AI halted a budding friendship.
Last summer I made a new friend at a weekly bar meetup. He was also an ex-pat, so we had that in common. After the meetups, we'd usually continue chatting for an hour or two about this and that. We got along really well quite quickly.
His hobby was traveling all over Japan. He had visited nearly every prefecture in just a couple of years. On the other hand, I've only been to a few over the past decade. He was a history buff and loved learning about feudal Japan and the various conflicts that shaped local lore. I know nothing of that, nor am I particularly interested in it. Still, I do like hearing others talk about what they're passionate about.
His new venture was making YouTube videos about the various places he's been, detailing what makes each prefecture unique. He delved into history, food, geography, and the like. The kicker was that he was using AI to make his videos. Nearly all the images were AI-generated. I asked if he had photos from his visits, but he wanted more "dynamic" images. He sent me the first edit for my opinions. Yeah, you can see where this is going. He knew his narration audio quality was poor and admitted he didn't know much about media creation. I have experience producing podcasts and short videos, so I offered to help him clean up his audio. I even suggested he bring his laptop to the bar and I could probably figure it out on the spot. He thought a better solution was to use an AI-generated narrator instead. Now the examples he was sending me were completely devoid of any human touch.
It was slop. Not slop in the way people throw it around casually today, when I don't think it's always warranted. This was crap. And it was long crap. Videos were running 30 to 50 minutes! Horrible, corny, inauthentic, and annoying videos. He started producing them weekly to cover all of Japan within a year. I asked what the rush was. He said he wanted to make money from it right away. At this point, I mentally checked out. He kept pushing me for critiques. He questioned why his videos weren't getting any likes. I tried to be diplomatic, but once you hint to someone that the thing they are making isn't very good, there usually isn't any coming back from that.
We haven't spoken in over a year.