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YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

bbc.com

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Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#71

Post by makeitdouble »

alex1138 wrote: post #16
Springtime wrote: post #11

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…

Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?

At this point, the stuff I'd want to remove:

- auto-dubbing

- auto-translation

- shorts (they're fine in a separate space, just not in the timeline)

- member only streams (if I'm not a member, which is 100% of them)

The only viable interface for that is the web and plenty of browser extensions.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#73

Post by Maken »

therein wrote: post #17
jszymborski wrote: post #2

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

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.

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.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#74

Post by hulitu »

fcpguru wrote: post #3
jszymborski wrote: post #2

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

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!

> Boost visual quality

So to make edible stuff from shit.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#75

Post by hulitu »

rckt wrote: post #55
watwut wrote: post #26

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

This one is the worst. I can't imagine the thought process behind it. How on earth it was seen as a wanted feature, and especially without a simple way to disable it? This feels like they used AI to code this AI thing in.

> How on earth it was seen as a wanted feature, and especially without a simple way to disable it?

Were you asleep in the last 10 years ? /s They have names for it: accessibily, User eXperience. Or as some other people put it: enshitification.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#76

Post by hulitu »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #33
watwut wrote: post #26

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

Nobody asked for it and you can't find discourse on the subject or give it a name, I've never had a feature made me feel more gas-lit. And I pay for premium dammit.

> And I pay for premium dammit.

Sometimes it is better when some things are left out. /s

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#77

Post by sfn42 »

mablopoule wrote: post #58
sfn42 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hear an AI voice I click the little menu button with three dots, then click don't show this channel or whatever it says. The Venn diagram of AI voice users and good content creators is pretty close to two separate circles. I don't really care about the minority in the intersection.

Except that now Youtube also "helpfully" auto-dub legitimate videos in other languages (along with translating the titles) by default, so even the 'AI voice' isn't a good signal for gauging if it's quality content or not. As a french-speaking person, I now find myself seeing french youtubers seemingly posting videos with english titles and robotic voice, before realizing that it's Youtube being stupid again. What's m…

That's gonna have to be the content creators' and YouTube's problem, I don't care.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#78

Post by artemisart »

Maken wrote: post #73
therein wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 chan…

> 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.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#79

Post by artemisart »

pier25 wrote: post #7
avasan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

#80

Post by exe34 »

close04 wrote: post #56
exe34 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you feel a need to stop other people doing things you personally don't like?

I want to remove them from my own feed. I want the button that says "hide" or "show fewer shorts" to actually work and ideally hide them forever. I have to play whack-a-mole on the different devices and browsers to try to hide shorts.

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