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YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

296 points by jakub_g 1y ago

jszymborski 1y ago
So I feel like article doesn't address the "why" of it all. Why auto AI upscale?
- fcpguru 1y ago
  Boost visual quality, which improve viewer retention. So, money. I've tried many times to get a short with retention > 90% that is, 90% of viewers watch all the way to end. That's the key to going super viral. Very hard to do. I've had many shorts get around 75% and about 1k views but then die. Maybe I need some AI!
  - avasan 1y ago
    Is the visual quality really boosted? It seems to give a very distinctive, almost uncanny-valley look to the video.
  - tovej 1y ago
    AI upscale does not improve quality imo, I'd much prefer to watch grainy vhs originals to AI upscaled ones that insert weird shapes in the image. This is especially bad in animation, where the art gets visibly distorted.
    - justsomehnguy 1y ago
      There are people out there who can vote and can (sometimes) buy and drink alcohol and who never used VHS in any capacity. And a new generation what is trained on a constantly enabled face filters and 'AI'-upscaled slop is already here.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > Boost visual quality So to make edible stuff from shit.
- pier25 1y ago
  Probably to reduce storage costs
  - avasan 1y ago
    But the upscaling isn't applied live/on viewing, right? The video being upscaled is still stored on their server and then streamed. How does it reduce storage costs?
    - pier25 1y ago
      Do you know that for a fact? Maybe Google has done the math and realized it's cheaper to upscale in realtime than store videos at high resolution forever. Wouldn't surprise me considering the number of shorts is probably growing exponentially.
      - artemisart 1y ago
        The economics don't make sense, each video is stored ~ once (+ replication etc. but let's say O(1)) but viewed n times, so server-side upscaling on the fly is way too costly and currently not good enough client-side.
        pier25 1y ago
        Are you considering that the video needs to be stored for potentially decades? Also shorts seem to be increasing exponentially... but Youtube viewership is not. So compute wouldn't need to increase as fast as storage. I obviously don't know the numbers. Just saying that it could be a good reason why Youtube is doing this AI upscaling. I really don't see why otherwise. There's no improvement in image quality, quite the contrary.
- josefx 1y ago
  Perceived quality? They tried to pull an "everything 4k@60Hz" for their 360p@30Hz low poly Stadia content as well.
- therein 1y ago
  To make people more accustomed to the AI generated look so that when they release their next Veo integration to YouTube content creator tools, these videos will stand out less as unnatural.
  - antiloper 1y ago
    There's also the on-by default, can't be disabled, auto-dubbing YouTube performs on every video that's not in the single browser's language. The dubbing quality is poor for the same reason, to intentionally expose viewers to AI content. It's 100% a push to remove human creators from the equation entirely.
    - anal_reactor 1y ago
      That's exactly it. All social media platforms are experimenting with replacing humans with AI.
  - Maken 1y ago
    Sadly, this is a real possibility. I would even conjecture they are testing a new pipeline, in which the input is real videos and the output are AI-generated. For now it's a kind of autoencoding, regenerating the same input video with minimal changes. They will refine the pipeline until the end video is indistinguishable from the original. Then, once that is perfected, they will offer famous content creators the chance to sell their "image" to other creators, so less popular underpaid creators can record videos and change their appearance to those of famous ones, making each content creator a brand to be sold. Eventually humans will get out of the pipeline and everything will be autogenerated, of course.
    - artemisart 1y ago
      > Then, once that is perfected, they will offer famous content creators the chance to sell their "image" to other creators, so less popular underpaid creators can record videos and change their appearance to those of famous ones, making each content creator a brand to be sold. I'm frightened by how realistic this sounds.
- hleszek 1y ago
  Maybe it's to make it more difficult to train AI video models from YouTube. Think about it, they have the raw footage so could use it if they want, but competitors using scrapers will have slightly distorted video sources.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Here's how I imagine it went:- 1. See that AI upscaling works kinda well on certain illustrations. 2. Start a project to see if you can do the same with video. 3. Develop 15 different quality metrics, trying to capture what it means when "it looks a bit fake" 4. Project's results aren't very good, but it's embarrassing to admit failure. 5. Choose a metric which went up, declare victory, put it live in production.
- flatb 1y ago
  I can’t think of a more dislike-able company than YouTube. I used to love youtube and watch it everyday and it would make me a happier, smarter person. Now youtube’s impact on their users is entirely negative and really the company needs to be destroyed. But they won’t be because they are now evil, and evil is profitable.
lolc 1y ago
> "You know, YouTube is constantly working on new tools and experimenting with stuff," Beato says. "They're a best-in-class company, I've got nothing but good things to say. YouTube changed my life." My despondent brain auto-translated that to: "My livelihood depends on Youtube"
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  xkcd 2015 closer than you think due to the magical technology of money https://xkcd.com/2015/ https://xkcd.com/2015/
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - yogorenapan 1y ago
    Wow, that xkcd really scares me. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It's definitely something that could realistically happen in the near future, maybe even mandated by the EU
    - Dilettante_ 1y ago
      Google People[1] vibes [1]https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
      - sixothree 1y ago
        What am I looking at? Is this a transcript of a real thread formatted in a flat manner? Or is this fiction?
        Dilettante_ 1y ago
        What I want to say for fun is: "Oooohhhh who knooowsss?" But serious discussion demands the truth: It is fiction, in the style of a twitter thread.
mcv 1y ago
I've noticed this for a while, when I accidentally click on YouTube Shorts. (I want to avoid it, because it's brain rot, but YouTube keeps enabling it and pushes it hard in notifications). It's most glaringly obvious in TV shows. Scenes from The Big Bang Theory look like someone clumsily tries to paint over the scenes with oil paint. It's as if the actors are wearing an inch thick layer of poorly applied makeup. It's far less glaring in Rick Beato's videos, but it's there if you pay attention. Jill Bearup wanted to see how bad it could get and reuploaded the "enhanced" videos a hundred times over until it became a horrifying mess of artifacts. The question remains why YouTube would do this, and the only answers I can come up with are "because they can" and "they want to brainwash us into accepting uncanny valley AI slop as real".
- freilanzer 1y ago
  > It's most glaringly obvious in TV shows. Scenes from The Big Bang Theory look like someone clumsily tries to paint over the scenes with oil paint. It's as if the actors are wearing an inch thick layer of poorly applied makeup. This might be the uploaders doing to avoid copyright strikes.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    It's 100% this
- moi2388 1y ago
  There are shorts blocker addons available.
Springtime 1y ago
