I think there are a lot of smaller creators who are amazing.
I’ve thought about YouTube storytelling for about 4-5 years now, with the core of the knowledge base being the direct studies of channels and videos…and so coming across videos that feel genuinely refreshing is often super hard.
Coming across videos that feel “real human” is surprisingly difficult. There’s a lot of videos that weave in humanistic aspects for the sake of views, but not because it’s real…it’s just for the act of seeming real. In the same way that people prompt an LLM to write in a casual tone with no caps. These fool many.
AI is everywhere. I don’t think people need to strive for “authenticity”, which ironically sometimes results in being something you’re not.
Instead, one should strive to *be*. It’s the being in human being. The act of trying your hardest to become a better person, genuinely struggling because your ambitions are higher than your current capability, and then articulating that that’s interesting.
These don’t necessarily even have to be big or grand desires. They can be small and simple desires, which is what a stake ultimately is.
I think that I’d love to see more YouTube videos — YouTubers — like that. There are both big and small YouTubers who are doing it well.
But it’s almost always the one that have a focus on something like, “how do I make this feel more me?“/“more human?“ rather than the question “how do I make this feel more authentic?“
The true motivation behind the questions shapes the answer, without one being conscious of it. I’ve realised this ironically in thinking about AI agents a lot recently.
It turns out there’s this mostly unconscious part of being a human that we are unconscious of, but affects everything we do:
We use *answers* to inform the questions we’re asking, before and whilst we’re asking it.
A seemingly innocent question such as “how do I be authentic?” may be informed by pre-imagined scenarios like “if I make the content less produced, maybe this will result in more views.” It’s not even articulated as a sentence in our mind, it’s just a thought that exists.
And therefore, asking questions like “how do I be authentic?” leads to answers like “I should include more stutters in the edit.”
As you can hopefully see, this process of using answers before questions is completely backwards! But it’s so fast we don’t realise it most of the time.
So you’ve got to be significantly more conscious of the questions you ask — because the answer is half-baked into the question itself. Answers are easy, questions are really freaking hard.
Even now…I wonder what questions I’m asking.
