YouTuber Fights AI Content Theft with Innovative Subtitle Poisoning Technique

How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content

If you've been paying careful attention to YouTube recently, you may have noticed the rising trend of so-called "faceless YouTube channels" that never feature a visible human talking in the video frame. While some of these channels are simply authored by camera-shy humans, many more are fully automated through AI-powered tools to craft everything from the scripts and voiceovers to the imagery and music. Unsurprisingly, this is often sold as a way to make a quick buck off the YouTube algorithm with minimal human effort. It's not hard to find YouTubers complaining about a flood of these faceless channels stealing their embedded transcript files and running them through AI summarizers to generate their own instant knock-offs. But one YouTuber is trying to fight back, seeding her transcripts with junk data that is invisible to humans but poisonous to any AI that dares to try to work from a poached transcript file. YouTuber F4mi, who creates some excellent deep dives on obscure technology, recently detailed her efforts "to poison any AI summarizers that were trying to steal my content to make slop." The key to F4mi's method is the .ass subtitle format, created decades ago as part of fansubbing software Advanced SubStation Alpha. Unlike simpler and more popular subtitle formats, .ass supports fancy features like fonts, colors, positioning, bold, italic, underline, and more. It's these fancy features that let F4mi hide AI-confounding garbage in her YouTube transcripts without impacting the subtitle experience for her human viewers. For each chunk of actual text in her subtitle file, she also inserted "two chunks of text out of bounds using the positioning feature of the .ass format, with their size and transparency set to zero so they are completely invisible." In those "invisible" subtitle boxes, F4mi added text from public domain works (with certain words replaced with synonyms to avoid detection) or her own LLM-generated scripts full of completely made-up facts. When those transcript files were fed into popular AI summarizer sites, that junk text ended up overwhelming the actual content, creating a totally unrelated script that would be useless to any faceless channel trying to exploit it.

One YouTuber has been poisoning AI tools that access her videos with .ass subtitle files and you can too

Faceless AI-generated YouTube channels have become a problem as of late, so one tech YouTuber took it upon themselves to poison the data they are trained on. In her latest video (via Ars Technica), f4mi has shown off a way to mess with the data that AI is trained on, specifically the subtitles of YouTube videos. Effectively, these bots can scrape all the information in the video by accessing the data in subtitle files, which are then synthesised with all the other YouTube videos it has taken data from. Someone can then instruct that bot to create a new video in the style of other videos. The tools aren't quite advanced enough to animate a lifelike face and the creators won't put their own face on it. That is where the "faceless YouTube channel plague" (as popular YouTuber Kurtis Conner describes it) comes from. "All this AI slop that's appearing on every social media platform is not made by robots trying to steal our jobs," says f4mi, "it's made by humans trying to make money using AI to launder other people's work." A little while back a life hack popped up online. Job applicants were putting positive keywords in white between margins in document folders to trick AI bots into thinking they were more employable. The poisoning method that f4mi invented is sort of like this. It grabs the standard subtitle text for a video, adds gibberish in between the lines, makes it invisible to the average user, and then feeds it back to YouTube. She did this by putting works in the public domain into her files and using a tool to make synonyms for many of the words so the AI doesn't spot what she's doing. A Python script simply went through and made these changes. Unfortunately, tools that can transcribe audio get around this but a few large LLMs like ChatGPT can't. Instead, the AI would 'hallucinate' inventing ideas about the video based on what it can grasp from the enormous amount of text in its subtitles. And this is where the '.ass' subtitle format comes from. It can be used for standard subtitles but also for animation and graphics, which allows the level of customisation needed to sneak in all of that pesky extra data. Entire books can be hidden with the file type's position tool to make both the size and transparency of unneeded text zero. .ass is not among the supported files for YouTube videos -- but you can convert an .ass file to an SRV3 file, which will then keep all of the data from your original file. Unfortunately, f4mi's video had problems with phones crashing "due to the subtitles being too heavy". YouTube has regional subtitle files you can activate, which allows users to account for cultural differences in phrases and tone, so the poisoned track only exists in the UK subtitle track for now, which is the original .ass file. f4mi has uploaded standard files for Australia, which means AI summary tools are getting around the poisoned track and to an untouched one. This means that plugging the video into an AI summary tool now works. However, as a proof of concept, this is a very smart workaround that means users wanting to steal your videos may have to do it the old-fashioned way, which might just be enough to deter many. f4mi is one of a long line of YouTubers (like Drew Gooden and Hank and John Green) who have been fighting against AI plagiarism on the platform, and likely won't be the last. It's unlikely the next major anti-AI effort will have quite as good a file name attached, though.