Youtube says this was done for select Youtube Shorts as a denoising process. However most popular channels on Youtube, which seem to be the pool selected for this experiment, typically already have well lit and graded videos shouldn't benefit much from extra denoising from a visual point of view. It's true though that aggressive denoising gives things an artificially generated look since both processes use denoising heavily. Perhaps this was done to optimize video encoding, since the less noise/surface detail there is the easier it is to compress.
- djmips 1y ago
  If we take them at their word then it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy.
  - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    > it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy. The controversy is that YouTube is making strange changes to the videos of users, that make the videos look fake. YouTube creators put hours upon hours on writing, shooting and editing their videos. And those that do it full time often depend on YouTube and their audience for income. If YouTube messes up the videos of creators and makes the videos look like they are fake, of course the creators are gonna be upset!
    - cma 1y ago
      It might be for making them compress better and be more likely to not buffer when you swipe up/preload more, like Tiktok serving them unencrypted to be more likely to be in a local cache for the ISP.
- alex1138 1y ago
  Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?
  - 1y ago
ollysb 1y ago
I've seem some game of thrones clips recently in youtube shorts which looked like they'd been generated by ai. I couldn't understand why anyone would have done that to the original good looking material. The only thing I could think was that it was some kind of copyright evasion.
- pnt12 1y ago
  As a fan of the early seasons, I get lots of suggestions for Got clips. I assume that's done by the author to get around copy right blocks. Quite often they also add music, which would make it easier to get around sound detection. I haven't noticed it outside copyrighted material, so it's probably intentional.
  - pixxel 1y ago
    [dead]
- Gigachad 1y ago
  The most charitable interpretation is it’s a very aggressive form of video compression. Denoising to reduce data and speed up video loads.
watwut 1y ago
Now to that stupid robot auto translation on non-english videos I never asked for and can not turn off.
- roelschroeven 1y ago
  Those translations are not only unwanted but also ridiculously bad (which is part of the reason why they're unwanted, I guess). I have to translate back to the original English, as far as that's even possible, to get an idea of what the video might be about. Who in his right mind thought this was a good idea?? I have a Firefox extension which tries to suppress the translations, but it only works for the main view, not for videos in the sidebar. It's better than nothing.
- jakub_g 1y ago
  The "can not turn off" part is the most jarring. Seriously, did none of Californian PMs hear about the concept of "being multilingual" and not needing to translate non-English content? --- By the way, this reminds me also of another stupid Google thing related to languages: Say your Chrome is set to English. When encountering another language page, Chrome will (since a decade ago or so) helpfully ask you to auto-translate by default. When you click a button "Never translate <language>", it will add language to the list which is sent out to every HTTP request the browser makes via `Accept-Language` header (it's not obvious this happens unless you're the kind of person who lives in DevTools and inspects outgoing traffic). Fast-forward N years, Chrome privacy team realizes this increases fingerprinting surface, making every user less unique, so they propose this: "Reduce fingerprinting in Accept-Language header information" (https://chromestatus.com/feature/5188040623390720 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5188040623390720) So basically they compensate for one "feature" with another, instead of not doing the first thing in the first place.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
    "Złomnik: Dodge Caravan Is a Large Wall Unit"
    - meindnoch 1y ago
chinathrow 1y ago
> YouTube did not respond to the BBC's questions about whether users will be given a choice about AI tweaking their videos. Says everything. Hey PM at YouTube: How about you think stuff through before even starting to waste time on stuff like this?
- rschiavone 1y ago
  They turned their brains off many years ago. Now it's all about AI, showing ads down our throats and keep children hooked to their iPads.
- vaenaes 1y ago
  [dead]
- npteljes 1y ago
  >How about you think stuff through before even starting to waste time on stuff like this? What makes you think they don't think it through? This effect is an experiment that they are running. It seems to be useless, unwanted from our perspective, but what if they find that it increases engagement?
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    Someone at google needs this promotion to feel like a real man
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      I think it's more the case that in today's Google, you need that promotion to stay employed.
      - uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
        seems to be the reason they go through UI changes every year or so. like agh, there goes my muscle memory again. at least ol' reliable hn is still the same good old plain renderable-by-anything-more-advanced-than-a-toaster html
anthonj 1y ago
I going to say something controversial, bu why is this even surprising? Google and YouTube have been framing themself as the kind company that will appropriate your work and make make money out of you. "You are the product" is a repeated endlessy even on social media, and this it thier private paltform after all. At this point getting involved with youtube is just the usual naive behaviour that somehow you are the exception and bad things won't happen to you.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Isn't this similar to what e.g. Instagram and co have done for ages? Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras.
- Frieren 1y ago
  > Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras. The level of post-processing matters. There is a difference between color grading an image and removing wrinkles from a face. The line is not cut clear but these companies are pushing the boundaries so we get used to fake imagery. That is not good.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >There is a difference between color grading an image and removing wrinkles from a face. You're implying the latter doesn't happen normally but denoising (which basically every smartphone camera does) often has the effect of removing details like wrinkles. The effect is especially pronounced in low light settings, where noise is the highest.
    - Frieren 1y ago
      > but denoising (which basically every smartphone camera does) often has the effect of removing details like wrinkles. I do not get the argument of "if nothing happens when an ant bites you then I can shot you with a cannon be cause it is the same thing just larger". The impact on society matters for me, and it is very different. Justifying AI at any cost is a marketing strategy that will hurt us long-term.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >I do not get the argument of "if nothing happens when an ant bites you then I can shot you with a cannon be cause it is the same thing just larger". this argument fails because at least in the examples provided, it's closer to the non-gen ai denoising/upscaling algorithms than telling chatgpt to upscale an image. >The impact on society matters for me, and it is very different. Justifying AI at any cost is a marketing strategy that will hurt us long-term. There's no indication it's AI, except some vague references to "machine learning".
dpassens 1y ago
This is getting into conspiracy territory but my personal assumption that they're trying to gaslight people into thinking that these weird AI artifacts are just how videos work, so that it's harder to distinguish between real videos and AI generated ones.
