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How an AI Snafu and A Video of Flowers Nearly Got Me Kicked Off YouTube
AI moderation run amok
The California Golden Poppy is my favorite flower.
Paper thin, aggressively orange, and nearly impossible to use in a bouquet (the instant you cut the flowers, they begin to shrivel, are are gone in hours), the Golden Poppy appears at random on hillsides around my Bay Area home in the Spring.
When I saw a little stand of these dramatic flowers last year, I took a quick vertical video of it and posted it to YouTube Shorts.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
Within a few minutes, I received a sternly worded message from YouTube, indicating that my channel had received a Content Moderation Strike.
Apparently, I had posted a video of “Drug Paraphernalia”. That’s against YouTube’s Content Guidelines. It’s the kind of action that can cost creators their channel.
I was confused. My video was an innocent, five second clip of some flowers. What was going on?
Aggressive Algos
I did some digging, and it turns out YouTube’s AI-powered content moderation was to blame.
YouTube receives an obscene number of submissions — millions of new videos per day. They can’t…
