I don’t know about everyone else, but I cannot go a day without some good ASMR.
It has completely taken over my feed on social media. I can’t stress how many hours I have spent scrolling on my phone, listening to various “triggers” to either relax or fall asleep.
However, recently a different kind of ASMR has graced my feed — and it is not one that I ever wanted to see.
AI ASMR is probably the most useless use of artificial intelligence.
Now, I am not a big fan of AI in general. There is a lot of debate whether it is “good” or “bad” and whether it should be used at all or not, but I don’t think the people who have worked so hard on creating it were expecting people to use it to create viral clickbait videos of honey keyboards.
Sometimes it might be hard to distinguish which ASMR videos are AI at the first glance. But I promise you, you have definitely seen one or two of them before.
And honestly, sometimes they can get very strange. The viral honey keyboard video is tame enough — many actual ASMR creators have even recreated it many times — but then you get to the different types of beds, animals being spread on toast or lava/cactus make-up — and that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg.
AI ASMR often follows the recent trends — like mukbang for example — but adds a certain twist to it. As in, instead of eating Raising Cane’s, the AI generated person eats a glass strawberry or drinks pure light.
The reception for these differs. Some people are in love with AI ASMR, as it is really eye-catching. There are also those who believe that the hyper-realism that these videos reach is not a good sign for the future of content, but that’s getting off track.
These videos often garner thousands, if not millions, of views, especially because some creators stitch and duet these videos and react to them, which only continues to spread them through the algorithm and generates more and more views, like a boulder rolling down the hill.
Creating these videos is easier than it seems. Meet Chat GPT’s younger cousin — Google Veo 3.
While you do need to be subscribed in order to use this service, simply type in as much detail what you want to see on your screen and the program does it for you. Granted it might take some back and forth to iron out the details and errors — after all, AI is not personal and lacks the emotion that content created by humans has — but once you master that skill, it only takes a few minutes to create the next viral video.
Google Veo 3 was launched earlier this year back in March, and unlike its predecessors, it can create video alongside audio and dialogue, making it seem more realistic than ever before.
Simple, easy, fast — and definitely lazy.
Anyone can open Google and type a quick sentence into a program that creates the video for you. A quick upload to TikTok, millions of views later, and the paychecks will just keep coming.
However, there are real people who dedicate their entire accounts into creating entertaining videos of different types of ASMR, a minute-long videos that often take hours and hours of work on their end with setting up, shooting and editing, only to end up with less than 100 views for months before they get any sort of real following.
AI has been also known to use an extreme amount of water so using it for something like ASMR quite frankly just seems unnecessarily wasteful.
There have been instances where AI was used to help doctors figure out if someone has cancer or not. AI Chatbots have improved customer service for many companies as they are a 24/7 resource for customer complaints and questions without needing to overwork some poor intern. AI can have many useful uses, outside of using it to pass that one class that you really don’t care about.
But AI ASMR does nothing but take the revenue and attention from actual hardworking content creators that go above and beyond to make sure their content is new and entertaining. So next time you come across an “eating lava as honey” video, maybe continue scrolling.
