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Tiny microphones, fake podcast ads and AI videos are everything wrong with online videos
By Matt Reigle
Published July 15, 2026
It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for another edition of the biggest thing to happen to complaining since Yelp, The Gripe Report!
This week we're going to talk about videos.
There’s no denying that video is a major part of our lives. Gone are the days of three networks, and in its place is non-stop video being force-fed into our eye holes thanks to social media.
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Watching videos online is a pretty common thing for most of us, which means that there are bound to be some things that are almost universally annoying. (iStock)
However, there are certain things about videos that I see on social media and elsewhere that absolutely drive me up a wall.
You’ve probably seen these too, so consider this some form of group therapy session.
No, you’re not alone.
AI-generated videos can be cool, until you embarrass yourself by sharing one without realizing it's not real. (iStock)
Sending someone a video then realizing it’s AI
Social media is rife with AI video. Some of it’s cool. Like one of my favorite genres of social media video is AI clips meant to look like you’re eating at a Pizza Hut in 1998 or cruising through a mall in 1984.
It’s awesome, but I’m cool with it because I know it’s AI.
I recently sent my wife a video I saw of a French bulldog wearing some kind of dog life-preserver. I thought it was cool, until my wife was like, "Y’know that’s AI, right?"
I didn’t, and I felt a lot of shame (even though dogs wearing life-preservers in a pool is a wild thing to make with AI).
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Why does getting called out for not being able to suss out AI feel like getting pantsed on stage in front of your high school?
You wind up getting pinned with a scarlet A, which stands for "A-hole who doesn’t know something is AI when he sees it."
Unfortunately, the only way to really avoid this is to go in assuming that everything is AI — and therefore not real — which is really a strange, dystopian place to be.
But if that's what it takes to not look like some rube who doesn't know a phony clip when he sees it, I can deal with it.
Sir, for crying out loud, get a stick mic or clip that thing to your shirt. (iStock)
Tiny Microphones
I think the proverbial toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube on this one, but it still makes my eye twitch with rage every single time I see it.
If you watch some videos on social media, you are bound to see someone using a small lavalier microphone.
Those are supposed to be clipped to your clothing — often to one's lapel if you've got one — which is why they're sometimes referred to as lapel mics.
I know this sounds obvious as hell, but in the age of social media, I always see people holding them between their thumb and forefinger, and it drives me insane that no one just clips it to their clothes or just gets a regular-sized stick mic.
I don’t know why this triggers me, but it does, and I’ve spent more time thinking about this than I’d really care to admit.
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Why do people do this? Half the time they hold these mics with the clip still attached. Does it not occur to them that it should, y’know, be clipped to something?
And on top of that, I usually see people holding tiny mics like this up to other people's mouths, meaning their nasty fingers are just centimeters from the person's mouth.
How does nobody say, "Bro, get an adult-sized mic or get your fingers away from my face?"
I’ve kind of just concluded that, like a lot of things on the internet, people are just emulating what they’ve seen because the Internet doesn’t really reward creativity or proper mic technique.
Everyone jumping on the same trends.
This week, anytime I hopped on social media, my feed was full of people pretending they were sitting down to be interviewed for a Netflix documentary.
Why? Because that was the trend this week, and next week the same unoriginal dopes will be onto something else.
For some reason, people feel like they have to get in on every single trend ever, lest they… I’m not even sure. Cease to exist?
I just don’t like that following these trends means a complete lack of originality. You’re just copying someone who actually came up with something that was, when it started, unique or clever or funny.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the way things are created is by taking inspiration from the past.
Black Sabbath took elements of blues, made it scary, added more distortion, and — voila! — heavy metal.
There are examples of that everywhere, but it seems like more and more people just copy stuff directly.
Sure, social media rewards those who catch the wave that comes when something trends, but by the time people you went to high school with get on board, that wave has crashed on the beach.
So, let’s all agree to be more original.
Mostly so I don’t have to see dozens of versions of the same video over and over and over.
"What's up, guys? We're two dudes, and welcome to our very real, not just for marketing purposes podcast. Hey man, how about we get started with you telling me about that new app you used to help you save as much as 15% off your monthly car insurance payments..." (isto)
Commercials that pretend to be podcast clips
My wife and I watch a lot of what are called FAST, or "free ad-supported streaming TV" channels because we watch "I Love Lucy," "The Twilight Zone," and "Unsolved Mysteries" all day. We even leave it on for the dog when we leave.
Which is great except for the part where we also pay for cable… that kind of p—-s me off.
But FAST channels have a lot of weird ads because not too many people are watching the Universal Monsters channel at one in the afternoon on Wednesday unless they work from home, as we do here at Reigle Manor.
I’ve seen a lot of ads on there, but also on YouTube and social media, that are meant to look like clips from podcasts, but clearly aren’t because they’re talking about a brand of deodorant or a slot machine app in a very Madison Avenue way.
It’s always two random guys sitting in a studio, with one being like, "Dude, tell me about this new deodorant you’ve been using." Then the other guy is like, "Yeah, it’s called Dudebro, and it keeps my pits dry all day and destroys odor at the source by killing off 99.99% of funkigens and sealing your stink glands," or some other pseudoscientific line of BS.
What a terrible podcast that would be if it were real, which it isn’t.
Just get the message out. Why does it have to be on a make-believe podcast?
Is it because people like watching clips from podcasts? That’s true, but those are clips from real, entertaining (well, sometimes) podcasts, not two dudes with unplugged mics swapping deodorant war stories.
I’ve seen this bleed into network TV too.
There’s a personal injury attorney who advertises during the morning news that I watch, and I’m fascinated because he started doing commercials where he wears a "cool" shirt and sits behind a microphone and tells people to check out his podcast where he talks about ambulance chasing.
What fascinates me is that, from what I’ve found, that podcast just doesn’t exist outside of the 30-second clips that air on TV.
And I looked. Boy, did I look all over the place.
This is just the weirdest thing to me. It would be strange if a personal injury attorney or a deodorant company did a podcast, but it’s infinitely weirder when they pretend to do fake podcasts.
It’s kind of the same as people jumping on trends. They see something that’s popular, but don’t bother to unpack why it’s popular and reverse engineer it for their needs.
No, they just go, "Hey, Joe Rogan clips do some serious numbers, so let’s just copy that, and we’ll get a bunch of rubes to download our mobile slot machine game."
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That's it for this week!
Be sure to send in your gripes for a future edition of The Gripe Report!
https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-culture/tiny-microphones-fake-podcast-ads-ai-videos-everything-wrong-online-videos