RicoElectrico 1y ago
How about they turn off their recent asinine title translation feature? Now every creator has to opt out of it manually - and the users have no recourse short of browser extensions.
torben-friis 1y ago
The recent sinking in quality of youtube as a platform has been awful to watch. Just a couple days ago I got an ad with a Ned Flanders singing about the causes of erectyle dysfunction (!), a huge cocktail of copyright infringement, dangerous medical advice and AI generated slop. Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong. The constant low quality, extremely intertwined ads start to remind me of those of shady forums and porn pages of the nineties. I'm expecting them to start advertising heroine now they've decided short term profits trump everything else.
- uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
  you'd think that by a certain point youtube ads would've been regulated/managed just like ads on tv channels.. it made sense not do to it that way when the platform was in its infancy, but nowadays almost every news channel is on youtube and the platform has the kind of money to manage ad spaces the same way or similar to the way television used to. whether that's the right method of doing it.. there'll probably be some objections to going back to that way of dealing with ads but a new system is needed because allowing instant adsense deployment to the entirety of youtube without any checks to make sure there's no inappropriate material, copyright infringement or scams isn't working out that well
- rchaud 1y ago
  > Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong. In other words, their Google Ads account is fully paid up. Copyright infringement only matters if you're a lowly uploader.
metalman 1y ago
what it boils down to is that "enhancement" is one more pilon to swerve around in the ongoing persuit of reality. given the overwhelming volume of media it's easy enough to modify ones asthetic monitoring and scan to simply ignore anything suspicious, or if it gets too bad, back right off
npteljes 1y ago
Unfortunately the article doesn't have an example, or a comparison image. Other reports are similarly useless as well. The most that seemed to happen is that the wrinkles in someone's ear changed. In case anyone else wants to see it in action: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_shorts_are_almost_certainly_being_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_sh... I skimmed the videos as well, and there is much more talk about this thing, and barely any examples of it. As this is an experiment, I guess that all this noise serves as a feedback to YouTube.
- whamlastxmas 1y ago
  ‘Member journalism? When any effort was actually made for news articles?
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Rare to come by, that's for sure. Although, I'm not incentivizing them either.
  - nmeofthestate 1y ago
    IME this is a long-standing thing - failing to include visuals for inherently visual news stories. They're geared towards text news stories for whatever reason.
- nmeofthestate 1y ago
  If you click through to Rhett Schul's (sp?) video you can see examples comparing the original video (from non-Shorts videos) with the sharpened video (from Shorts). Basically YouTube is applying a sharpening filter to "Shorts" videos.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    This makes sense. Saying YT is applying AI to every single video uploaded would be a huge WTF kind of situation. Saying that YT has created a workflow utilizing AI to create a new video from the creator's original video to fit a specific type of video format that they want to promote even when most creators are NOT creating that format makes much more sense. Pretty much every short I've seen was a portrait crop from something that was obviously originally landscape orientation. Do these videos that YT creates to backfill their lack of Shorts get credited back to the original creator as far as monetization from ads? This really has a feel of the delivery apps making websites for the restaurants that did not previously have one without the restaurant knowing anything about it while setting higher prices on the menu items while keeping that extra money instead of paying the restaurants the extra.
hulitu 1y ago
> YouTube made AI enhancements This is a contradiction in terms.
hliyan 1y ago
A chill ran down my spine as I imagined this being applied to the written word online: my articles being automatically "corrected" or "improved" the moment I hit publish, any book manuscripts being sent to editors being similarly "polished" to a point that we humans start to lose our unique tone and everything we read falls into that strange uncanny valley where everything reads ok, you can't quite put your finger on it, but it feels like something is wearing the skin of what you wrote as a face.
- anon191928 1y ago
  Maybe it's time for people to realize that you create product inside a product. Those T&S didnt write themselves. Not defending them. This is what tech bros in SV built and they all love it.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  The only way to know for sure that something was written by a human: It contains racism, or any other opinion AIs are forbidden to express. Now imagine the near future of the Internet, when all people have to adapt to that in order to not be dismissed as AI.
  - delecti 1y ago
    Most of the big LLMs have those restrictions, but not all.
  - tempodox 1y ago
    How naive. Grok generates racism as a service, and Elon does his best to tune it that way.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      Well then we will have to fucking swear in everything we fucking write, to identify ourselves as humans, since AI doesn't like nasty language. And we should also insult other participants, since AI will almost never take an aggressive stance against people it is conversing with, you god damned piece of shit.
viktorcode 1y ago
We can relax; it's only about YouTube shorts
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  For now.
yk 1y ago
Reminder, there is no cloud, there is just computers of other people. And I for one support those other people's right to do on their computers what they want.
Planktonne 1y ago
If AI is as wonderful and world-changing as people claim, it's odd that it's being inserted into products exactly like every other solution in search of a problem.
- brookst 1y ago
  Would you say the same thing about the internet?
  - Planktonne 1y ago
    People voluntarily visit the internet because it gives them things they want. This is an article about unwelcome changes being automatically made. Those things are different.
    - varelse 1y ago
      [dead]
  - Yossarrian22 1y ago
    In the 90s? Sure, Pets.com was a solution in search of a problem. Same with any Uber for dog sitters or whatever from the 10s.
  - rurp 1y ago
    If it's being added to a toaster for no good reason, sure. But the internet as a whole, through a browser? That's not comparable, people explicitly seek it out when they want to.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    Yeah I would, if "Internet" came with zero safeguards or regulations and corporations put the onus on the user to sift through mountains of spam or mitigate credit card leakage risks when buying something online.
Waterluvian 1y ago
Last week I went to buy a Philip K Dick eBook while on vacation. It was only $2 and my immediate thought was, “what are the odds this is some weird pirated version that’s full of errors? What if it’s some American version that’s been self-censored by Amazon to be approved by the government? What if it’s been AI enhanced in some way?” Just the consideration of these possibilities was enough to shake the authenticity of my reality. Even more unsettling is when I contemplate what could be done about data authenticity. There are some fairly useful practical answers such as an author sharing the official checksum for a book. But, ultimately, authenticity is a fleeting quality and I can’t stop time.
