Okay so Youtube started recommending these videos in a genre called “HFY” or “Humanity Fuck Yeah” which, as far as I can tell, involves AI narrators reading AI-generated stories over slideshows of AI-generated images and the stories are all military sci-fi where humans are the bestest warriors the galaxy has ever seen and kill stupid evil caricature aliens 1000:1. Once in a while there’s a story where an alien race does a massacre to humans which gives the humans an excuse to gloriously commit righteous genocide
Why is this a thing
Who asked for it
Who’s watching it
Unless the stories are obviously AI generated too I’d assume it’s bots/grifters scraping posts from r/HFY and running them through a text-to-speech thing, genning some images to accompany it, stitching it together into a slideshow video, and posting it in the hopes of grifting ad money. If they are clearly also AI generated stories then the same thing, except it was openAI or whoever that scraped the sub and can churn that slop out for them.
As a genre, HFY itself started off of stuff that was imitating things like The Road Not Taken and just general internet contrarianism/edginess built off the real literary/worldbuilding complaint that sci-fi and fantasy stories usually made humans into some kind of generic middleground species or ascribed something sort of naive and bland like “adaptability” or “imagination” as traits that humans had above other sapient beings, and more or less coming to conclusions like “humans are (space) orcs, actually” and more or less wanking to things in the vein of WWII Medal of Honor recipient stories, endurance hunting, or extreme survival stories. Naturally that had an intrinsically fashy sort of vibe, since it was all about stirring up this mix of painful and triumphant vicarious emotions, of violent destruction and overcoming, all in a completely empty and purposeless way, just giving someone an empty tearjerking power kick.
Now looking at r/HFY it seems like it turned into people posting chapter by chapter power fantasy webnovels indistinguishable from like the sloppiest isekai or “super powered guy shunned by party but he’ll show them!” sort of slop, except it’s being published in English first instead of in Japanese. In fact I think some of it is literally just an English version of those exact sorts of genres, I even saw villainess genre slop on the first and only page I glanced at just now.
So yeah that explains the why, who, and who I think: it’s empty formulaic power fantasy slop with a fashy western flavor targeting the same sort of people that isekai and related power fantasy slop is.
Lately I’ve found myself especially annoyed with the “persistence hunting” myth as there’s basically zero evidence it was ever a thing. Why would you spend days tracking a single animal when there’s far more efficient methods of gathering food? Dig up some roots my guy. Lash together canes to make a fish trap. Eat some fruit.
No but you see everything we have as a species we owe everything we have to meat eating!!
Really if you look at nature being able to sprint very fast = predator, being able to run for a long time = prey.
Unless the stories are obviously AI generated too
The character names Elara and Elias keep showing up, which is a dead giveaway.
Lmao. There’s something absurd and existentially horrifying about slop machines coming not just for real jobs, but also the kind of cringe fanfic/OC slop people post for fun as a hobby.
“back in my day we used to write cringe fanfics all on our own! We didn’t use AI, or any nonsense like that! I just wrote some cheesy isekai and published it on Wattpad for all to see!”
AI slop drinking game: take a shot every time you see the words “ozone” or “testament”
Hard mode: those rules, plus
- Not X. Not Y. Just Z. (or, “But Z.”)
- Not with X, but with Y.
- utterly
- —
- visceral
Bet there will be shit like avatar but the humans are somehow the goos guys and the unobtanium is needed for humans to survive despite them fucking up another planet.
If you were to dig far enough back into r/HFY’s history you would absolutely find that, yes. Like I’m not even guessing here, I am 100% confident that literally that exact fanfic is somewhere in the depths there, right alongside memes of the one officer lifting weights captioned with a particular rant that I can’t remember if it was a quote from the movie or 40k inspired fanwank.
Like the WH40k flavored contrarian reaction to Avatar was 100% part of the genesis of that genre and that sub.
a particular rant that I can’t remember if it was a quote from the movie or 40k inspired fanwank.
I had the misfortune of seeing that exact image and can confirm it wasn’t in the movie. It’s also completely at odds with the character it’s posted next to, who’s a stereotypical dumb violent meathead (so accurate portrayal of an American troop)
spoiler
Humanity is awed by the alien invaders, as the maneuverability granted by their technology suggests the rest of their civilization is equally impressive. But as they begin their assault, things take a turn for the absurd—the Roxolani attack with matchlock weapons and black powder explosives.
tbh this sounds like it could be a fun read
edit: skimmed over the wiki of the author’s bibliography and
tbh this sounds like it could be a fun read
From what I remember it is, albeit very short (only a few pages long IIRC). It’s one of those old short stories published in magazines.
edit: skimmed over the wiki of the author’s bibliography and
From what I’ve heard his writing isn’t as chuddy as it sounds (the short story I mentioned is the only bit of I’ve actually read), for all that it was a huge inspiration to chuds, but it is very much
, yes.Alternate history tends to attract/create two types of writers: outright chuds, and New Deal liberals who combine a basically progressive outlook with American exceptionalism and unexamined conservative assumptions. Turtledove is one of the latter.
