The History Channel's Horrible AI Monster Show

Yeah, this is Billiam, and the History Channel recently brought back one of my guilty pleasures from childhood, Monster Quest. But this time, all of the Bigfoot werewolves, and now Goatmen, are AI generated. It looks horrible, and it does nothing to match the storytelling. Simply having Bigfoot walking in slow motion, out of focus, in shadow. The result is a boring, humorless show. Even Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot over 10 years earlier would have these ridiculous animated segments that were essential to draw the audience into the storytelling. It would match the witness descriptions no matter how absurd they were. Look at CGI Mothman from the original series. It's not some beacon of quality, but it's charming. But New Monster Quest Mothman is ugly and absolutely fails to live up to any image of this creature that has existed prior to it. And it's not even the first show on the History Channel to cut corners using AI. Which is really indicative of how little the History Channel cares about providing value to its viewership. The old show would even travel around the world, which aided its storytelling. When they're looking for the Loch Ness Monster, they get on a plane, go to Scotland, get on a boat, and get on that lake. But in the new show, they even use AI to build the locations they're visiting. So heavily relying on AI transforms the show from a fun, investigative format, to a series of nonsensical ghost stories. With each episode featuring four or five tales of cryptid, alien, and yes, ghost encounters. Adopting heavy use of generative AI is a natural progression of the channel's slow abandonment of anything resembling quality. So let's talk about this slop. Sometimes I have a monstrous schedule and when I need to cook a meal at home, it ends up looking like AI made it for me. 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Excuse me if I just eat this whole thing on camera. That's pretty darn good. So if you want to enjoy CookUnity's delicious meals, you can use my link in the description to get 50% off of your first week. Thanks to CookUnity. Now back to the video. The newest season of MonsterQuest is absolutely a lesser show than its predecessor. The bulk of its content comes from reenacting eyewitness accounts, which are mostly uninteresting. The best interview is with Joyce, who apparently saw a werewolf in 1977. I think I'm being stalked by a werewolf. Joyce absolutely crushes her story. She and her boyfriend found the werewolf's bed in a wheat field, and her boyfriend peed on it. This thing was thinking, oh, you messed up. Trying to mark my territory. The werewolf follows Joyce over several nights. It was the growl that froze me. It just sounded like pure evil. So she sleeps at her boyfriend's house, but it follows her there too, and it kills her boyfriend's dog. Oh my god. My dog is out there. King! She's emotional. She's doing sound effects. No one in this show makes me believe their story except for Joyce. Didn't think I'd die like this. And that's because her storytelling is so good. The reenactments themselves are completely forgettable. The werewolf is AI. Her house is AI. The werewolf's shadow on the walls are AI. And yes, the actual dog is AI. Instead of profiling one monster every episode, each episode features a loose theme, such as monster stories told by cops. The best way I can describe it is half man and half goat. The upper part of its body was that of human. Bottom half was that of a goat. Unfortunately, not a single goblin shows up. Because the sightings are the focus, the eyewitnesses add so many details to their stories, which highlights their lack of creativity. Like apparently an alien looked at this guy dead on and said, If I wanted to kill you, you would already be dead. I think he thinks he's living in a movie. It feels like AI has also written the eyewitness accounts. It's a deeply cliche and hollow show. The whole show just seems like it's supposed to be cut up into YouTube videos and TikToks to scare babies. The cop talks about seeing a goat man. He was driving and saw the goat man in his rearview mirror, then drove away. That's all there is to this story. We see an AI goat man in the AI rearview mirror, and they dedicate a quarter of the episode to it. I believe you. To me, the part of cryptozoology that's interesting isn't the quest for these creatures that probably don't exist. They're never going to find Bigfoot, and that's why the interesting part of it is the social phenomena. People truly believe they've seen these monsters, and the history of sightings across decades become local folklore. Name Sasquatch or Bigfoot. And sure, this new season of Monster Quest begins each story with newspaper clippings, but they quickly move on to the drawn out reenactments. In the original show, these reenactments would be so brief and often funny. Faye found herself face to face with a creature through a car window. Get down, you guys, get down! Faye told her younger siblings to hide. This woman from Papua New Guinea acts her heart out. The new show is mostly humorless with a few exceptions, and what's disappointing is they do have real actors on real sets. According to an interview with showrunner Jared MacGillard, Each recreation is like a movie based on someone's encounter. We hired actors, had big sets, lit up entire forests. It was a lot of fun. The goal was to take an elevated cinematic approach to transport the audience into the encounter as if they were there. So it's a shame that whatever effort they put into filming these reenactments are just completely