- thisisauserid 1y ago
  You're obviously reading way too much Philip K Dick. You need to make it more about personal identity crisis though, not just reality in general.
  - Waterluvian 1y ago
    Alas, in this economy I cannot afford drug-induced paranoia.
- akomtu 1y ago
  Authenticity can be proven by saying things that upsets censors. For example, if I mention the Tiananmen square, you can be sure my comment wasn't edited by CCP's LLMs.
bgwalter 1y ago
I suppose we should fire up those "AI" browsers and let them loose on YouTube in a while loop. They are just the right audience for "AI" enhanced content and YouTube's advertisers will be thrilled.
blinding-streak 1y ago
When you upload a video to YT, it's heavily compressed. Your pristine creation is converted 10 ways to Sunday, which then can be played back in a variety of formats, speeds, and platforms. Long before you even uploaded that video, for free, to give the world the chance to see your creative genius, you agreed to this process, by agreeing to Youtube's T&C's. People may be upset, and I get that. But it's not like the videos were in their original format anyway. If you want to maintain perfect video fidelity, you wouldn't choose YouTube. You chose YouTube because it's the path of least resistance. You wanted massive reach and a dead simple monetization route.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Exactly this. The only reason video works at all is because the machine is trying to make changes to it that it doesn't think humans will notice.
- layer8 1y ago
  People are upset by visible or audible compression just the same.
- therobots927 1y ago
  Compression doesnt put words in your mouth. Do you honestly think they're the same thing or are you just being pedantic on purpose?
  - blinding-streak 1y ago
    I think you need to re-read the article.
floppyd 1y ago
AI fearmongering probably produces a lot of clicks if upscaling gets labeled as "might bend reality". YT shouldn't just be doing it without user's input, but pearl clutching is unproportiona.
jeffbee 1y ago
Re: "without warning or permission". The YouTube Terms of Use require you to grant YouTube the (perpetual, worldwide, etc) right to prepare derivative works.
crazygringo 1y ago
From the linked tweet from YouTube's head of editorial: "No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)" https://x.com/youtubeinsider/status/1958199532363317467?s=46 https://x.com/youtubeinsider/status/1958199532363317467?s=46 Considering how aggressive YouTube is with video compression anyways (which smooths your face and makes it blocky), this doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it overprocesses in some cases, but it's also an "experiment" they're testing on only a fraction of videos. I watched the comparisons from the first video and the only difference I see is in resolution -- he compares the guitar video uploaded to YT vs IG, and the YT one is sharper. But for all we know the IG one is lower resolution, that's all it looks like to me.
- CodingJeebus 1y ago
  This is an absolutely huge deal. It doesn't matter how small the scope of the change is, they thought it was a good idea to apply mandatory AI post-processing to user content without consent or acknowledgement. Secret experiments are never meant to be little one-offs, they're always carried out with the goal of executing a larger vision. If they cared about user input, they'd make this a configurable setting.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Again, this isn't GenAI. The idea of it being "without consent" is absurd. Your phone doesn't ask you for consent to apply smoothing to the Bayer filter, or denoising to your zoom. Sites don't ask you for consent to recompress your video. This is just computational image processing. Phones have been doing this stuff for many years now. This isn't adding new elements to a video. It's not adding body parts or changing people's words or inventing backgrounds or anything. And "experiments" are just A/B testing. If it increases engagement, they roll it out more broadly. If it doesn't, they get rid of it.
    - giantrobot 1y ago
dmix 1y ago
> And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup Those AI skin enhancement filters are always terrible. Especially on men. Crazy they'd try it automatically. This isn't like the vocal boosting audio EQing they do without asking. Google must have some questionable product management teams these days if they are pushing out this stuff without configuration. Probably trying to A/B it for interal data to justify it before facing the usual anti-AI backlash crowd when going public.
sota_pop 1y ago
It was purely luck of the context that I noticed, but I received an email notification that someone had messaged me on LinkedIn via my gmail account. When this happens, the email contains the message contents. However, in this case the message contents did not match between the version within LinkedIn and the version presented in the email. Only two words were different, but that slight change made it even more peculiar and unsettling.
- salt4034 1y ago
  Maybe the sender edited the LinkedIn message? The email shows the original version, before the user edits.
shadowgovt 1y ago
As with so many mistakes Google makes, this is letting the technical people front-run an interaction that should have been spearheaded by the social people. From a technical standpoint, it's easy to think of AI-based cleanup as in the same category as "improving the compression algorithm" or "improving the throughput to the client": just a technically-mediated improvement. But people have a subjectively-different reaction between decreasing instances of bandwidth-related pixelation and making faces baby-smooth, and anyone on the community side of things could have told the team responsible (if they'd known about it). Sometimes Google's tech-expert-driven-company approach has negative consequences.
felineflock 1y ago
YouTube has responded: > We hear you, and want to clear things up! This is from an experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning – not GenAI. More info from @YouTubeInsider here: > No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video) > YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1958286550229541158 https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1958286550229541158
- corytheboyd 1y ago
  All of which is pretty reasonable, especially for shorts, which are meant to be thrown directly in the trash after being used to collect some ad revenue anyway, right?
- RankingMember 1y ago
  Love the "[company] is always working on ways to provide the best..." that's always in these explanations, like "you actually just caught us doing something good! You're welcome!"
- netdur 1y ago
  This outrage feels odd, TV has "improved" movies for ages, youtube doing it with machine learning is the same idea, are we really upset because an ear looks a bit clearer?
  - rurp 1y ago
    No, people are upset because Youtube is editing their content without telling them. If they really thought this was a high value add they could have added an enhance button to let creators opt in, as has been done elsewhere. I wouldn't like it if HN started "optimizing" the wording my comments without telling me, even if it made them better along some metric.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
iamleppert 1y ago
It's obvious and clear that Google's end game is to completely replace the creator, and auto-generate all their videos. How far off we are from this, no one knows, probably not that far. Google likely already has all the data they need, it's now just about how long it will take to develop the AI.
eqvinox 1y ago
This was the last drip in an almost-full bucket for me & I finally made the jump to "disable" YouTube on my phone. And, honestly, my mental health improved a bit. Rarely still pull up YT on laptop, but that's a different use pattern than on phone. (I don't have any other YouTube-like on my phone, particularly no TikTok. Actually started reading more books instead.)