It is a young adult fiction series and so racial slurs, profanity, and sex are considerably muted, compared to Turtledove’s other work.
So, having read some Turtledove in my youth, it’s probably not as bad as it seems. His WorldWar series, where alien iguanas invade earth during WW2 with 21st century military weapons tech is a fun speculative sci-fi, where multiple perspective style allowed a young me insight into some of the other unexplored parts of WW2: for instance, one of my favorite characters was a young Chinese woman who, after having lost everything to first the Japanese, then the Aliens, ends up joining and leading her local Maoist rebel group against the Alien occupation of China, climbing the ranks as the series goes. Another character was a woman pilot in the Red Army, who pilots her little biplane around the eastern front until she ends up teaming up with a worn out sympathetic Wehrmacht tank commander to stop literally Otto Skorzeny from nuking Warsaw, since the partisans threw in their lot with the Aliens since everyone else in Europe treated the Jews so badly. So I suppose it’s a bit of a mixed bag, lol, but ultimately I think I can trace a decent portion of my socialist tendency to having my horizons opened thanks to his series.
His other book where the Axis won WW2 ends with Nazi Germany becoming a liberal democracy in the 2010 or something because of vibes after like Himmler dies, having carried on Hitlers legacy. He also wrote Guns of the South, a speculative sci-fi where future skinheads travel back in time and give the Confederacy AK-47s (no, really) so they stand a fighting chance, but then also as a result, become sorta but not really liberalized by General Lee being exposed to the future racist ideology and deciding that’s too racist even for him. So I think he’s just a really dedicated Lib, when it comes down to it, but that’s not exculpatory of say, that one weird book he wrote about a joint Nasa-Soviet mission to explore an alien planet, where all the yanks end up fucking and cheating on each other cause they thought it was a good idea to send 3 married couples.
Turtledove
I’m amazed that you bring up Turtledove World War 2 fiction and neither of the series is the one I read! I liked his Darkness series which was basically “What if World War II but the Fantasy Manhattan Project is about breakthroughs in mathematical magic and the Fantasy Australians did it, and instead of fighter jets they have dragons, and instead of tanks they have fucking woolly rhinoceroses with canons and catapults mounted to their sides and their cover art is sick and enticing if you’re 14 years old”. It was cool how it tells the story from many different perspectives (but still makes it clear that Fantasy Nazis are bad) and doesn’t turn it into “Fantasy America carried the entire war”. There’s an arc that covers the Battle of Stalingrad and it’s really harrowing.
Edit: Ok not just if you’re 14.
i have to shamefully admit i used to like r/HFY when i was a teenager. there was one story in particular that i thought was incredible but i dont remember the name of it, the gist goes that some alien species comes through and wipes out the entire human race, humans manage to build an AI composed of multiple people last moment that takes hundreds(?) of years to fully come online because of damage to memory and sets out to take revenge on the alien species. thinking back it was probably complete libshit (particularly end-of-history capitalism type stuff iirc) for the most part, but i still think it had a relatively good ending where the main AI character actually decides to stop their genocide and frees its AI children/slaves that it created who end up taking up the legacy of humanity. idk if anyone else here has read it and it was actually terrible or something sorry lol, i just remember thinking it was a beautiful story about the nature of revenge, learning to let go, and what it means to be “human”
most of the other stuff i read on there was complete slop though, remember one that was particularly cringe because they fantasize about aliens thinking they’re engaging in “glorious battle” with humans and then it turns out it was a group of 6yo cub scouts and soldiers come in and massacre them or something like this
“This really makes you think about how brown people are like the aliens
”I never understood how clickbait works on people because I have such a viscerally negative kneejerk reaction. It’s so intensely visually unappealing to me.
Hell, it’s probably just bots all the way down.
I have such a viscerally negative kneejerk reaction (to clickbait)
HFY originates from Reddit, or maybe it’s older and Reddit is where I first saw it, but its been a genre of story for a while and these are just AI grifters reposting fiction written by Redditors twenty years ago with slop visuals.
The amount of AI slop is unreaaal. I have to manually curate a selection of videos of planes taking off or landing because my eldest is allowed to watch like half an hour a day of very boring videos. God forbid I forget to turn off autoplay however and I still have to discuss with him why we aren’t clicking that really cool looking thumbnail…
Thank god disabling cookies and everything makes youtube “withhold” recommendations and shows you a blank frontpage lol.
I still have to discuss with him why we aren’t clicking that really cool looking thumbnail
I’m not a parent but I think this is probably a good thing regardless. It’s the same lesson that can be used to dissuade buying junk food at the grocery store because it’s colorful and has a Disney character on it. I know it’s annoying because it will take years to actually get through to a kid on this but it’s worth it for encouraging critical thinking/suspicion.
