My 5 y/o has found all of these videos, I guess they're linked by recommendation. And even weirder ones in the past month. One positive might be that I haven't noticed violent or sexual content aimed at children, it's just very strange. Not sure what to make of it.
If you watch long enough (I left it running on the side while at work, muted, out of curiosity) and some of that stuff will come up eventually.
It gets weirder when you have the live action stuff with kids' favourite characters murdering and raping each other. Somebody put in actual effort to put some of that stuff together. Other animated pieces are just a bad accident.
It seems kind of circular. Somebody writes an algorithm to try and take advantage of kids' love for popular cartoons. It grabs keywords, phrases, characters, tones, sound clips, etc. It puts them together into a short (or too long) animated video. The YouTube algorithms pick up on some common tropes and then those autofab end up in kids' watching queues, they end up getting enough views because they keep kids numbly watching (not knowing what it is their taking in), other groups start noticing and decide exploit the algorithms in the same way. At least that's how it appears to me...
Purely algorithmic generation seems less likely to me than Southeast Asian video factories that use cheap labor to churn out a bajillion variations of the same thing with different keywords and characters slotted in.
You are probably right ATM, but the technology is improving rapidly. At any rate, it is entirely plausible that the story themes are autogeneratrd (using a neural net to identify hot topics, then curating what it can produce on its own).
The kind of people pushing content like this are not using neural nets. They’re probably using Markov chains and PHP YouTube uploaders from 2012.
There’s a very distinct internet marketing subculture, and for some reason it’s always had a lot of cross over with script kiddies and semi technical Wordpress marketers.