undermined with the use of generative AI. It makes me feel like the real stuff they filmed is cheaper as well, and that's because it is cheaper. From the use of generative AI, it's obvious they were not given enough time and money to get insert shots, establishing shots, and enough coverage of the actors to actually build out a scene. They don't want to pay animators or the cast and crew. They don't want to pay a crew to visit locations. They don't want to pay local guides. They don't want to pay specialized experts to give interviews on anything they're talking about. They want to make and sell garbage. The original show had a balance of different kinds of storytelling, which included a 3D mock-up of the creature they were talking about. Seen in plain view, these were often the highlight for me as a kid. It brought me into the storytelling. When the monsters are created with generative AI and they are afraid to show them, it fails to have the same imaginative grip. I saw two scary gorilla-looking things. This is only exasperated by the fact that we're not profiling one creature in every episode. We're jumping all over the place, so you don't have time to become engrossed in the folklore. You're not actually traveling to these locations you're talking about, so how would I feel like I'm there? This vignette format has been used by a lot of different ghost shows, which makes sense to me because this season of MonsterQuest is no longer a cryptozoology show. Yes, they catalog every variety of Bigfoot along the way. You got the Ohio Grassman, the Folk Monster, Bigfoot, Skunk Ape. Incredibly muscular. And that spooked me. But it doesn't seem like they wanted to do another season of MonsterQuest. It seems like they wanted to do their own spin on Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America, which is also built entirely from reenactments and eyewitness accounts, but it's significantly more fun because it was campy. It had humor. Once the aliens started moving towards them, Hickson and Parker were gripped by a paralyzing force. But the generative AI images have no personality. If you want proof that AI inadvertently plagiarizes, take a look at the Falk Monster, which is undoubtedly sampling images from Godzilla and Kong. That's Scar King. I know Scar King. I walked down the toy aisle at Target. One episode is called Grave Encounters and is themed around ghosts and demon stories, including the story that inspired The Conjuring and Amityville Horror. These are the most overtold ghost stories ever, and MonsterQuest does nothing to add to it. The show just opts to use its regular cast of rotating narrators. Why do I care what an astrophysicist has to say about ghost stories? He sees something really frightening. It's interesting that he doesn't provide a skeptical perspective on any of this. Yes, the original show had one episode about ghosts and one episode about the Flatwoods Monster, which is depicted as an alien. Isolated, it doesn't bother me too much that MonsterQuest would cover ghosts or aliens, but there are so many other shows that cover these topics. Why does MonsterQuest have to do it? This is the Bigfoot show. It's about to get a whole lot worse. But then there's a story about time slips. People who just walk into different time periods by accident, and at random, I keep waiting for a monster to show up. Why is this here? This little girl's in her dad's house, and she looks outside and sees an AI tractor and her long dead AI uncle, who hunches over, AI dead, artificial and stupid. How did this slip into the show? To be fair, in this supposed episode revolving around ghosts, they do manage to slip in a Bigfoot and a skunk ape story. This woman tells of hearing a skunk ape attack. She and her mom were sleeping, and a skunk ape started hitting the camper. Then a bigger skunk ape approached the smaller skunk ape and started yelling at it. It's presumably her child. I could hear that he was being hit, and then I'd feel the jolt. All from the sound, the witness heard skunk ape hit its kid and drag it away. The skunk ape is out here beating its kid, and you want me to believe in it? Maybe if we all believed in skunk ape to begin with, skunk ape wouldn't have felt the need to hit its kid. Maybe that's the lesson we're supposed to learn here. Also from the TV Insider interview, the EP said the show was constructed to appeal to believers and skeptics alike, which is what the original show sought out to do. Yet New Monster Quest offers no skeptical perspective whatsoever. There's a guy who talks about seeing a genie. If somebody believes that, how do you offer a skeptical perspective? In addition to the new season, a digital exclusive series, Monster Quest Origins, has launched, which does try to focus more on the folklore. But even more so than the TV series, it over relies on AI images to an excessive degree. But missing from both is any attempt at trying to appear to have a historical, scientific, or skeptical perspective. Skeptic Sharon A. Hill on her blog reported host Sapphire Sandalow is a self-described occultist. The original Monster Quest pretended to have a balanced perspective, a skeptical perspective. So to figure out how we got here, let's talk about the original Monster Quest. But before that, I just wanted to give a shout out to our patrons, whose names are on screen now. Thank you so much for supporting us. Also, I launched a brand new YouTube channel with my girlfriend, Savannah. It's called Billy and Savannah, BS for short. We talk about very serious topics. Our newest video is all about alien conspiracies the internet has latched onto, which