It’s called proper lighting and camera work. It may be alien to you if you watch YouTube videos created by people that don’t use actual motion picture lights.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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All Things Tom Scott
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Its a completely normal well lit shot on a high end camera. Algos have been trained on stuff like this.
I was worried about this. People are used to shit phone cameras being their main idea of what a photo looks like, and are getting increased exposure to AI generated photos that look like professional ones versus exposure to actual professional photos. Soon people are going to incorrectly associate a lot of the hallmarks of good photography with it being faked
A few days ago on Lemmy a Photoshop that someone spent a lot of time on was accused of being AI.
Yeah, we seem to be approaching a point where people who can't do a thing, but know "AI" can "do" a thing, assume every instance is AI. I cannot understand the ego of such a position.
A side effect of LLM media brings into focus something it's basically obvious, but silently pushed to the back of the mind: media is manufactured.
Movies, tv series, influencers, content creators etc, it's all fake. In the sense that it's intentionally positioned to look in a certain way and have a desired effect.
LLMs imitate that fakeness, but because the program can't understand why it is how it is, the results bring the artificiality of it all into focus.
So I'd say you're not seeing the "AI", but rather plasticity of today's ultraprocessed media extracts.
LLM media
Just wanted to chime in that AI image generation is usually done using Diffusion Models, not LLMs.
I think if anything he's the last YouTuber I follow who I would expect to do something like that. He's always presented himself as someone with a lot of integrity which, whether that's genuine or not I don't know him, would be a massive departure to his established image, he's also been pretty sceptical about AI. It's also not like he's completely disappeared for the past two years, he's done his podcast and other collaborations, no evidence that he's massively shifted his values over that time. Can't really comment on the video quality itself, not much of a visual person really I tend not to notice this kind of stuff, but that's my "personal" interpretation, I think it's unlikely.
I think Tom has better standards than to use AI and not disclose, or use it at all.
The background looks a bit weird but it doesn't scream anything particularly to me. He's been away for a while, with enough time to change his entire video recording setup from what you may be used to.
As a joke, you may just not recognize Tom now that he's aged like fine wine.
To add to everything already said here, YouTube sometimes uses AI-based filters and/or compression, sometimes without creator's consent.
Isn't his new shit on Nebula?
Just for early access. He'll still post it on YouTube as well.
Idunno, I unsubscribed many years ago after he kept on shitting on FOSS devs and shilling Windows despite the obvious enshittification. But the interface here looks like youtube, so my guess it's on there
Can you tell me more about that? That doesn't sound like someone I'd want to follow.
It was in a couple of videos, the one I can remember right now is https://youtu.be/lIFE7h3m40U?t=294 (it's especially funny because you could do this entire project on Linux in a few lines of udev and a trivial actkbd config)
The other video was on some other channel, I can't find it right now. I don't remember the exact quote but the gist was "Linux is not a serious or usable OS", he just dismissed it outright. I'm generally ok with people shitting on Linux, but I remember that was particularly annoying and dismissive of both developers and users, especially so since he's a techy person.
He might have changed his stance since, but I've not been keeping up so I don't know 🤷
Dude, he plugged all 14 Keyboards and without touching a terminal it all worked. For customizing he ran a free software program. Again no terminal.
Your comment on udev and actkyb is exactly the reply he mocked.
I run Linux but for most people a computer isn't a lifestyle. And these videos are from 10 years ago.
Nope, it's just high production.
I think it's just an oddly grey set, with some unusual lighting.
The only thing that looks weird in this particular screenshot is the background, and that could be because he is in front of a green screen or using a shitty camera.
Maybe he got Botox or changed his makeup artist
No however he maybe using a background replacement.
I think it might just be a large table at an odd angle. The upright beam behind the table on the right is more in focus than the one on the left.