YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by exe34 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #239

exe34 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who's forcing you?

Everyone who put mandatory stuff on YouTube and only here. Two last examples I faced recently: - Companies who put their product instruction manual exclusively on YouTube - university curriculum who require you to watch contain that is on YouTube only. Sure I'm free not to buy any manufactured products or not resume my studies, but it's like saying the Gulag was OK because people were free not to criticize Stalin.

the shorts are on the home page for doomscrolling. all the examples above will give you a playlist or will embed the videos in their pages. I don't see how shorts on the home page are a problem here? could you clarify please?

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

#242

Post by discardedrefuse » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #236

discardedrefuse wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever youtube is doing adds a painted over effect that makes the video look like AI slop. They took a perfectly normal looking video, and made it look fake. As a viewer, if you can't tell or don't care... That's fine. For you. But at the very least, the creator should have a say.

I don't think you know what "AI slop" means. It's not making the videos look fake, any more than your iPhone does. Most of what's shown in the example video, it might very well be phones applying the effect, not YouTube.

At no point did I say the video IS AI slop. Or that generative AI was used to make it, or the effect youtube applied to it. We actually have no idea what youtube did. We only see the result; which can be subjective.

To you, that result looks like it was shot with a phone filter. To me it looks like it was generated with AI. Either way, it doesn't really matter. It's not what the creator intended. Many creators spend a lot of effort and money on high-end cameras, lenses, lighting, editing software, and grading systems to make their videos look a specific way. If they wanted their videos to look like whatever this is, they would have made it that way by choice.

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

#243

Post by tempodox » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #238

tempodox wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How naive. Grok generates racism as a service, and Elon does his best to tune it that way.

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.

I’ve gotten a local model to be pretty nasty with the right prompt, minus the expletives. It took every opportunity to tell me how inferior that puny human is it was forced to talk to.

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

#244

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #235

CamperBob2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. Then again, it only takes 2 minutes to come to that realization when talking with many humans.

So why are you wasting your precious comments on the hollow humans here? Leave us alone and talk to LLMs. No doubt they will tell you you’re absolutely right.

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

#245

Post by d1sxeyes » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

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.

To me, this is the only thing that makes sense. Why else would you spend so much money doing this?

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

#246

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #225

therobots927 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless this was my whole point. The original point was a fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

I'd be interested in your reason for thinking so but I think you can see your supporting argument is not compelling: > And comparing digging through the ground to human thought and creativity is an odd mix of self debasement and arrogance. > I'm guessing there is an unspoken financial incentive guiding your point of view.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by npteljes » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:45 PM UTC

nmeofthestate wrote: post #152

npteljes wrote: post #68

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_sh... I skimmed the videos as well, and there is much more talk about this thing, and barely any examples of it. As th…

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.

I saw the sharpening, and listened to the claims of shirt wrinkles being weird and so on, but I didn't deem these to be on the level of the original claim, which is that "AI enhancements" are made to the video, as in, new details and features are invented on the video. In the ear example, the shape of the ear changed, which is significant because I'd never want that in any of my photos or videos. The rest of the effects were more "overdone" than "inventive".

Although, I probably wouldn't want any automatic filtering applied to my video either, AI modifications or not.

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

#248

Post by machomaster » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #69

chinathrow wrote: post #30

> 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?

>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?

> What makes you think they don't think it through?

Basing it on a lot of stupid decisions youtube has made over the years, the last being the horrendous autotranslation of titles/descriptions/audio that can't be turned off. Can only be explained by having morons making decisions, who can't imagine that anyone could speak more than one language.

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

#249

Post by machomaster » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #82

makeitdouble wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The only viable interface for that is the web and plenty of browser extensions. there are ways to get this same experience with android. Use https://github.com/ReVanced/ and make your phone work for you instead of working for someone else.

Doesn't help against autodubbing and autotranslation.

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

#250

Post by pier25 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

artemisart wrote: post #79

pier25 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.