r/technology • u/ErinDotEngineer • 10h ago
Artificial Intelligence YouTube secretly used AI to edit people's videos. The results could bend reality
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission711
u/MotherFunker1734 9h ago
Time to replace YouTube.
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u/XDon_TacoX 9h ago
that time was in 2015, it's just that no one dares to try, when we would all jump to the first serious oportunity
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u/ReadditMan 9h ago edited 9h ago
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube, the problem is getting people to actually use them.
People aren't just going to jump to a different website. The stuff they're watching is only on YouTube, you would have to convince thousands of content creators to switch to a different platform and that's not going to be easy because it could cost them subscribers.
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u/Neptune28 9h ago
Dailymotion and Vimeo are the only ones I can think of, but they aren't anywhere close to Youtube
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u/AirbagOff 7h ago
I will never understand why Pornhub, which has all of the infrastructure as YouTube, doesn’t just re-skin a mainstream version of itself as, say, Videohub and compete with YouTube. Especially in this era where it’s looking like Visa and MasterCard might be trying to cut off money to adult companies and their business model might be at risk.
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u/ConstableGrey 6h ago
There's some troopers on pornhub just uploading their Call of Duty highlights or their Minecraft commentary. God bless em.
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u/Beliriel 6h ago
People don't like porn associated with their normal videos. Also porn is monetized to hell and back. Basically every video is potential money for pornhub. Not so much for youtube. Youtube hosts a lot of garbage that is made by kids which they aren't allowed to monetize.
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u/AgathysAllAlong 3h ago
Because they have an ad-based revenue model. If they made a side-website for regular videos, they'd need an entirely new sponsorship system, and an entirely new client base. And the companies that advertise on Youtube REALLY don't want to be associated with anything remotely NSFW, hence all the stupid restrictions and demonetization.
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u/JingleBellBitchSloth 7h ago
Rumble?
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u/2RINITY 7h ago
Way too fascist. Can’t build a reputable channel over there
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u/StraightedgexLiberal 5h ago edited 4h ago
The question was asking for an alternative, not if you like the alternative or not.
Reach is not free speech and the conservatives lost in the Supreme Court when they were also told to use Rumble and they refused to use Rumble because they feel entitled to YouTube's reach and power in the free market (and angry Trump got kicked out)https://netchoice.org/netchoice-wins-at-supreme-court-over-texas-and-floridas-unconstitutional-speech-control-schemes/
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u/SCP-iota 9h ago
Yeah, we need more popular YouTubers to get on board with promoting an exodus - parallel posting their videos elsewhere and having exclusive content on the other platforms to encourage moving, while also encouraging people to still watch them on YouTube too so they don't lose algorithm points
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u/ShiningBlizzard 8h ago
That’s what Nebula keeps trying to do.
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u/General_Snow_5835 8h ago
Nebula charges a subscription fee, and the only youtubers seriously making a push for it are established longform media analysis channels. Without communities like lets-players, youtube poops, soundtrack repost channels, etc, also migrating to Nebula, thats leaving behind a huge amount of why people actually use youtube
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u/TackoftheEndless 8h ago
Yeah I love the idea of Nebula, a place for creatives with intelligent analysis and visions to be able to make things away from Youtube and it's Algorithm's and constantly changing community standards.
But on Youtube I can get their content, music, news channels, movie clips, some full TV episodes officially uploaded by the rights holders, and dozens of lower quality videos that still fill a niche of "killing time". Youtube Premium is worth every penny to me.
They need to find a way to get that kind of content on a alternative before you can expect a mass exodus.
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u/ModerNew 4h ago
I think we can't except (realistically) everybody moving to one platform. YouTube has all those people cause it was the only viable platform in the beginning and managed to establish monopoly before serious alternatives started popping up, there's no real chance of this happening now with some other platform. So if we're gonna move away from YouTube it's probably gonna end up like (movie/TV) streaming: split up across tens of platforms.
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u/arahman81 4h ago
Nebula has its niche, and its not really trying to replace YouTube, but focusing on being more creator friendly.
And it does now have a certain functionality that can't be replicated on YouTube.
