A live robot film explores the unseen Youtube

‘What the Robot Saw’ is a live, continuously-generated, robot film, curated, analyzed and edited using computer vision, neural networks, and contrarian search algorithms.

The Robot curates clips from among the least viewed and subscribed YouTube videos uploaded in recent hours — videos that would be buried by YouTube’s engagement-centered ranking algorithms, which favor attention-grabbing content at the expense of less eye-catching, polished, search-optimized, stereotypically-aligned or sensational videos. As the Robot generates its film, it titles its subjects according to Amazon Rekognition’s demographically-obsessed algorithms.

‘What the Robot Saw’ is a non-commercial project by Amy Alexander.

See it on Twitch and at