by Charles Miller

There are now quite a few very good implementations of AI chatbots, and for quite some time I have been urging readers to not think of all AI chatbots as being alike. There are in fact differences in how individual chatbots respond to the same query. That means you could be making a big mistake by not trying out the different chatbots to see the differences for yourself. Doing this revealed a mistake I had been making.

For quite some time it has been an annoyance to me that while surfing several popular online news sites that quite a few of the embedded videos would not play through my browser. I hope you understand that what I refer to is when a news story includes between paragraphs of text a link to a video, you are supposed to be able to click on the image to play a short snippet of video with sound. Frequently when I did that, my browser responded "This video cannot be played." When I copied the video address and manually went to that site, such as youtube.com, the video always played just fine.

That led me to conclude, mistakenly as it turned out, that youtube.com and other video sharing websites were deliberately blocking the news sites from being able to display youtube's videos. My erroneous conclusion was based in part on the fact that when embedded videos did play on the new web site they usually did so with no ads, but when I viewed the same videos by going to youtube.com the play was interrupted frequently by annoying ads that raised the volume to ear-shattering levels when playing the ads.

So recently I encountered a news story that featured not one but several embedded videos, some of which I could play and others not. Armed with the address of that page I went to my AI chatbot of choice to ask the following: "Examine the following web page and explain why the first video will play through my browser while the third video will not" then I listed the address.

The first AI chatbot answered "I can't access the specific URL to analyze the videos directly. However, there are common reasons…" Not satisfied with that non-answer, I copied and pasted the same question into another AI chatbot.

The second, AI chatbot Llama 4 Scout answered "I can't access the website directly, but I can provide general guidance on common issues that might cause …"

The third AI chatbot answered "I'm unable to directly access external URLs. However, I can guide you on how to troubleshoot the issue yourself."

The fourth, fifth, and sixth AI chatbot all provided equally useless responses. Then the response from "O4-mini" changed everything when it actually provided a substantive answer to my question.

O4-mini started off with "The top video is a straightforward HTML5 tag (or YouTube iframe) with no "muted" attribute or forced mute parameter…" then "The bottom video is embedded in such a way that the browser is explicitly or implicitly muting it by default." What followed that was page after page of detailed technical information explaining what the inept web designers had done wrong… and tacitly proving that I had been completely wrong to suspect that Youtube was blocking any of the news web sites. The information on how to fix the problem would have been helpful to the web site designers, but unfortunately this could not help me fix their problem.

The point of all this is to reiterate the potential benefit of trying different AI chatbots. Had I not taken the time to copy and paste the same question into several different AI chatbots I would never have discovered the truth about whether or not Youtube was engaging in online censorship. In this case Youtube was not guilty of doing that, and so they have my sincerest apologies for my believing otherwise.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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