Guilty as charged. I often need white noise to lull my brain to sleep. And, what better way of procuring such "background mush" than to play a lengthy documentary on YouTube, replete with a sonorous narrator.
Over the past month or so, Boring History channel has populated my bedtime routine. After all, the channel is filled to the brim with AI-generated, hours-long videos, that do their part fairly well: convince my hyper-active brain to go to sleep.
This relatively innocuous bedtime hack, however, has some serious drawbacks: people are going to sleep while being fed inaccurate facts, ones that distort the entire historical paradigm.
For instance, one such video that talks about how Medieval peasants survived cold nights, glitched after about an hour and 15 minutes, going on to talk about the murdered wife of the insatiable Tudor King, Henry VIII, and then making a jarring pivot towards the American colonies of all things:
"In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator glitches. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” the video continued."
This video is from a YouTube channel called Sleepless Historian. And, there are tons more: Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria.
While some of this content is quite entertaining, frankly speaking, and forms the perfect background hum to fall asleep, it is likely not stringently fact-checked, and can affect one's perception of history via subliminal messaging, which uses hidden visual or auditory stimuli to influence behavior without conscious awareness. What's more, our brain becomes more vulnerable to absorbing such messages and cues as sleep approaches.
Additionally, such content, available in titanic volumes, trivializes to some degree the hours spent by genuine historians and anthropologists to publish rigorously fact-checked videos on YouTube.
Do you listen to such content while going to sleep. What's your overall opinion on AI-generated informational content? Let us know your opinions in the comments section below.
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