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u/vertexxd 7h ago
Speaking of Nebula anyone know what happened to Kento Bento?
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u/adequateproportion 5h ago
Nebula is a closed, subscription driven service that is run by a group of YouTube "elite" who pretend like they're the arbiters of good taste. It's dead in the water because of that.
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u/needlestack 2h ago
We couldn't even get people off Twitter, which should be 10x easier.
People and their habits are hard to break. Even when the habits hurt them. This tells you a lot about the state of the world.
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u/i__hate__stairs 9h ago
It'll happen when they egregiously affect the user experience. They're very good at riding a laser thin line though.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 3h ago
It's not just this, most creators can upload to multiple sites.
The biggest issue is that any serious competitor would end up with most if not all of the same problems, because they're more a function of advertiser demands or technical requirements. Any better alternative would either cost money to use, pay creators worse, or both.
Granted this AI stupidity isn't one of those things, but every company is currently smoking the AI pipe, sooooo yeah....
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u/AgathysAllAlong 3h ago
The problem is also community. If you make a Youtube alternative, the easiest customers to grab are people that were too toxic for youtube. And who the hell wants to join a community full of people Youtube kicked out?
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u/FeelsGoodMan2 2h ago
The other problem is even if you do get people to move, youtube/google just buys the new platform and it becomes youtube again.
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u/9-11GaveMe5G 9h ago
I use yt solely for music. I can pick exactly the songs I want, no ads, no premium. What's my replacement that ticks those boxes?
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u/One-Reflection-4826 4h ago
The stuff they're watching is only on YouTube
creators can post their videos on multiple sites too
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u/old-reddit-was-bette 9h ago
Do the math, the data transfer and storage cost is astronomical, unless you own the infrastructure and can skip the cloud bills.
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u/Chicano_Ducky 8h ago edited 7h ago
Newgrounds did that before youtube, but you cant just upload whatever and creators must pay into the system they use. Newgrounds does actual vetting of creators and look what it created: it created the people behind Smiling Friends and created a whole generation of content creators that dominated Youtube for over 15 years.
Maybe we dont need shorts of some rando in a corner eating food or doing a commercial for skin cream.
Maybe we dont need streamers sitting in a chair reacting to videos and talking about nothing. Twitch changed their rules and found the top streamers were REALLY botted 50-70% and twitch never turned a profit. Why do we subsidize this dead end content creation that only clankers watch?
Maybe we dont need 1 billion lets plays with 1,000 1 Hour+ episodes with 5 views at best recorded by a 12 year old who thinks they can be the next Markiplier (who moved onto actual movies btw).
Maybe we dont need AI content farms spamming out 100s of videos an hour.
Youtube is expensive because anyone can upload anything of any quality even if its useless. Quantity over quality and most content that no one will use.
Maybe the future of entertainment is actually vetting creators and providing a bare minimum standard of quality like Nintendo did after the video game crash.
Lets be honest here, all those big numbers big tech loves to advertise are bots and AI scrapers and advertisers are catching on that views are meaningless now unless it comes with a guarantee its a person. Dead Internet Theory is here and the only thing that can survive in the future are gated communities with vetted creators.
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u/SCP-iota 9h ago
Then don't use a centralized replacement (which would likely end up getting enshittified too anyway). This isn't 2010 anymore - we have all the building blocks in place: the Fediverse, IPFS, IndieAuth...
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u/Deathwatch72 9h ago
Even decentralized replacements still have to solve those issues, just at a slightly smaller scale.
Why do think your solutions will succeed when it is basically multiple different versions of Dailymotion that all need to be successful and smaller than YouTube. Dailymotion itself couldn't even do that once lol
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9h ago
[deleted]
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u/AgathysAllAlong 3h ago
Let's take a relatively big, but not close to the biggest creator. Ludwig Ahgren is up there, and he uploads about 2 hours of video a week. His videos regularly get 1 million views. Let's assume the average viewer watches half the video. Some people will only watch a bit, some people will replay full videos multiple times just to listen to, so that sounds fair. And let's assume it's 1080p, not 4K.
