YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

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.

> is what style guides that go into the minutiae of comma placement try do do

Eh. There might be a tacit presumption here that correctness isn't real, or that style cannot be better or worse. I would reject this notion. After all, what if something is uniquely crap?

The basic, most general purpose of writing is to communicate. Various kinds of writing have varying particular purposes. The style must be appropriate to the end in question so that it can serve the purpose of the text with respect to the particular audience.

Now, we may have disagreements about what constitutes good style for a particular purpose and for a particular audience. This will be a source of variation. And naturally, there can be stylistic differences between two pieces of writing that do not impact the clarity and success with which a piece of writing does its job.

People will have varying tastes when it comes to style, and part of that will be determined by what they're used to, what they expect, a desire for novelty, a desire for clarity and adequacy, affirmation of their own intuitions, and so on. We shouldn't obfuscate and sweep the causes of varying tastes under the rug of obfuscation, however.

In the case of AI-generated text, the uncanny, je ne said quoi character that makes it irritating to read seems to be that it has the quality of something produced by a zombie. The grammatical structure is obviously there, but at a pragmatic level, it lacks a certain cohesion, procession, and relevance that reads like something someone on amphetamines or The View might say. It's all surface.

> 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.

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.

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.