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  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

'Cheapfake' AI Celeb Videos Are Rage-Baiting People on YouTube (wired.com)

(Friday August 15, 2025 @05:21PM (msmash) from the rage-baiting-as-a-service dept.)


WIRED identified 120 YouTube channels [1]creating AI-generated celebrity confrontation/rage-baiting videos using still images and artificial voiceovers (rather than deepfake technology). One channel, Talk Show Gold, accumulated 88,000 subscribers with a fake Mark Wahlberg and Joy Behar confrontation that drew 460,000 views. YouTube removed 37 flagged channels following WIRED's inquiry, including Celebrity Central and United News.

The platform updated its policies on July 15 requiring disclosure when content shows real people doing things they didn't do. University of Bristol cognitive psychologist Simon Clark characterized the videos as "cheapfakes" that exploit emotional triggers despite their unsophisticated production. Most channels operate from outside the United States and display signs of coordinated content farming operations.



[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cheapfake-ai-celeb-videos-are-rage-baiting-people-on-youtube/


Ragebait is facinating. (Score:2)

by Morromist ( 1207276 )

One thing that is cool about the interesting times we live in is that you can see bad actors exploit human psychology in really powerful ways. I myself fall for ragebait far, far more than a lot of other types of attempted bait like - advertisements, false promises of riches or enticing images of intersting things that don't really exist.

I don't particularly like falling for ragebait but I do find it interesting and I look forward with dread/facination for the next ways human psychology is exploited in the

To code the impossible code, This is my quest --
To bring up a virgin machine, To debug that code,
To pop out of endless recursion, No matter how hopeless,
To grok what appears on the screen, No matter the load,
To write those routines
To right the unrightable bug, Without question or pause,
To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To be willing to hack FORTRAN IV
To mount the unmountable magtape, For a heavenly cause.
To stop the unstoppable crash! And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest,
And the queue will be better for this, That my code will run CUSPy and calm,
That one man, scorned and When it's put to the test.
destined to lose,
Still strove with his last allocation
To scrap the unscrappable kludge!
-- To "The Impossible Dream", from Man of La Mancha