The AI is not paying for watching videos yet

Indeed, it's the advertisers who are paying for AI to watch videos....

And paying for my sofa to watch a unskippable 50s ad while I make a coffee.

Back in the day when everyone used to watch broadcast TV, and stations synchronised their add breaks, water consumption would spike with every add break.

The UK has a unique problem with demand spikes for electricity during commercial breaks, due to the British penchant for using high-power electric kettles to make tea. In the worst case, demand could rise and fall by gigawatts within a matter of minutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA

Google already invests a tremendous amount of resources into identifying and preventing fraudulent ad impressions -- I don't see that changing much until AI is so cheap that it makes sense to run a full agent for pennies per hour. Sadly.

Not talking about fraud per se - in the sense of trying to drive revenue for a particular video channel - just that if you wanted to train AI on youtube videos you are in effect getting the advertisers to pay for the serving of them.

Perhaps the difference here is the behaviour would be much more human and thus harder to detect using current fraud detection?

Yes it will. Soon humans will be the minority on the internet. I wrote some guesses about this 2 years ago: https://art.cx/blog/12-08-22-city-of-bots