Or at least make the fucking "thumbs down" mean something.

I hate AI videos as much as the next person, but why would YouTube take those down. As far as I know they aren’t against any guidelines.

That's very fair, it's definitely in the vein of what LLMs are (theoretically) meant for, i.e. summarization and language parsing/analysis. I find that LLMs work pretty well for translation too. It's just a shame that executives have run it to the ground like they usually do. And the people poisoning us are the same ones treating it in this case.

That's a trial and error approach for something that could easily be a simple setting.

It also doesn't work if you use an alternative front end or aren't signed in.

Additionally it also depends entirely on the content you view and your viewing enough of it to train the algorithm, which means new accounts or little used accounts have no recourse.

There's plenty of long form AI content lately too. Wikipedia articles make for great YouTube videos, and there's no shortage of them. I've run into several channels lately where it took me about 30 seconds to realize something was off, and checking the channel's history you can usually tell by finding older videos which actually have a person in them who is clearly very different than the narrator in the newer videos, or by just not having any older videos at all.

Every single AI short video that shows up I thumbs down and tell me never to show me that channel again. Doesn't stop like 85% of my feed from being essentially the same AI short videos by users with names like agagin9927385, liafu63836662, or crazyvideos445442..I spend more times thumbs downing and saying never to show this again than I do watching the videos.

Same. I never see AI slop. Or politics. My algorithm is dialed in and my recommended is all bangers.

It's still a problem when searching though.

I don't get that. It's available on shorts only. On videos I get "Not Interested".

Edit: It is available for me but only on some videos, and it's hit or miss on mobile. In the browser (like another person said) it does work, so I suppose that's something.

A bit of both. I just quit watching things on YouTube. Years ago I made it a point to not be tracked, use a third party client, and never subscribe to anything unless it could be done anonymous and third party.

I do have a subscription to Nebula and have three channels that I like and I hope it helps them, but I really only use it on the TV. Which I watch sparingly.

In general though: I just wont watch things on youtube and I really am not missing anything, because I almost always have something better to do.