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I was not previously aware of this phenomenon. I’m not sure if I should thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I have no proof one way or another for how these things are getting made. Though I suspect that cheap labor and stolen content is responsible for quite a bit of it. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a lot of automation involved, but the clips I glanced at were both too varied and too samey to be easily procedurally generated. Parts that would be easy to vary were straight-up copied from video to video, while other parts used radically different art styles. Some of them likely use some of the animation automation tech to puppet the characters, but I’d be a bit surprised if anyone’s set up a wholly automated system.

If there’s a system operating here, I suspect “cottage industry” rather than “rogue AI”. (Of course, there’s a point of view that holds that corporations are a form of AI, but that’s not what you were asking.)

But I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that some of the videos were procedurally generated. It’s not impossible. Millions of the books on Amazon were created automatically, after all. And there are bots that procedurally generate YouTube videos. For that matter, YouTube itself will automatically create videos and channels where it sees a need.

I suspect that one reason why this is a bit mysterious is because it stems from a culture clash between separate audiences on the internet.

YouTube has a thriving, if under-studied, infant audience. I can’t find any information on how widespread the practice is, but there’s some anecdotal evidence that infants and young children are watching a heck of a lot of online video. I ran across some mommy blogs written by parents who were sick of listening to the videos (or their children singing the song).

Four-year-olds don’t chat online much, but they’re perfectly happy watching videos. And, from the content creators’ perspective, toddlers don’t know how to use adblock, and are probably more likely to sit through the ads. There’s a ton of other nursery-rhyme videos on YouTube, profiting off a similar dynamic. Some even offer customization options, creating videos with “your child as the star.”

It does suggest that the future of young children’s entertainment may involve some form of procedural generation. Children are famously willing to watch repetitive content, and may end up being the perfect audience for testing generative algorithms. Some kind of infernal cross between Emily Short’s mushroom principle and Alfred Bester’s earworm from The Demolished Man.

I’m now going to go scrub this song out of my head forever.