PBS uploaded the video of Kirk's wife eulogy and the thumbnail was her smiling and people, including myself chocked this up to PBS being propogandist scumbags.

I did an experiment and downloaded their video and uploaded it, and these were the AI auto generated picks.

The thing about auto youtube thumbnails is they almost always pick happy faces over sad faces because in general people will click a happy attractive face over a sad face.

As someone who's uploaded videos to Youtube, youtube's auto thumbnails almost always go for moments where smiling happens because it's "good for the algorithim"

Those were the only 3 choices I was given without having to create a custom thumbnail.

Since PBS news uploads like 10 videos a day, and their videos are just news, they go with whatever the auto thumbnail is over custom thumbnails. The majority of their videos are just screenshots from the video itself. On their channel they rarely use a custom thumbnail.

PBS uploaded the video of Kirk's wife smiling and people, including myself chocked this up to PBS being propogandist scumbags.

I did an experiment and downloaded their video and uploaded it, and these were the AI auto generated picks.

The thing about auto youtube thumbnails is they almost always pick happy faces over sad faces because in general people will click a happy attractive face over a sad face.

As someone who's uploaded videos to Youtube, youtube's auto thumbnails almost always go for moments where smiling happens because it's "good for the algorithim"

Those were the only 3 choices I was given without having to create a custom thumbnail.

Since PBS news uploads like 10 videos a day, and their videos are just news, they go with whatever the auto thumbnail is over custom thumbnails. The majority of their videos are just screenshots from the video itself. On their channel they rarely use a custom thumbnail.