the future of ad-blocking may be - an AI intermediary that knows the format you want, in an arms race with the source AI to defeat yours. Similar issues with online game cheating.