That means every week, we're looking at 2GB storage (2 hours of 1080p video) and about 1,000,000 GB of uploading. Yes compression might help, but there's also downloaded data that's never viewed and the number is already astronomical. That's the real cost there. HD video streaming is massively expensive, and any solution needs to take that into account.
Here's one of the cheapest CDNs you can use: https://bunny.net/pricing/stream/ Based on their calculator, and then more math because that's so much more than they planned for, their cheapest price is going to be about $20,000 a month to host Ludwig. And that's ONE guy who isn't even that active on the platform. There are people uploading long videos daily.
Who the hell is paying for that? What kind of decentralized network is going to make that happen? A torrenting power-user can handle about a terabyte a month, which means that one youtuber needs 4,000 dedicated power-users exclusively uploading his content to maintain youtube levels.
It just doesn't work. Nobody can get within a few exponents of youtube even with corporate data-centers. The fundamental barrier of the entirety of the technology is the wires in your house, not the platform or software.
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u/The_frozen_one 3h ago
It’s easy to get hand wavy about decentralized storage when most decentralized options are run by enthusiasts. This is not a solved problem when you’re talking a low bar / no bar video service. Will it store my encrypted content? Can I just use this service as a personal free cloud backup?
The closest technology I can think of would be BitTorrent, it can handle bulk delivery but it’s not long term storage.
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u/SCP-iota 9h ago
On a centralized solution, storage and availability aren't demand-scaled, so a provider would get overwhelmed trying to store and replicate a bunch of uploaded videos that aren't actually being watched enough to warrant the resources being dedicated to them. Decentralized protocols naturally scale by demand because instances will only replcate content that is being interacted with through that instance (and in the case of IPFS, since clients are also servers, the ability to serve a video scales naturally with the more clients accessing it.)
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u/Deathwatch72 9h ago
And the speed penalty on the videos "not being watched enough" is gonna piss off users and small creators.
You also didn't answer my infrastructure question outside of giving an unrelated answer comparing protocol archetypes.
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u/SCP-iota 9h ago
Small creators have had a strategy for this for quite a while - it's called p.o.s.s.e: "Post on site, syndicate elsewhere." Basically, creators initially serve their content from their own instance while viewership is small and easily handled, and they also link back to it by syndicating through other instances. As viewership grows, the burden of storing and serving the content shifts proportionally to the instances from which the viewers are accessing it.
As far as infrastructure, there's a big difference between a decentralized protocol and a bunch of separate DailyMotion clones; a DailyMotion-like-thing has no way to shift the storage and serving burden across instances, nor to use clients to handle some of that task. IPFS, for example, forms infrastructure by turning clients into small temporary servers and storage pools for shards of data, so more viewers automatically means more infrastructure to serve the content.
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u/kushangaza 9h ago
Peertube exists, but hasn't gotten much traction over the last 6 years. Just as all the youtube competitors that have come and gone. Creators upload where the vast majority of the users are, users watch where the vast majority of creators are
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u/SCP-iota 9h ago
Peertube failed because its goal was to ditch YouTube immediately and move elsewhere completely, so it just became a niche thing that didn't have much discoverability. If something wants to compete with YouTube, they'd need to encourage creators to cross-post to YouTube as well as the alternative and try to get their viewers to watch on both for a bit.
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u/Mistyslate 9h ago
I just stopped watching videos 🤷
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u/DungeonDragging 9h ago
See you on Instagram
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u/-The_Blazer- 7h ago
It's not any more possible than getting a population to 'free-marketly' switch to a 'competing railway' where an incumbent has already established one. That's why railways are nationalized, they are natural monopolies.
Internet business are infrastructure businesses. They provide 'platforms' that are really just infrastructure that allows people to establish connections and relations, further reinforcing the infrastructure itself, as these systems run on content recommendation and networking.
So once the platform-monopoly reaches critical mass, competition becomes just as impossible as trying to build a 'competing' railway next to an existing one. The incumbent has so much accumulated capital with near-infinite scaling potential (tracks or user-networks) that no amount of competition will ever put a dent in their business.
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u/StraightedgexLiberal 5h ago
YouTube is not a monopoly because it's large and successful in the free market.
