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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

#261

Post by pbronez »

crazygringo wrote: post #160
CodingJeebus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Yeah, the big video platforms are constantly working on better ways to store and deliver video. If this stuff is applying to some workflow that automatically generates Shorts from real videos... whatever. Very similar to experimenting with different compression schemes. Video compression can differ on a per-shot basis now!

If you want to make pristine originals available to the masses, seed a torrent.

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

#262

Post by iamleppert »

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.

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

#263

Post by cma »

corytheboyd wrote: post #179
cma wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the biggest example outside of his thumbnails?

So much of the channel consisting of Hot Spicy Take content really turned me off from hearing anything else he has to say, which is unfortunate, because I liked his music theory videos when I was learning about that. Lots of very hateful, negative content too. It didn’t take me long to find the video “why this new artist sucks.” Another find, what I assume is an overblown small quibble turned into clickbait videos, w…

> “why this new artist sucks.”

That's about AI, not very polarizing at the level it's currently at.

> Another find, what I assume is an overblown small quibble turned into clickbait videos, was “this record label is trying to SILENCE me.”

That might be overblown, but it doesn't sound polarizing at all. OP was saying he always has the most polarizing opinions.

If that last one is the vid I'm thinking of, the same record company has sent him hundreds of copyright strikes and he has to have a lawyer constantly fighting them for fair use. He does some stuff verging on listen-along reaction videos, but the strikes he talks about there are when he is interviewing the artists who made the songs and they play short snippits of them for reference while talking about the history of making them, thought process behind the songwriting, etc.

I think it's not just automated content ID stuff where it claims the monetization, but the same firm for that label going after him over and over where 3 strikes removes his channel. The title or thumbnail might be overblown, probably the firm just earns a commission and he's dealing with a corporate machine that is scatter shotting against big videos with lots of views that have any of their sound rather than targetting him to silence something they don't want to get out, but I don't think the video was very polarizing.

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

#264

Post by roguetoasterer »

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.

Is what I've been noticing this past week! There have been a handful of videos that looked quite uncanny but were from creators I knew, and a few from unknown sources I completely skipped over because they looked suspect.

Have to say, I am not a fan of the AI sharpening filter at all. Would much prefer the low res videos.

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

#265

Post by eqvinox »

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.)

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

#266

Post by mvdtnz »

rurp wrote: post #216
netdur wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

"Editing" implies they are applying some kind of editorial change. From what I've seen it's a sharpening/upscaling filter to improve visual quality. If your issue is that Youtube is changing the quality of the video, well, they have been doing that since the very first video every uploaded to Youtube. All Youtube videos are compressed, they have always had that ugly softness to them.

I'm not seeing the outrage here.

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

#267

Post by ta8645 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #201
ta8645 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc. I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technop…

Reading leads to the actual thoughts in our brains. It's a form of self programming. So yeah, it's OK for people to care about what they consume.

And shovelling leads to actual muscles in our arms. People said that calculators would be the end of mathematical intelligence too, but it turns out to be largely a non-issue. People might not be as adept at calculating proper change in their heads today, but does it have a real-world consequence of note? Not really.

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

#268

Post by ta8645 »

os2warpman wrote: post #122
ta8645 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc. I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technop…

There is a difference. Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used. If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind. Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse. Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insi…

> Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Your bias is showing through.

For what it's worth, it has made everything I use it for, much better. I can search the web for things on the net in mere seconds, where previously it could often take hours of tedious searching and reading.

And it used to be that Youtube comments were an absolute shit show of vitriol and bickering. A.I. moderation has made it so that now it's often a very pleasant experience chatting with people about video content.

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

#269

Post by anigbrowl »

ta8645 wrote: post #103
hliyan wrote: post #83

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…

My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc. I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technop…

When I see an argument like this I'm inclined to assume the author is motivated by jealousy or some strange kind of nihilism. Reminds me of the comment the other day expressing perplexity over why anyone would learn a new language instead of relying on machine translation.

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

#270

Post by anigbrowl »

JdeBP wrote: post #210
conradfr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other day he posted about the abusive copyright claims he has to deal with that cost him a lot of money and could maybe have his channels closed.

Although xe lays the blame for those at the feet of Universal Music Group, not YouTube. Apparently, UMG simply refuses to learn from the experience of having thousands of copyright claims rejected on fair use grounds. It's almost as if there's a mindless robot submitting the claims to YouTube. Perish the thought! (-:

Can you please stop doing that
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