seem to originate from ancient aliens. It's a real fun time, so go check it out after this video. The link is in the description. So much of the production process makes the old show worth watching, even when you don't believe in the creatures. They're actually traveling to these locations to find these monsters, the Himalayas, Papa New Guinea, whatever. In the new show, there are no lake monsters, because there's no way they have a budget to rent out a boat and get out on the water. The traveling itself is visually interesting. It's essential for talking about local folklore. It gave the show a little bit of value. But nostalgia aside, the original Monster Quest was flawed in its own right. First airing before Ancient Aliens, it's sort of the precursor to the insanity the History Channel would become known for. He grabbed that and he drank the coffee can, ground and all. The beast ran off, likely looking for water. Especially in the nearly 20 episodes about Bigfoot-like creatures, the original Monster Quest offered very little skeptical perspective. Because they cover Bigfoot so many times, these episodes are often dedicated to the quest. Because the show has already haphazardly covered Bigfoot's folklore. Yes, someone on screen may doubt human-sized footprints actually belong to Bigfoot. To me, they fit proportionally into a human description. The foot's supposed to be bigger. But no one questions connecting unrelated Native American folklore, which describes things that look nothing like an ape man, to Bigfoot. Though the questing was occasionally fun, especially when they would look for real animals. They did a whole episode about the box jellyfish, which I watched in a marine biology class in high school. I distinctly remember the whole room gasping and cracking up every time the scenes transitioned with Bigfoot's eye. They also did an episode about invasive pythons in Florida, and giant hogs. Monster Quest is looking for giant hogs. The video assembly will be attached to a harness that will be fitted onto the hog. Things that were not necessarily cryptids, but took advantage of the show's format. Still, even these episodes would often fail to offer a scientific perspective. In 2007, in the third episode of Monster Quest, they arguably captured the very first video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat. Photo images were captured just a few years before, but the first video of a giant squid is not credited to Monster Quest. It's often credited to a Japanese team from 2012, in part because of how poorly Monster Quest presented the data captured. First off, in the episode, they're not even looking for a giant squid. They're looking for a giant variety of Humboldt squid, which is unknown to science. The lead diver on the episode, Scott Castle, designed the live camera rig using a Humboldt squid as bait to lure out the giant squid. But he distanced himself from the program, in part because he was not consulted for the hard facts the program presented, which resulted in poor estimations of the squid's size, which they said could possibly be over 100 feet long, which would make it the longest animal to ever have existed ever. Castle was not given the opportunity to analyze the footage himself before the show aired, but he still believes the footage to have captured a giant squid, though it's hard to tell for sure, as the video does not have any specific tells for the species visible. I can't comprehend this is a Humboldt, even I can't. The show also got simple facts wrong, such as the location of the dive. It says that their live Humboldt squid rig is what captured this footage, but it didn't work. And despite the intro saying that science searches for answers, their carelessness when they actually did find something interesting speaks to the disinterest the show actually had when it came to science. The show always humors the idea that these folklore creatures are actually real, which often inadvertently supports completely unscientific ideas. For example, cryptozoology has connections to young earth creationism, as many dinosaur-inspired cryptids are championed by young earth creationists such as William Gibbons, who searches for Maukele Mbembe, a supposed surviving sauropod in the Congo. And its appearance struck him with terror. It had a long neck. I was afraid and just run. The only part of the animal we saw was the head and the neck. Everything was shaking in the river. The sound that it made terrified the boy. At the time of the Monster Quest episode, Gibbons supposedly has been to Cameroon six times to look for this thing to prove that dinosaurs and humans live together, which he believes would verify the creation story told in the Bible. He presents himself as a hardened explorer, but when they travel into the jungle looking for footprints, he and the expedition team give up in what seems like a few minutes and spend the rest of the episode chilling in a boat. They spot an unusual fish floating in the water. Drunk like an elephant. They use sonar to measure the floor of the river, where they suspect the reportedly territorial creature is every odd shape they go over. That's a croc. May not even been a crocodile. No, there's so many strange animals in this river. It never comes out of the water. It may be territorial, but it's also very shy. They find the smallest cave ever. But Gibbons is like, no, this isn't where he lives. This is an air hole connected to the bigger cave where he really lives. In another episode, young Earth creationist Garth Gessman, who runs the Genesis Park website, which features images of dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, goes to Papua New Guinea to look for the ropin, a supposed pterosaur that glows in the dark. Or bioluminescence, meaning it is able to emit its own light. A pterosaur that glows in the dark is low-key sick. Like, that would be sick if that existed. I want that to be real just because of how sick it is. I've seen up to seven in the sky at once. And at no point does MonsterQuest take the time to explain that these supposed living dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles are behaviorally and visually based on outdated ideas by paleontologists. For decades, sauropods were incorrectly believed to be aquatic because of their size, and pterosaurs were incorrectly depicted with leathery, naked skin instead of insulating fur-like material. So these creatures have to be based on popular depiction of these animals, rather than the up-to-date data that we know about these animals. And I was just absolutely astonished at that time because this was a pterodactyl. And that's not a surprise because popular imagery can be used to describe a lot of cryptid sightings. Darren Nash's Hunting Monsters is still the best book on the subject and talks about how cryptozoology is fascinating from a cultural perspective. But one of my favorite citations in the book is about the Loch Ness Monster and how no one described it as looking like a plesiosaur until after 1933, the same year King Kong came out, which featured an image of a plesiosaur. If it were a real animal, eyewitness descriptions would be consistent instead of following popular imagery and pop culture. But this is not to say that MonsterQuest wouldn't often try to have a skeptical perspective. You see, sometimes cameras will capture this little streak across it and it seems to have multiple sets of wings and goes, like, faster than the speed of sound. And some of our smartest fellow human beings have figured out that these must be evidence of, like, interdimensional UFOs or interdimensional creatures. They are simply called rods. Watching the episode, knowing what rods actually are is kind of hilarious. Most of these rods are actually bugs flying very close to a camera lens. The rod shape is caused by a combination of shutter speed, interlaced footage, and rolling shutter, which often smears and duplicates a bug's wing and other parts of the bug's body. The show actually does a great job of demonstrating this phenomena, which really makes a lot of the talking heads look foolish. There's rods on your tape! Skeptics of the rods phenomenon said these strange images are likely birds or bugs. This is a great example of rods. It's a good example because, one, it's got rods. The best example of skepticism in the show is the final episode of its original run, America's Wolfman. Locals refer to the monster as the werewolf. I'm thinking, what in God's name is that? This is a great episode and illustrates why the original MonsterQuest could sometimes create value. They interview a local Michigan DJ, Steve Cook, who wrote a novelty song about Michigan's Dogman in the 1980s. A cool summer morning in early June is when the legend began. A creature he thought he made up for an April Fool's Day joke until locals started calling him claiming to have seen the real thing. Then the thing let out an unearthly scream and came out and stood upright. The show tracks this moment in pop culture which exasperated local sightings. Then we see the mysterious Gable film that supposedly shows the Dogman in a piece of footage shot in the 1970s. To me, that is so obvious that that is a guy in a suit. And they even have a video analysis expert come on and he's like, If indeed it was a human in a suit, they did a great job. But then they track down the creators of the footage who made it in the 2000s to post on the internet. A gruesome wore the costume himself. I was trying to be a werewolf. Leaving the sequences with the investigation team as a great study and how people can fool themselves into seeing monsters once it's suggested to them monsters exist. I feel like that's the format MonsterQuest should have taken. It opens the door to examine a much more interesting cultural phenomena when you approach it that way. But this attempt to have a skeptical perspective is completely abandoned by the new show. Cutting out the skeptical perspective cuts corners just like using the AI imagery cuts corners. I am skeptical that anybody who uses generative AI to create something is actually trying to provide value of any kind to viewers. And the lack of value is what makes the new season of MonsterQuest one of the worst paranormal shows on TV. But what's funny is back in 2010, History Channel cancelled MonsterQuest even though the viewership was there and even though they had plenty of more topics to explore. It was cancelled because the History Channel thought it damaged their brand. And then Ancient Aliens became the most popular show on the channel. Now it's most popular shows are things like The Curse of Oak Island which is about two guys looking for a treasure that probably doesn't exist. And The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch about an interdimensional ranch that might have connections to time-traveling UFOs and like time-traveling wolves and stuff. Time-traveling wolves. It's all slop. But this newest season of MonsterQuest is the sloppiest of them all. And as always, see ya. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to check out my new channel, Billion Savannah. BS for short. We're really proud of what we're making over there. So go and subscribe. And you can subscribe here. Thanks. See ya.