296 points by jakub_g 1y ago

jszymborski 1y ago

So I feel like article doesn't address the "why" of it all. Why auto AI upscale?

fcpguru 1y ago
Boost visual quality, which improve viewer retention. So, money. I've tried many times to get a short with retention > 90% that is, 90% of viewers watch all the way to end. That's the key to going super viral. Very hard to do. I've had many shorts get around 75% and about 1k views but then die. Maybe I need some AI!
- avasan 1y ago
  Is the visual quality really boosted? It seems to give a very distinctive, almost uncanny-valley look to the video.
- tovej 1y ago
  AI upscale does not improve quality imo, I'd much prefer to watch grainy vhs originals to AI upscaled ones that insert weird shapes in the image. This is especially bad in animation, where the art gets visibly distorted.
  - justsomehnguy 1y ago
    There are people out there who can vote and can (sometimes) buy and drink alcohol and who never used VHS in any capacity. And a new generation what is trained on a constantly enabled face filters and 'AI'-upscaled slop is already here.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Boost visual quality So to make edible stuff from shit.
pier25 1y ago
Probably to reduce storage costs
- avasan 1y ago
  But the upscaling isn't applied live/on viewing, right? The video being upscaled is still stored on their server and then streamed. How does it reduce storage costs?
  - pier25 1y ago
    Do you know that for a fact? Maybe Google has done the math and realized it's cheaper to upscale in realtime than store videos at high resolution forever. Wouldn't surprise me considering the number of shorts is probably growing exponentially.
    - artemisart 1y ago
      The economics don't make sense, each video is stored ~ once (+ replication etc. but let's say O(1)) but viewed n times, so server-side upscaling on the fly is way too costly and currently not good enough client-side.
      - pier25 1y ago
        Are you considering that the video needs to be stored for potentially decades? Also shorts seem to be increasing exponentially... but Youtube viewership is not. So compute wouldn't need to increase as fast as storage. I obviously don't know the numbers. Just saying that it could be a good reason why Youtube is doing this AI upscaling. I really don't see why otherwise. There's no improvement in image quality, quite the contrary.
josefx 1y ago
Perceived quality? They tried to pull an "everything 4k@60Hz" for their 360p@30Hz low poly Stadia content as well.
therein 1y ago
To make people more accustomed to the AI generated look so that when they release their next Veo integration to YouTube content creator tools, these videos will stand out less as unnatural.
- antiloper 1y ago
  There's also the on-by default, can't be disabled, auto-dubbing YouTube performs on every video that's not in the single browser's language. The dubbing quality is poor for the same reason, to intentionally expose viewers to AI content. It's 100% a push to remove human creators from the equation entirely.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    That's exactly it. All social media platforms are experimenting with replacing humans with AI.
- Maken 1y ago
  Sadly, this is a real possibility. I would even conjecture they are testing a new pipeline, in which the input is real videos and the output are AI-generated. For now it's a kind of autoencoding, regenerating the same input video with minimal changes. They will refine the pipeline until the end video is indistinguishable from the original. Then, once that is perfected, they will offer famous content creators the chance to sell their "image" to other creators, so less popular underpaid creators can record videos and change their appearance to those of famous ones, making each content creator a brand to be sold. Eventually humans will get out of the pipeline and everything will be autogenerated, of course.
  - artemisart 1y ago
    > Then, once that is perfected, they will offer famous content creators the chance to sell their "image" to other creators, so less popular underpaid creators can record videos and change their appearance to those of famous ones, making each content creator a brand to be sold. I'm frightened by how realistic this sounds.
hleszek 1y ago
Maybe it's to make it more difficult to train AI video models from YouTube. Think about it, they have the raw footage so could use it if they want, but competitors using scrapers will have slightly distorted video sources.
michaelt 1y ago
Here's how I imagine it went:- 1. See that AI upscaling works kinda well on certain illustrations. 2. Start a project to see if you can do the same with video. 3. Develop 15 different quality metrics, trying to capture what it means when "it looks a bit fake" 4. Project's results aren't very good, but it's embarrassing to admit failure. 5. Choose a metric which went up, declare victory, put it live in production.
flatb 1y ago
I can’t think of a more dislike-able company than YouTube. I used to love youtube and watch it everyday and it would make me a happier, smarter person. Now youtube’s impact on their users is entirely negative and really the company needs to be destroyed. But they won’t be because they are now evil, and evil is profitable.

lolc 1y ago

> "You know, YouTube is constantly working on new tools and experimenting with stuff," Beato says. "They're a best-in-class company, I've got nothing but good things to say. YouTube changed my life." My despondent brain auto-translated that to: "My livelihood depends on Youtube"

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
xkcd 2015 closer than you think due to the magical technology of money https://xkcd.com/2015/ https://xkcd.com/2015/
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yogorenapan 1y ago
  Wow, that xkcd really scares me. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It's definitely something that could realistically happen in the near future, maybe even mandated by the EU
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    Google People[1] vibes [1]https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
    - sixothree 1y ago
      What am I looking at? Is this a transcript of a real thread formatted in a flat manner? Or is this fiction?
      - Dilettante_ 1y ago
        What I want to say for fun is: "Oooohhhh who knooowsss?" But serious discussion demands the truth: It is fiction, in the style of a twitter thread.

mcv 1y ago

I've noticed this for a while, when I accidentally click on YouTube Shorts. (I want to avoid it, because it's brain rot, but YouTube keeps enabling it and pushes it hard in notifications). It's most glaringly obvious in TV shows. Scenes from The Big Bang Theory look like someone clumsily tries to paint over the scenes with oil paint. It's as if the actors are wearing an inch thick layer of poorly applied makeup. It's far less glaring in Rick Beato's videos, but it's there if you pay attention. Jill Bearup wanted to see how bad it could get and reuploaded the "enhanced" videos a hundred times over until it became a horrifying mess of artifacts. The question remains why YouTube would do this, and the only answers I can come up with are "because they can" and "they want to brainwash us into accepting uncanny valley AI slop as real".

freilanzer 1y ago
> It's most glaringly obvious in TV shows. Scenes from The Big Bang Theory look like someone clumsily tries to paint over the scenes with oil paint. It's as if the actors are wearing an inch thick layer of poorly applied makeup. This might be the uploaders doing to avoid copyright strikes.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  It's 100% this
moi2388 1y ago
There are shorts blocker addons available.