The Republicans argued (and lost) the same thing in the Supreme Court because they were crying YouTube kicked out Donald Trump and they don't want to use other alternatives on the internet to share their viewpoints
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u/Actually-Yo-Momma 9h ago
So many folks say this but go ahead and try. Storing THAT much data is no small feat and is only possible because Google owns them
No start up or anyone outside the Mag7 is going to be able to have the budget for datacenters purely for video storage
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u/sabo-metrics 9h ago
With new compression technology, a company won't need as much storage space as the old giants like youtube.
They were built for the 2010s, not the future.
That's typically how this stuff goes. The giants get too big and can't adapt as quickly.
So i welcome the next video hosting site that comes along and doesn't immediately get greedy with ads and weird with recommendations and pushing sponsored content....
THEY WILL THRIVE!
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 9h ago
new compression technology
Middle-out!
Seriously though, I'm not sure what you're referring to because I could be out of the loop, but I haven't heard of anything in the real world that would make any kind of meaningful difference.
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u/Virtual-Cobbler-9930 8h ago
AV1 pretty good, 1m of 4k 120fps video fits in just ~24mb. (heavily depends on video itself of course, but hey, who cares)
The thing is, youtube uses it for a year already and I think even transcode every old video into new optimized format. It's not like they store original raw footage.
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u/uzlonewolf 6h ago
It's not like they store original raw footage.
Except they do. It's how they can transcode every old video into new optimized formats without turning them into a copy of a copy of a copy.
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u/EarthlingSil 5h ago
AV1 pretty good, 1m of 4k 120fps video fits in just ~24mb.
That's gotta be some low quality AV1 videos cause mine are always over 100mb (I make 1min motion graphics animations, without audio).
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u/LunchTwey 6h ago
Good fucking luck, that monopoly isn't getting toppled without government intervention.
That's not me doom posting either just there is genuinely zero chance youtube gets overtaken. The server costs alone would make any startup crumble
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u/oCrapaCreeper 9h ago
I thought the almighty reddit already agreed to replace YouTube like 5 years ago. What happened?
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u/Wiggles69 3h ago
Wooley argues YouTube's choice of words feels like a misdirection. "I think using the term 'machine learning' is an attempt to obscure the fact that they used AI because of concerns surrounding the technology. Machine learning is in fact a subfield of artificial intelligence," he says.
AI isn't the issue, the issue is fucking with peoples videos without permission and without disclosing the fact to the creators or their audience.
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u/sojuz151 10h ago
There are no comparison photos. This could be the result of more aggressive compression algorithm
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u/jessepence 9h ago
There is a linked video which shows the content compared to Instagram versions of the same content, and it seems pretty clear that there is some sort of HDR or "Oil Painting" type gloss added to the YouTube shorts.
It definitely seems like more than just compression unless they are doing extreme compression along with ai upscaling to save on bandwidth but that would be so expensive in compute that I can't see it being worth it.
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u/coffunky 8h ago
Wow, I’ve been noticing this exact problem in shorts. I’ve scrolled through some videos immediately because of the AI look, and creators I was used to from TikTok looked… off. I’m so sick of auto filtering and upscaling. It’s fine if it is an opt-in option but not the default. Its gross.
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u/APeacefulWarrior 3h ago
Yeah, one YouTuber I follow - Jill Bearup - started calling them out for this as soon as she noticed it happening. If people want another example.
And what gets me is just... WHY? As others have mentioned, there have to be significant power costs associated with this. Where's the benefit to YouTube, forcing this on people without even telling them?
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u/West-Abalone-171 7m ago
Step one is get people used to content passing through an ai filter.
Step two is add some product placement.
Step three is wholesale replacing the back catalogue to change products to ones youtube is paid for and change the ideological message.
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u/LandscapeSubject530 2h ago
Is that why my shorts just ain’t working any more?? Shit was running fine then all of a sudden it stopped
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u/garanvor 8h ago
So thats what it was. This has been bothering me for weeks, that uncanny smoothing of faces.
