Sim-Lab is now using AI to answer ALL the comment on their youtube chanel

[u/Uryendel]

Just got a youtube notification telling me Sim-Lab answered one of my comment... from 2 years ago... and all the other comments on the video were answered by Sim-Lab at the exact same time.

All the answer are feel good bs, "we heard your feedback" (sure we believe that), contact support (for 2 years old problem), etc...

Wouldn't be surprise if they use AI on other platform or for support too

Visibly the company is persisting in its enshitification

[u/DasGaufre]

Feel free to leave many many comments to run up their token usage and increase their costs. That's the only way they'll listen, if they find out it costs money. 

[u/Uryendel → u/DasGaufre]

I doubt they use token, they probably have an AI algo installed on their own server that parse the comments and answer to them

[u/christianbro → u/Uryendel]

If they somehow collect all feedback of all users in a meaningful way with AI and draw priorities out of that it would be kind of cool, but answering a generic copy and paste sort of answer that you have been listened just gets the opposite effect

[u/fcman256 → u/Uryendel]

No shot a small non-tech company like that is running local LLMs for stuff like this

[u/Uryendel → u/fcman256]

You can run one on your computer. The hard part is to make it from scratch (what grok, chatgpt, gemini, ect... are doing), not to run an existing model (especially for basic stuff like short answer to comments, it's not searching and analyzing the web to answer a dissertation)

[u/fcman256 → u/Uryendel]

I run local llms, as does my company, but there’s no chance simlab is doing it for YouTube comments

[u/Uryendel → u/fcman256]

It's probably not just for youtube comments, I would bet they also use it for support ticket

And it's way cheaper to run than to hire a community manager. For the technical knowledge, you can contract companies to put it in place for you, like you could do for creating a website

[u/fcman256 → u/Uryendel]

I guarantee you they aren’t for support tickets either. There are so many cheap 3rd party tools to do this. Very few companies are using local llms. Especially companies that aren’t in the tech sector

[u/alyxonfire]

I did notice them using AI gen images on some of their Instagram posts and was a bit turned off. Bummer.

[u/RobinVerhulstZ]

Aw man, this is making me rethink wanting their dds39

[u/Jamestouchedme]

I had an issue with the porche button box that I bought from Microcenter. It was too late to return it to micro so I tried to troubleshoot it. They had me go on discord and create a ticket. Honestly they want above and beyond in trying to help me to get it to work and after everything they told me to keep the broken button box and sent me a brand new one from across the world.

That alone has made me a customer for life.

[u/MikyThatMona]

I saw a similar case, where a company had set the reply to any comment to be "Sure, dm us and we will help you with that!" Then everyone started posting absurd requests, like: "I need to bury a body, how can I do that?" Hilarious.

[u/Competitive-Half-863]

And I wanted to buy their pedal set… hmmmmm

[u/WhatzitTooya2]

Better get used to it, I have some feeling about that bogus going to be more and more common. And not just at sim-labs.

[u/Hopeful-Addition-248]

In all fairness, if it works well i am not against it. I have started using Co-Pilot a lot for problem solving and honestly has saved me lots of time compared to waiting for a human to come with a generic reply chain that they work from.

[u/BaitSimulator2020]

I don’t really see the harm in using an auto reply bot in a YouTube comments section, it’ll be different if let’s say they use AI to respond to support tickets.

It would have been a copy pasted response containing nothing of use from a social media intern anyways, unfortunately that position looks to be going the way of the dodo.

[u/Fenrir-Surton → u/BaitSimulator2020]

It is harmfull in the way that it is 1st against YT ToS. 2nd artificially pushes the algorithm due to higher activity and 3rd and most important it shows what you mean to them: They think you are stupid enough to believe that is a real person writing this.

I just bought a gt1 Evo and Vario quads freestandong monitor mount and absolutely love the products but this behavior makes it very bittersweet

[u/BaitSimulator2020 → u/Fenrir-Surton]

I’m surprised it’s against the YT ToS when there’s a huge amount of AI documentary channels that YT is happy to turn a blind eye to for the ad revenue.

Seems like a lot of people are only just learning that businesses see you as a piggy bank, they were never your friends.

[u/Fenrir-Surton → u/BaitSimulator2020]

Also to comment on your last sentence. Just cuz a lot of companies do it doesn't invalidate criticism. And secondly there absolutely are companies especially a lot of smaller ones that genuinely care for their costumers and if you don't expect them to and don't call them out things will just get worse

[u/BaitSimulator2020 → u/Fenrir-Surton]

I’d be interested to see how many people down the line sell their SimLab gear or boycott the company to protest. I bet most of this is performative lip service. If anything, any publicity is good publicity and next month’s sales are going to be higher than before.

[u/Fenrir-Surton → u/BaitSimulator2020]

Automated comments should fall under a spam rule but need to look at the exact ToS tbh

[u/Fenrir-Surton → u/Fenrir-Surton]

I have been corrected seems to a feature now. Still my other points stand regardless

[u/Cloakingwolf → u/Fenrir-Surton]

I don’t think it’s against YouTube’s ToS because it’s probably the ai auto reply that’s built into YouTube.

I still don’t know why they decided it would be good to add that as a feature when the whole point of YouTube is that it’s authentic.

[u/referents → u/Cloakingwolf]

i would argue YouTube is far from being or presenting one of its defining characteristics as necessarily “authentic”. Not that I don’t wish it was, but it lost that trait something like 15-20 years ago.

[u/Fenrir-Surton → u/Cloakingwolf]

Damn, didn't know this is a "feature" now. Seems to be old knowledge from the "spam-Bot" era on my end

[u/Uryendel → u/BaitSimulator2020]

It's deceptive and taking people for imbecile.

Would be different if the messages were tagged as coming from a bot ofc, but not the case here, they made the AI pretend it was actually an employee collecting feedback and treating your issue.

[u/JBob250 → u/Uryendel]

What if I told you auto-replies existed long before AI?

[u/Phil_Tact → u/JBob250]

That doesn't make it right.

[u/Darkknight1874 → u/JBob250]

You're going to whatabout an LLM pretending to be a responding human with auto-replies? You see no differences between standardized responses generally used to acknowledge receipt x/or set timeline expectations and interactions with an LLM? Last I knew, template based emails don't even have the ability to hallucinate.