Springtime 1y ago

Youtube says this was done for select Youtube Shorts as a denoising process. However most popular channels on Youtube, which seem to be the pool selected for this experiment, typically already have well lit and graded videos shouldn't benefit much from extra denoising from a visual point of view. It's true though that aggressive denoising gives things an artificially generated look since both processes use denoising heavily. Perhaps this was done to optimize video encoding, since the less noise/surface detail there is the easier it is to compress.

djmips 1y ago
If we take them at their word then it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy.
- QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
  > it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy. The controversy is that YouTube is making strange changes to the videos of users, that make the videos look fake. YouTube creators put hours upon hours on writing, shooting and editing their videos. And those that do it full time often depend on YouTube and their audience for income. If YouTube messes up the videos of creators and makes the videos look like they are fake, of course the creators are gonna be upset!
  - cma 1y ago
    It might be for making them compress better and be more likely to not buffer when you swipe up/preload more, like Tiktok serving them unencrypted to be more likely to be in a local cache for the ISP.
alex1138 1y ago
Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?
- 1y ago

ollysb 1y ago

I've seem some game of thrones clips recently in youtube shorts which looked like they'd been generated by ai. I couldn't understand why anyone would have done that to the original good looking material. The only thing I could think was that it was some kind of copyright evasion.

pnt12 1y ago
As a fan of the early seasons, I get lots of suggestions for Got clips. I assume that's done by the author to get around copy right blocks. Quite often they also add music, which would make it easier to get around sound detection. I haven't noticed it outside copyrighted material, so it's probably intentional.
- pixxel 1y ago
  [dead]
Gigachad 1y ago
The most charitable interpretation is it’s a very aggressive form of video compression. Denoising to reduce data and speed up video loads.

watwut 1y ago

Now to that stupid robot auto translation on non-english videos I never asked for and can not turn off.

roelschroeven 1y ago
Those translations are not only unwanted but also ridiculously bad (which is part of the reason why they're unwanted, I guess). I have to translate back to the original English, as far as that's even possible, to get an idea of what the video might be about. Who in his right mind thought this was a good idea?? I have a Firefox extension which tries to suppress the translations, but it only works for the main view, not for videos in the sidebar. It's better than nothing.
jakub_g 1y ago
The "can not turn off" part is the most jarring. Seriously, did none of Californian PMs hear about the concept of "being multilingual" and not needing to translate non-English content? --- By the way, this reminds me also of another stupid Google thing related to languages: Say your Chrome is set to English. When encountering another language page, Chrome will (since a decade ago or so) helpfully ask you to auto-translate by default. When you click a button "Never translate <language>", it will add language to the list which is sent out to every HTTP request the browser makes via `Accept-Language` header (it's not obvious this happens unless you're the kind of person who lives in DevTools and inspects outgoing traffic). Fast-forward N years, Chrome privacy team realizes this increases fingerprinting surface, making every user less unique, so they propose this: "Reduce fingerprinting in Accept-Language header information" (https://chromestatus.com/feature/5188040623390720 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5188040623390720) So basically they compensate for one "feature" with another, instead of not doing the first thing in the first place.
- scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
  "Złomnik: Dodge Caravan Is a Large Wall Unit"
  - meindnoch 1y ago

chinathrow 1y ago

> YouTube did not respond to the BBC's questions about whether users will be given a choice about AI tweaking their videos. Says everything. Hey PM at YouTube: How about you think stuff through before even starting to waste time on stuff like this?

rschiavone 1y ago
They turned their brains off many years ago. Now it's all about AI, showing ads down our throats and keep children hooked to their iPads.
vaenaes 1y ago
[dead]
npteljes 1y ago
>How about you think stuff through before even starting to waste time on stuff like this? What makes you think they don't think it through? This effect is an experiment that they are running. It seems to be useless, unwanted from our perspective, but what if they find that it increases engagement?
- estimator7292 1y ago
  Someone at google needs this promotion to feel like a real man
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    I think it's more the case that in today's Google, you need that promotion to stay employed.
    - uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
      seems to be the reason they go through UI changes every year or so. like agh, there goes my muscle memory again. at least ol' reliable hn is still the same good old plain renderable-by-anything-more-advanced-than-a-toaster html

anthonj 1y ago

I going to say something controversial, bu why is this even surprising? Google and YouTube have been framing themself as the kind company that will appropriate your work and make make money out of you. "You are the product" is a repeated endlessy even on social media, and this it thier private paltform after all. At this point getting involved with youtube is just the usual naive behaviour that somehow you are the exception and bad things won't happen to you.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

Isn't this similar to what e.g. Instagram and co have done for ages? Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras.

Frieren 1y ago
> Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras. The level of post-processing matters. There is a difference between color grading an image and removing wrinkles from a face. The line is not cut clear but these companies are pushing the boundaries so we get used to fake imagery. That is not good.
- gruez 1y ago
  >There is a difference between color grading an image and removing wrinkles from a face. You're implying the latter doesn't happen normally but denoising (which basically every smartphone camera does) often has the effect of removing details like wrinkles. The effect is especially pronounced in low light settings, where noise is the highest.
  - Frieren 1y ago
    > but denoising (which basically every smartphone camera does) often has the effect of removing details like wrinkles. I do not get the argument of "if nothing happens when an ant bites you then I can shot you with a cannon be cause it is the same thing just larger". The impact on society matters for me, and it is very different. Justifying AI at any cost is a marketing strategy that will hurt us long-term.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >I do not get the argument of "if nothing happens when an ant bites you then I can shot you with a cannon be cause it is the same thing just larger". this argument fails because at least in the examples provided, it's closer to the non-gen ai denoising/upscaling algorithms than telling chatgpt to upscale an image. >The impact on society matters for me, and it is very different. Justifying AI at any cost is a marketing strategy that will hurt us long-term. There's no indication it's AI, except some vague references to "machine learning".

dpassens 1y ago

This is getting into conspiracy territory but my personal assumption that they're trying to gaslight people into thinking that these weird AI artifacts are just how videos work, so that it's harder to distinguish between real videos and AI generated ones.

