Personal Finance and Investing

videos with more time between them than is typical of purely AI slop channels.

If you look at the page showing all the videos

https://m.youtube.com/@HistoryXFinance/videos

you'll see a lot of really tacky AI slop images used as thumbnails, with the AI images for thumbnails going back years. So whoever has that channel is unethical enough to use AI tools he has to know are trained on stolen intellectual property.

The channel was originally named No Fuss Finance - as you'll find out if you listen to just the start of the oldest video. He decided a few years ago to focus on history instead and changed the name (and got rid of the older videos that must have once been there, since he's welcoming people back to No Fuss Financd).

The narrator's voice, presumably the channel owner's voice, seems pretty much the same from that oldest video to the newest. Though he could be using AI trained on his own voice for narrating.

The video description links to a Google Docs page with his sources, or rather links to sources - they're all online. No mention of books or articles on history that he's read that aren't online.

So it's at least possible he simply had a chatbot use those sources to write the script for this video, and find online images that would go with it. And then checked it, because this video does seem to be more carefully done than most videos done with any use of AI.

He didn't check it carefully enough, though, as you'll see if you look at the video at about 21:48, where the word crow appears where he'd meant crown, asking what he says is this very important question:

Who governs the markets
And who holds the crow
When the crown is invisible

I'll admit that gave me a good laugh, picturing someone holding a crow. It also told me he used AI to help create the video, and he's so used to doing so that he wasn't watching for errors as much as he should have been.

He's probably using AI to give him ideas for clickbait video titles, and it failed him this time, because I skimmed some of the comments on the video and saw lots of people pointing out that they'd learned about this trading company in school. Which he'd probably have remembered himself, or heard from others if he asked even a few people about this. There's a sameness to the clickbait titles of AI slop videos that suggests the titles are generated by AI.

There may or may not be factual errors in this video. I'm not going to spend time checking for them. As I said, he does seem to have put more time and effort into his videos than is typical of most AI slop videos that claim to be history.

But if you're interested in the Dutch trading empire, I'd recommend finding videos, articles or books from real experts with real credentials, rather than a YouTuber unethical enough to use AI at least some of the time.