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u/lavabeing 4h ago
Does it look like intra prediction?
https://jmvalin.ca/daala/paint_demo/
It was hard to view in detail the vertical videos squeezed into a horizontal frame
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u/Chicano_Ducky 6h ago
Dolan Darkest did a video that showed how bad it got
Savannah XYZ is a 3D modeller that mimics claymation, but the subtle finger prints on the clay made the AI sharpen her videos until the fingerprints were black lines and everything had blown out highlights.
Mr Bravo had an 80s VCR filter on his videos and the AI removed that.
I would link a video but links may get automodded.
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u/kdawg94 7h ago
Nah, YouTube is quoted saying they're doing what they're accused of
Now, after months of rumors in comment sections, the company has finally confirmed it is altering a limited number of videos on YouTube Shorts, the app's short-form video feature. "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)," said Rene Ritchie, YouTube's head of editorial and creator liaison, in a post on X.
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u/Gastroid 10h ago
That's exactly what Pied Piper wants you to think.
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u/Moist-Operation1592 9h ago
hot dog, not hot dog
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u/Deathwatch72 9h ago
I fucking loved that whole plot line. Especially the part where it becomes the dick pic filter and Dinesh is faced with the prospect of helping train the image recognition
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u/lookashinyobject 5h ago
If you want a comparison Jill Bearup did a short when she noticed it where she re-uploaded it 15 times and showed a side by side of the first upload https://youtube.com/shorts/vzzfQy3G5cU?si=MbM_i7XEajbRL7Rs
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u/MR_Se7en 9h ago
I feel bad for the creators. They just wanna share their content...
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u/matthewpepperl 9h ago
Maybe some do but if that all there was to it there would be more of them on odysee nothing stopping them from posting on both but they dont
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u/Even-Smell7867 9h ago
Maybe we don't need so much useless and worthless content. Maybe they should go out and get a real job.
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u/artinthebeats 9h ago
More people on YouTube just share shit than expect to get famous.
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u/Even-Smell7867 9h ago
And again, do we really need more of this shit content?
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u/Whorsorer-Supreme 8h ago
I mean... why are you acting as if you're forced to watch any of it? I think this is a non-issue
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u/artinthebeats 9h ago
What shit content?
You're basically looking at people's public family videos.
It's the algorithm bullshit, the REAL bullshit, corporations trying fuck with peoples completely innocent videos.
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u/GazMembrane_ 8h ago
People sharing themselves and their art with the world? Yeah. I'd say it's the foundation of humanity. Sharing things with people. Forming communities. And as the professionally produced media gets shittier and pushes agendas, people are looking elsewhere for their entertainment. Add the cost of everything soaring and never relenting for even a moment also pushes people to look for cheap or free entertainment.
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u/CaptainKrakrak 9h ago
Maybe because they want to compress videos a lot more to save space and they think that using some AI to denoise and sharpen will hide the low bitrate.
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u/JShelbyJ 8h ago
My take. Lower bitrate where possible and higher bitrate on edges and especially on faces.
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u/2Sap2Loerex 6h ago
Definitely noticed this with a video I rewatched recently that for sure had been changed, but I knew that that video's page was still the original so it wasn't (or at least wasn't advertised as) a reupload.
Crazy world of content we find ourselves in. Every day, more of more of the truth is lost to us...
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u/The-Gargoyle 4h ago edited 2h ago
Just wait, the 'AI filter everything' problem is about to start resulting in serious issues people are not expecting as we charge forward like idiots and needlessly stuff AI in to everything without asking or thinking.
Example: Every new camera seemingly has some AI filter built into it to 'sharpen' the images. At the moment, this is simple weird stuff.. make the moon look better, smooth out skin and wrinkles.. fix a reflection in a surface..
What happens when a photo that has been auto-doctored by a in-device AI is used as evidence in a legal case?
This photo shows the defendant at the crime scene!... or does it? They are pretty far away from the camera, was it really them, or did the AI on this persons phone use the 300 photos of their best bro as a training model and assume 'oh, thats best bro face again, lemme fix his face so it looks right.' and auto-edit the crime photo to put that persons face on it instead of the real face?
Now youtube wants to play the same game, post-filming. Clearly if you recorded your footage and didn't AI smooth and filter it before uploading it, it's obvious you should just have this filtering/post processing applied without even having to ask for it.. right?
