Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | December 19, 2025
I’m fascinated by the legal gray area in which YouTube appears to operate. For instance, I love falling asleep on the couch during the holidays while watching old Christmas specials on TV. Like a reliable radio station of my youth, YouTube has specials from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and today. This year, I’ve been able to watch full television broadcasts. I’m talking about hours of Nick At Nite programming, complete with commercials and bumpers. But how?! How does YouTube get away with this while scores of older shows and movies are prevented from being streamed due to rights issues?
The likeliest answer is that the stuff on YouTube is not important enough for the rights holders to care about, or those people just no longer exist as a production entity, or … at all. So, someone with a VHS converter and spare time can upload hours of unlicensed shows and movies without any recourse. Some users use formatting tricks to avoid detection. Others remove sound. But the things I’m watching come completely intact, and occasionally even feature modern-day ads in addition to retro ones. However, the buck has to stop somewhere.
That seems to be the case with YouTube’s recent attempt at rights moderation. While the site may contain hours of relatively ancient entertainment, it also features a host of jabronis who are using generative AI to create trailers for movies that haven’t been released yet (and, in some cases, don’t exist at all). You can’t spend more than two minutes on the site without being force-fed a steady diet of slop. According to Deadline, studios were okay with this at first, and even attempted to get money earned from it funneled into their pockets (ew).
Now, the tide has changed. Deadline reports that YouTube has closed the channels known as Screen Culture and KH Studio, two of the site’s biggest producers of terrible AI trailers. Apparently, in some instances, they were able to garner more views than the actual trailers they were ripping off. YouTube had initially suspended the two users’ abilities to have ads, but clearly realized that means dick all in terms of actual punishment. Instead, the channels have been removed, but the problem is far from over.
There are still plenty of terrible, wooden, uninteresting, multi-fingered trailers on YouTube. The screenshot in the header is from a fake Avengers Doomsday clip, and even at only a minute, it’s one of the most god-awful things I’ve ever seen. Unless YouTube institutes some kind of blocker that recognizes AI, a bunch of losers will still pump this garbage out. nd look, I’m not upset at what this may do to the pocketbooks of overpaid executives. I don’t like what it may do to media literacy (which is already struggling).
My kids are almost five years old. They don’t have unfettered access to any media, but I’ll let the streaming service they’re watching move to the next show sometimes, just so they see something new. YouTube is a different story. Its insane algorithm can end up sending you from Bluey to a video of Chucky’s head on a monster truck with spider legs that jumps up and down (true story). While my kids won’t have to deal with that nonsense, plenty of their friends are given YouTube like it’s water. They’re going to see these terrible AI videos at an alarming speed, and our future will be worse for it.
Two channels getting taken down is a good start, but more need to follow.