RicoElectrico 1y ago

How about they turn off their recent asinine title translation feature? Now every creator has to opt out of it manually - and the users have no recourse short of browser extensions.

torben-friis 1y ago

The recent sinking in quality of youtube as a platform has been awful to watch. Just a couple days ago I got an ad with a Ned Flanders singing about the causes of erectyle dysfunction (!), a huge cocktail of copyright infringement, dangerous medical advice and AI generated slop. Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong. The constant low quality, extremely intertwined ads start to remind me of those of shady forums and porn pages of the nineties. I'm expecting them to start advertising heroine now they've decided short term profits trump everything else.

uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
you'd think that by a certain point youtube ads would've been regulated/managed just like ads on tv channels.. it made sense not do to it that way when the platform was in its infancy, but nowadays almost every news channel is on youtube and the platform has the kind of money to manage ad spaces the same way or similar to the way television used to. whether that's the right method of doing it.. there'll probably be some objections to going back to that way of dealing with ads but a new system is needed because allowing instant adsense deployment to the entirety of youtube without any checks to make sure there's no inappropriate material, copyright infringement or scams isn't working out that well
rchaud 1y ago
> Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong. In other words, their Google Ads account is fully paid up. Copyright infringement only matters if you're a lowly uploader.

metalman 1y ago

what it boils down to is that "enhancement" is one more pilon to swerve around in the ongoing persuit of reality. given the overwhelming volume of media it's easy enough to modify ones asthetic monitoring and scan to simply ignore anything suspicious, or if it gets too bad, back right off

npteljes 1y ago

Unfortunately the article doesn't have an example, or a comparison image. Other reports are similarly useless as well. The most that seemed to happen is that the wrinkles in someone's ear changed. In case anyone else wants to see it in action: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_shorts_are_almost_certainly_being_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_sh... I skimmed the videos as well, and there is much more talk about this thing, and barely any examples of it. As this is an experiment, I guess that all this noise serves as a feedback to YouTube.

whamlastxmas 1y ago
‘Member journalism? When any effort was actually made for news articles?
- npteljes 1y ago
  Rare to come by, that's for sure. Although, I'm not incentivizing them either.
- nmeofthestate 1y ago
  IME this is a long-standing thing - failing to include visuals for inherently visual news stories. They're geared towards text news stories for whatever reason.
nmeofthestate 1y ago
If you click through to Rhett Schul's (sp?) video you can see examples comparing the original video (from non-Shorts videos) with the sharpened video (from Shorts). Basically YouTube is applying a sharpening filter to "Shorts" videos.
- dylan604 1y ago
  This makes sense. Saying YT is applying AI to every single video uploaded would be a huge WTF kind of situation. Saying that YT has created a workflow utilizing AI to create a new video from the creator's original video to fit a specific type of video format that they want to promote even when most creators are NOT creating that format makes much more sense. Pretty much every short I've seen was a portrait crop from something that was obviously originally landscape orientation. Do these videos that YT creates to backfill their lack of Shorts get credited back to the original creator as far as monetization from ads? This really has a feel of the delivery apps making websites for the restaurants that did not previously have one without the restaurant knowing anything about it while setting higher prices on the menu items while keeping that extra money instead of paying the restaurants the extra.

hulitu 1y ago

> YouTube made AI enhancements This is a contradiction in terms.

hliyan 1y ago

A chill ran down my spine as I imagined this being applied to the written word online: my articles being automatically "corrected" or "improved" the moment I hit publish, any book manuscripts being sent to editors being similarly "polished" to a point that we humans start to lose our unique tone and everything we read falls into that strange uncanny valley where everything reads ok, you can't quite put your finger on it, but it feels like something is wearing the skin of what you wrote as a face.

anon191928 1y ago
Maybe it's time for people to realize that you create product inside a product. Those T&S didnt write themselves. Not defending them. This is what tech bros in SV built and they all love it.
carlosjobim 1y ago
The only way to know for sure that something was written by a human: It contains racism, or any other opinion AIs are forbidden to express. Now imagine the near future of the Internet, when all people have to adapt to that in order to not be dismissed as AI.
- delecti 1y ago
  Most of the big LLMs have those restrictions, but not all.
- tempodox 1y ago
  How naive. Grok generates racism as a service, and Elon does his best to tune it that way.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    Well then we will have to fucking swear in everything we fucking write, to identify ourselves as humans, since AI doesn't like nasty language. And we should also insult other participants, since AI will almost never take an aggressive stance against people it is conversing with, you god damned piece of shit.

viktorcode 1y ago

We can relax; it's only about YouTube shorts

RandomBacon 1y ago
For now.

yk 1y ago

Reminder, there is no cloud, there is just computers of other people. And I for one support those other people's right to do on their computers what they want.

Planktonne 1y ago

If AI is as wonderful and world-changing as people claim, it's odd that it's being inserted into products exactly like every other solution in search of a problem.

brookst 1y ago
Would you say the same thing about the internet?
- Planktonne 1y ago
  People voluntarily visit the internet because it gives them things they want. This is an article about unwelcome changes being automatically made. Those things are different.
  - varelse 1y ago
    [dead]
- Yossarrian22 1y ago
  In the 90s? Sure, Pets.com was a solution in search of a problem. Same with any Uber for dog sitters or whatever from the 10s.
- rurp 1y ago
  If it's being added to a toaster for no good reason, sure. But the internet as a whole, through a browser? That's not comparable, people explicitly seek it out when they want to.
- rchaud 1y ago
  Yeah I would, if "Internet" came with zero safeguards or regulations and corporations put the onus on the user to sift through mountains of spam or mitigate credit card leakage risks when buying something online.