Also, this isn't new. They have had various 'video enhancement' for things like 'motion correction' which was horrible and turned every video into a nausea triggering wibble-wobble by trying to correct any movement of the camera blindly. Nobody used it because it was horrible. Same pretty much goes for all of their 'optional' enhancements.
Now they have the 'new stuff' ready to test, and they won't be asking anybody first.
Either way, this is a can of worms, and YT really should be smart enough to know better.
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u/BeeWeird7940 10h ago
Another “could” headline!
Gotta love it. Journalists don’t have to find out anymore. Publication only requires speculation.
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u/made-it 6h ago
Bruh, did you read the article?
Now, after months of rumors in comment sections, the company has finally confirmed it is altering a limited number of videos on YouTube Shorts, the app's short-form video feature.
YouTube says it's similar to the AI sharpening on phones, except on phones you have the option to disable it.
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u/firecorn22 8h ago
I think speculation based on evidence is fine like if I find evidence that a bridge is unsound, then making a head like "bridge could fall apart" is accurate since it hasn't yet fallen but likely will due to journalistically evidence
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u/BeeWeird7940 8h ago
The problem you have is the word “likely.” How “likely” is “likely” enough to be likely? A 2% chance a bridge falls with people on it in the next decade is not terribly likely, but it’s definitely an unacceptable risk in America. Is it likely enough? Who the fuck knows?
The journalists are using “could” to mean any possible outcome of a policy. Needless to say, they can write “could” for any outcome. So, if we’re in a conservative website, Trump’s Policy Could Usher In a New Golden Age And if we’re on a liberal website, Trump’s Policy Could Usher In the Four Horsemen of the Aplocalypse.
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u/-The_Blazer- 7h ago
Big Tech literally runs the most opaque business model in human history, where nothing can be audited, known, or ever accounted for because it's behind their servers. How does this tech actually work? When? How? Who knows! It's like super good for you though, just trust me bro.
They could simply operate openly so that no speculation is warranted instead of treating users like guinea pigs. Until then, I will shed no tears for them being subjected to the most outlandish speculations you can imagine.
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u/StraightedgexLiberal 5h ago
Big Tech literally runs the most opaque business model in human history
It still isn't the government's job to intervene because they are a private company in free market capitalism.
California also cried about the lack of transparency on big social media websites like YouTube and they thought they could intervene..... they ended up writing a check to Elon Musk because they refused to read the First Amendment (and understand private company rights)
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u/1rg3ndw3r 4h ago
They are international not american and the non USA part of the world, which is the bigger part by the way, neither cares for your pro company anti human laws nor your constitution or its amandments.
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u/idten_t 4h ago
Just saw that it happened to a bunch of videos I worked on for a client. I didn’t ask for this, neither did they, and now the videos look like garbage.
I do not understand what YouTube’s tech team thinks they’re doing. Literally nobody asked for this.
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u/Mrslinkydragon 2h ago
So Google can change our stuff without permission ("Oh you clicked accept on the terms and conditions. You agree!") But we cant say killed, suicide, death, sex, etc or we get the ban hammer.
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u/Yukimare 1h ago
I'm curious, what exactly did they change on your videos? Some details to try to modify compression, or did they straight up modify what info was said or depicted?
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u/viciousxvee 5h ago
Wow. This is absolutely not ok. Especially for it to be happening without consent. I certainly hope they're not doing it on the beauty YouTube community's videos, that could damage a youtuber so badly that they lose all their following. Additionally it could cause us consumers to buy products that we think look good but doesn't IRL. I doubt the AI took that into account so I'm sure it's probably happened to some beauty videos. Shame on YouTube.
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u/Sedierta2 10h ago
This just in, YouTube joined Apple, Samsung, and every other phone and apps like Zoom in using “AI” to improve media quality.
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u/CaptainKrakrak 9h ago
But it doesn’t improve it, it looks horrible and uncanny.
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u/Sedierta2 8h ago
Same as all the others.
The headline though is trying to make this nefarious “secret ai!!!”
