AI: The Ultimate Intelligence Phaser. Zap. You Are Now Dumber Than Before the Zap
June 6, 2025
We need smart, genuine, and kind people so we can retain the positive aspects of humanity and move forward to a better future. It might be hard to connect the previous statement with a YouTube math channel, but it won’t be after you read BoingBoing’s story: “Popular Math YouTuber 3Blue1Brown Victimized By Malicious And Stupid AI Bots.”
We know that AI bots have consumed YouTube and are battling for domination of not only the video sharing platform, but all social media. Unfortunately these automated bots flagged a respected mathematics channel 3Blue1Brown, who makes awesome math animations and explanations. The 3Blue1Brown team makes math easier to understand for the rest of us dunderheads. 3Blue1Brown was hit with a strike. Grant Sanderson, the channel’s creator, said:
“I learned yesterday the video I made in 2017 explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down, and my channel received a copyright strike (despite it being 100% my own content). The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies" I could be wrong, but it sounds like there’s a decent chance this means some bot managed to convince YouTube’s bots that some re-upload of that video (of which there has been an incessant onslaught) was the original, and successfully issue the takedown and copyright strike request. It’s naturally a little worrying that it should be possible to use these tools to issue fake takedown requests, considering that it only takes 3 to delete an entire channel.”
Can we do a collective EEP?!
ChainPatrol.io is a notorious YouTube AI tool that patrols the platform. It “trolls” channels that make original content and hits them with “guilty until proven innocent” tags. It’s known for doing the opposite of this:
“ChainPatrol.io, the company whose system initiated the takedown, claims its "threat detection system makes use of advanced LLM scanning, image recognition, and proprietary models to detect brand impersonation and malicious actors targeting your organization.”
ChainPatol.io responded with a generic answer:
“Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at @ChainPatrol. We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again. We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through. We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it’s never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We’re very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.”
Helpful. Meanwhile Grant Sanderson and his fans have given ChainPatrol.io a digital cold shoulder.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2025
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