Waterluvian 1y ago

Last week I went to buy a Philip K Dick eBook while on vacation. It was only $2 and my immediate thought was, “what are the odds this is some weird pirated version that’s full of errors? What if it’s some American version that’s been self-censored by Amazon to be approved by the government? What if it’s been AI enhanced in some way?” Just the consideration of these possibilities was enough to shake the authenticity of my reality. Even more unsettling is when I contemplate what could be done about data authenticity. There are some fairly useful practical answers such as an author sharing the official checksum for a book. But, ultimately, authenticity is a fleeting quality and I can’t stop time.

thisisauserid 1y ago
You're obviously reading way too much Philip K Dick. You need to make it more about personal identity crisis though, not just reality in general.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Alas, in this economy I cannot afford drug-induced paranoia.
akomtu 1y ago
Authenticity can be proven by saying things that upsets censors. For example, if I mention the Tiananmen square, you can be sure my comment wasn't edited by CCP's LLMs.

bgwalter 1y ago

I suppose we should fire up those "AI" browsers and let them loose on YouTube in a while loop. They are just the right audience for "AI" enhanced content and YouTube's advertisers will be thrilled.

blinding-streak 1y ago

When you upload a video to YT, it's heavily compressed. Your pristine creation is converted 10 ways to Sunday, which then can be played back in a variety of formats, speeds, and platforms. Long before you even uploaded that video, for free, to give the world the chance to see your creative genius, you agreed to this process, by agreeing to Youtube's T&C's. People may be upset, and I get that. But it's not like the videos were in their original format anyway. If you want to maintain perfect video fidelity, you wouldn't choose YouTube. You chose YouTube because it's the path of least resistance. You wanted massive reach and a dead simple monetization route.

jeffbee 1y ago
Exactly this. The only reason video works at all is because the machine is trying to make changes to it that it doesn't think humans will notice.
layer8 1y ago
People are upset by visible or audible compression just the same.
therobots927 1y ago
Compression doesnt put words in your mouth. Do you honestly think they're the same thing or are you just being pedantic on purpose?
- blinding-streak 1y ago
  I think you need to re-read the article.

floppyd 1y ago

AI fearmongering probably produces a lot of clicks if upscaling gets labeled as "might bend reality". YT shouldn't just be doing it without user's input, but pearl clutching is unproportiona.

jeffbee 1y ago

Re: "without warning or permission". The YouTube Terms of Use require you to grant YouTube the (perpetual, worldwide, etc) right to prepare derivative works.

crazygringo 1y ago

From the linked tweet from YouTube's head of editorial: "No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)" https://x.com/youtubeinsider/status/1958199532363317467?s=46 https://x.com/youtubeinsider/status/1958199532363317467?s=46 Considering how aggressive YouTube is with video compression anyways (which smooths your face and makes it blocky), this doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it overprocesses in some cases, but it's also an "experiment" they're testing on only a fraction of videos. I watched the comparisons from the first video and the only difference I see is in resolution -- he compares the guitar video uploaded to YT vs IG, and the YT one is sharper. But for all we know the IG one is lower resolution, that's all it looks like to me.

CodingJeebus 1y ago
This is an absolutely huge deal. It doesn't matter how small the scope of the change is, they thought it was a good idea to apply mandatory AI post-processing to user content without consent or acknowledgement. Secret experiments are never meant to be little one-offs, they're always carried out with the goal of executing a larger vision. If they cared about user input, they'd make this a configurable setting.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Again, this isn't GenAI. The idea of it being "without consent" is absurd. Your phone doesn't ask you for consent to apply smoothing to the Bayer filter, or denoising to your zoom. Sites don't ask you for consent to recompress your video. This is just computational image processing. Phones have been doing this stuff for many years now. This isn't adding new elements to a video. It's not adding body parts or changing people's words or inventing backgrounds or anything. And "experiments" are just A/B testing. If it increases engagement, they roll it out more broadly. If it doesn't, they get rid of it.
  - giantrobot 1y ago

dmix 1y ago

> And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup Those AI skin enhancement filters are always terrible. Especially on men. Crazy they'd try it automatically. This isn't like the vocal boosting audio EQing they do without asking. Google must have some questionable product management teams these days if they are pushing out this stuff without configuration. Probably trying to A/B it for interal data to justify it before facing the usual anti-AI backlash crowd when going public.

sota_pop 1y ago

It was purely luck of the context that I noticed, but I received an email notification that someone had messaged me on LinkedIn via my gmail account. When this happens, the email contains the message contents. However, in this case the message contents did not match between the version within LinkedIn and the version presented in the email. Only two words were different, but that slight change made it even more peculiar and unsettling.

salt4034 1y ago
Maybe the sender edited the LinkedIn message? The email shows the original version, before the user edits.

shadowgovt 1y ago

As with so many mistakes Google makes, this is letting the technical people front-run an interaction that should have been spearheaded by the social people. From a technical standpoint, it's easy to think of AI-based cleanup as in the same category as "improving the compression algorithm" or "improving the throughput to the client": just a technically-mediated improvement. But people have a subjectively-different reaction between decreasing instances of bandwidth-related pixelation and making faces baby-smooth, and anyone on the community side of things could have told the team responsible (if they'd known about it). Sometimes Google's tech-expert-driven-company approach has negative consequences.

felineflock 1y ago

YouTube has responded: > We hear you, and want to clear things up! This is from an experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning – not GenAI. More info from @YouTubeInsider here: > No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video) > YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1958286550229541158 https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1958286550229541158

corytheboyd 1y ago
All of which is pretty reasonable, especially for shorts, which are meant to be thrown directly in the trash after being used to collect some ad revenue anyway, right?
RankingMember 1y ago
Love the "[company] is always working on ways to provide the best..." that's always in these explanations, like "you actually just caught us doing something good! You're welcome!"
netdur 1y ago
This outrage feels odd, TV has "improved" movies for ages, youtube doing it with machine learning is the same idea, are we really upset because an ear looks a bit clearer?
- rurp 1y ago
  No, people are upset because Youtube is editing their content without telling them. If they really thought this was a high value add they could have added an enhance button to let creators opt in, as has been done elsewhere. I wouldn't like it if HN started "optimizing" the wording my comments without telling me, even if it made them better along some metric.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

iamleppert 1y ago

It's obvious and clear that Google's end game is to completely replace the creator, and auto-generate all their videos. How far off we are from this, no one knows, probably not that far. Google likely already has all the data they need, it's now just about how long it will take to develop the AI.

eqvinox 1y ago

This was the last drip in an almost-full bucket for me & I finally made the jump to "disable" YouTube on my phone. And, honestly, my mental health improved a bit. Rarely still pull up YT on laptop, but that's a different use pattern than on phone. (I don't have any other YouTube-like on my phone, particularly no TikTok. Actually started reading more books instead.)