At the bottom of the text blurb on the Veo page: "In the future, we’ll also bring some of Veo’s capabilities to YouTube Shorts and other products."

So...you're not cynical, it's an explicit product goal.

It's already here. There are communities forming around generating passive income from mass producing AI videos as tiktoks and shorts.

I saw one of those where a guy just made videos about increasingly elaborate AI generated cakes. You're right, I guess we're mostly there.

But those still require some human input. I'm imagining a sort of genetic algorithm for video prompts, no human editing, input, or curation required.

YouTube’s endgame is to not need content creators in the loop any more. The algorithm will just create everything

The endgame of that is that people will leave.

I'm somewhat surprised people still watch YouTube with the horrible recommendations and non-stop spam

YouTube actually has really good recommendations and comments these days.

In fact I would say the comments are too good. They clearly have something ranking them for "niceness" but it makes them impossibly sentimental. Like I watched a bunch of videos about 70s rock recently and every single comment was about how someone's family member just died of cancer and how much they loved listening to it.

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

If it really suited my exact tastes, that would actually be great. But I don’t see how we’re anywhere close to that. And they won’t target matching your exact taste. They will target the threshold where it’s just barely interesting enough that people don’t turn it off.

I had the same thought regarding infinite jest recently

And somehow our exact tastes would also include influencer coded advertisements.

Can you explain this aspect of infinite jest to me without spoiling the book?

It's introduced early on (and not what the book is really about): distribution of a video that is so entertaining that any viewer is compelled to watch it until they die

This basically already exists for porn

There's a naive statement to make.