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some require looking at other videos on that channel.

These warning signs are for video channels you're unfamiliar with, not stuff from established organizations, magazines, etc.

The first thing to check is when a video was uploaded. (You can find the exact date viewing the video on YouTube and clicking on ...more on the line with the hashtags..) If it was before 2023, then it's very UNlikely to have any AI content, other than possibly some images from early AI image generators, which produced much worse AI images than you see now. Fwiw, I've never run across a YT video with any generative AI content from before 2023, but I'm sure there are probably a lot from, say, early users of Midjourney showing off their AI art.

OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, and that was when the flood of text from AI started, which would have included AI-written YouTube scripts, but it would be impossible to spot AI scripts from one video alone.

Which is why the second thing to look for, after going to the YouTube channel a video is from, is how many videos it uploaded in a fairly short period of time. This channel has 298 videos, the oldest uploaded on August 22, 2024. That's a lot of videos with a lot of narration, fairly long scripts, a rate of production that would be impossible or nearly impossible for one person working alone, or even a small team. But AI can spit out scripts that long in seconds. AI can also offer subject ideas - in fact YouTube has suggested to its creators that they ask AI for video ideas - and patch together research (that might get a lot wrong but will be impressive at first glance).

The third thing to watch for is AI-generated images, especially in the thumbnail, the image you see before you play the video. The girl smiling at you from the thumbnail on the video in the OP is AI-generated, but very much a '70s cover girl type. AI art often has a sort of plastic look to it - at least it looks like that to me, and that's the way I've most often seen it described. If you look at the page for that channel showing the videos

https://youtube.com/@WayBackAmericana/videos

you'll see mostly images taken from actual ads, but if you scroll down to the oldest videos there, the first couple of dozen, the "models" whose faces are shown there are all AI-generated. The owner of that channel apparently decided to cut back from having obvious AI images on every thumbnail, though they still showed up occasionally.

The fourth indicator is the narration. AI-generated voices don't sound quite human, and the narrator often changes from video to video, even if the AI user doesn't want that. When that happens with AI music generators - for instance someone generating songs for an AI album - the singer's voice won't be quite the same from track to track.

When I looked at '70s nostalgia videos last night, I saw one from a guy who started doing such videos several years ago, creating them himself, but the more recent videos he's uploaded are AI with AI narration.

Fifth - and maybe I should have mentioned this earlier - you should also check the YouTube comments, because other people who saw the video earlier will often post if there's obvious AI use, errors in the content, etc. And often you'll see their comments juxtaposed with comments from people who didn't notice any of that - so please don't feel bad if you don't spot those problems immediately.

The channel for this nostalgia video you posted does have a lot of GENUINE '70s content, and those parts DO evoke nostalgia.

But the AI narration plus the AI script trying to be so emotionally manipulative left me feeling depressed watching it. Especially since whoever has that channel might not have been born yet by the 1970s, and they might not be American, might never have been here. The channel info says the owner is in Portugal, but that might not be true, either. There are a lot of AI-generated YT channels that say they're in the US that are really in Asia (just as much of the AI slop on Facebook is from Asia, according to news stories I've seen from 404 Media and others). Content farms churn out a lot of this stuff.

It makes me feel both exasperated and sad that there are already so many AI videos out there, in just a few years. AI is threatening to completely swamp human content. As I mentioned in a Music Appreciation thread the other day, AI-generated music is now 40% of what's uploaded to music platforms. It's a nightmare for people who want human creativity, not something AI spits out in seconds.

Apologies for the length of this.

I do want to add one final paragraph, though, which I'd meant to add to my previous reply when I posted that video of '70s and '80s commercials. I'd been surprised at first to see that Hershey's Christmas bells commercial, which I knew had been around a long time but I thought might have been from the '90s. Nope. It was first shown in December 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Bells_(advertisement)