In reality it’s nothing except maybe annoying if it’s making image quality worse.
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u/ceonsiune 7h ago
Edge has this feature as an opt-in for video players (it enhances quality.. sometimes). I guess YouTube wants that feature and is running a live experiment to develop it as fast as possible.
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u/Gaiden206 3h ago edited 3h ago
It's certainly true that modern smartphones come with built-in AI features that can enhance image and video quality. But that's an entirely different affair, according to Samuel Wooley, the Dietrich chair of disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. "You can make decisions about what you want your phone to do, and whether to turn on certain features. What we have here is a company manipulating content from leading users that is then being distributed to a public audience without the consent of the people who produce the videos."
Most smartphones use "Computational Photography", which relies on machine learning and AI to work. This can't be fully turned off, even when choosing RAW output, as it's a fundamental part of the imaging stack on smartphones. Without it, smartphone photos would look way worse due to the tiny camera sensors they use.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 8h ago
FFS just have an "enhance details" checkbox when uploading don't just force it on videos!
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u/testicularjesus 6h ago
I hope someone else chimes in to validate, but I’ve genuinely been having like a mental health episode because of this lately, I see the faces of someone I’ve seen 1000 times on YouTube and it’s just uncanny and doesn’t feel right. I’m not doing good, and there’s people doing worse than me, this stuff will spiral people, it spiraled me, please please please talk about this more.
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u/MooseBoys 9m ago
Hey man, just remember that some dev is going to get a promo and a huge bonus because of this feature!
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u/folder52 10h ago
Here’s a Top-5 summary in English of the article:
- YouTube secretly altered videos with AI — Some Shorts creators (e.g., Rick Beato, Rhett Shull) noticed subtle changes like sharper wrinkles, smoother skin, or warped ears. YouTube later admitted to running an AI/ML experiment to “unblur, denoise, and improve clarity.”
- Creators feel misrepresented — Musicians like Shull argue that these hidden tweaks make their videos look “AI-generated,” undermining authenticity and potentially eroding audience trust.
- Larger concern: AI mediating reality — Experts warn that invisible AI edits insert extra layers between us and reality, weakening the connection between media and real events, much like past controversies over Photoshop or beauty filters — but on steroids.
- Consent and transparency are missing — Unlike smartphone AI features users can toggle, YouTube applied these edits without asking permission, raising ethical questions about manipulation of creator content.
- Broader trend across tech — From Samsung’s AI “Moon photos” to Google Pixel’s “Best Take” smile-fixing, AI increasingly reshapes what images and videos represent. Scholars worry this normalization could further blur what people can trust online.
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u/_Cratos 9h ago
The irony of this AI summary of the article highlighting a “larger concern” of AI mediating reality.
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u/Same-Letter6378 9h ago
The difference is the original data still exists if you don't want to use the AI generated summary.
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u/AltruisticHamster343 9h ago
I watched the entire video and don’t really understand the outrage. Depending on the camera, encoding, the social media app, their compression algorithms etc. you get a certain look (sharpening, smoothing, pixelating etc.) to the uploaded media. Like for example for years you could distinguish between ios and android instagram users by looking at their stories bc there was some bug that made android videos look bad and janky
I get that the examples look a little uncanny, but if no one pointed them out I wouldn’t notice. i’d say if it helps youtube reduce traffic (and therefore use less electricity) then they should just focus on tweaking those upscaling algos
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u/Chicano_Ducky 6h ago
You 100% notice it on media that is meant to be analog horror or grainy, the AI thinks its actual 90s footage and removes all the effects.
Then there is what happened to SavannahXYZ with the AI blowing out the color gradient because of a fingerprint on fake 3D clay.
Dolan Darkest has more examples and they are indefensible.
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u/omniuni 9h ago
Retouch, not edit. Somewhat annoying, but not as nefarious as it sounds.
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u/night_dude 9h ago
Retouching is a form of editing. Editing is not just cutting or recutting a video.
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u/james2183 9h ago
Disagree. Whilst they are posting on their platform, YouTube are doing it without their consent. That's the biggest problem with this.
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u/Gunslinger_69 8h ago
What alternatives are there really?