Yeah that’s true. The whole idea of watching videos is introducing him to digital media with baby steps.
I only use YouTube either in a custom app or in a browser with no cookies. Everyone always asks me how I get a nice, empty homepage. Amazingly, people don’t actually want to be bombarded with tons of bullshit!
I highly recommend the Tubular app on Android. It lets you have a “subscription” list without an account, and you can mix YouTube subscriptions with PeerTube ones. It also has SponsorBlock built in.
I’m lucky because the majority of the creators I like now have a PeerTube mirror feed, so I don’t have to deal with YouTube’s terrible practices anymore.
Solid suggestions thanks, but I don’t want him to watch on a phone. We watch videos together on my laptop, or I learn my vocabs in parallel.
I manage the selection via bookmarks and we do search for stuff he likes on youtube occasionally but I get to select which video we then watch.
It’s more of a general recommendation for the readers :)
As far as I know HFY originated on 4chan’s /tg/ board back in the day as 40k fanwank and of course redditors took it and ran with it making it somehow even more cringe
originated on 4chan
That explains so much
There’s also a “Earth is a hellworld and humans are space orks” genre of Reddit story based on how terrifying Earth wildlife is and how to humans it’s normal. A lot of these seem to be based on that genre, just expanded out into hours of slop. As a Star Trek fan I’ve had to put a ton of effort into purging my recommendations of these.
Unfortunately you’re correct, and i’m not surprised somebody decided to mine a 20 year old protofascist meme for AI slop.
The slop economy.
There’s also an r/HFY subreddit that’s been around for years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was just AI bots trawling that and mashing it into whatever these videos are. I’m not going to go check either of those things though lol.
Bots making videos for other bots
The bots are honing their propaganda techniques. For no reason, don’t worry about it. Stare at this video human.
a thousand mien kampfs except they’re all ai generated and sci-fi
It’s just america in space shit. Hooah USA USA USA military propaganda transcribed onto sci fi.
It’s someone’s op. Who? Feds? Right wing think tank? Some secret society of bankers that know this shit is good for them? Military industrial complex? Take your pick, lots of possible groups.
It’s not impossible that it’s an op, but from the information given I don’t think there’s any reason to believe it’s that rather than the expected market response to the consumption habits of a rancid culture that has long been cultivated by ops
idk if its really an op more just spamming youtube with slop to rake in ad money on zero effort
White males age 18-34
Why is this a thing
Who asked for it
Who’s watching it
If your first thought was redditors, give yourself a medal lol.
I clicked on a few and they were bad-bad. I mean - I think they were ~30 minutes of still images with - I assume - tediously bad narration. I was about to give up and I jumped to a random spot in the very last vid I was going to check out. I found this bad-good stuff…
Humanity is Using the Stupidest Weapon I’ve Ever Seen | Sci-Fi | HFY
Ninja edit. I took a screengrab too early. Sigh. ~10 seconds later there’s “glitter and pork rinds” followed by a “chainsaw” and a “jar of something that looked like regrets”.
buy one get rpg
Wow a deal!
Glob knob
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Why is this a thing
AI-gen slop will get enough views that someone in the global south who runs the channel is able to make some money.
Who asked for it
40k and Stellaris players.
Who’s watching it
This one I have no idea.
Who’s watching it
This one I have no idea.
my guess is 15 year olds. I can’t explain why, but HFY gives me the same vibes as me being too into Kaiserreich when I was in high school
40K has a lot of actually good lore channels. Nobody is watching this over Luetin. The charm of 40K is that Humans are quite literally space Nazis.
Shoutout to my boy Arbitor Ian
when the AI hits you with the thumbnail stare
a better question might be what the hell is happening with your watch-history for your recommendations to be cursed like that
Probably nothing. My watch history is like music, critical role, math and engineering videos, and robot fights and I still get suggestions like these and also random white supremacy things. YouTube loves trying to get people to watch shit like this it’s super weird
The algorithm doesn’t actually exist to feed you, a prior-existing human, what you want. It exists to mold you into a specific sort of consumer over time.
everybody on YT is just two wrong turns away from being offered the entrypoint to one of a million fascist rabbit holes, even when your recs are curated so carefully that they are missing any reactionary content and AI slop on most days
i still get some d*stiny (streamer not game) clip channels every few months even though i hit not intrested and dont reccomend this channel every time, i assume this is mostly because i watch hasan stuff occasionally and i think ive watched a vid from a destiny orbiter before
yeah that’s a thing the algorhithm absolutely does, trying to drag you into drama and controversies around content you like. i also get clout chaser reaction content fostering drama with my subscriptions on a semi-regular basis, oh and every time there’s a mayor election coming up i get flooded with recommendations for detrans content for a few weeks.
Yeah, my recs mostly consist of food, travel, cars, and tormenting a fiat niki. Maybe old stand up specials occasionally.
My watch history is mostly communist music and Vinesauce
