YouTube's sneaky AI 'experiment'
45 comments
·August 23, 2025rhdunn
kace91
Language is one of the silliest things in modern tech.
I speak fluent English, but my native language is Spanish. I should be the most basic case of bilingualism for an app to handle - my native language is popular, English is the poster child of second language you learn for global communication, the combination itself is common as well...
The amount of stupid assumptions apps and sites make about me is mindboggling.
"Your app and OS is set to English, you watch mostly English content, you use no subtitles and your subscriptions are mostly US-based. let's give you an extremely fake dub over the content you usually watch."
Reddit also auto translate the links I enter and makes them gibberish if I'm not logged in, chagpt switches languages halfway through a message regardless of what I use...It's becoming borderline hostile.
tavavex
It's mind-boggling and insane how hostile YT became to multilingualism. You'd think that out of the hundreds of people involved in this project, at least one would've been bilingual and experienced this hostility firsthand. I can't even come up with any explanations for how this happened, except for no one important being bilingual (or even having thought of bilingual people), and/or some kind of systemic flaw that lets these breaking changes slip into the final product.
YouTube doesn't care about the languages listed in your Google account, as everything else does. It doesn't care what content you watch. The algorithm seemingly takes your display language and forces poorly AI-translated content down your throat, more often than not completely obliterating any coherence the original video had. And this change is forced upon you, you must watch it in the language YouTube decides you have to watch it in.
There is a browser extension that reverts this behavior to how it used to be and makes YouTube load the proper audio track. What happens when that stops working?
glitchc
I'm certain it boils down to money. Someone like you (fluently bilingual) would provide the best translation but also the costliest. Every other option is cheaper, and Youtube will strive for the cheapest available.
Google Translate and Gemini are essentially free to Youtube, so why not?
tavavex
The crazy part isn't that the feature exists - I'm sure YouTube wants to make foreign content available to people who don't speak that language, and of course they can't manually translate every video in the world - it's that it's mandatory.
anal_reactor
I've been downvoted for this and I'll be downvoted again, but average user is monolingual and for them, shitty automatic translation is better than no translation. Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language. It's mind-boggling that HN users don't understand that they're not the target audience of most major platforms.
Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.
viraptor
Everyone who finished highschool with me knows at least 2 languages. Anyone who wants uni knows 3 at least vaguely. And that's in a country with a single official language. There are places with 2+ of them.
Xelbair
even if average american is...
then launch that cesspool of feature in US only.
Wowfunhappy
> but [the] average user is monolingual
That's certainly true in America, but my understanding (as an American myself) is that it's not true in much of the world! In Romania for example people speak Romanian and English; in Ukraine they speak Ukrainian and Russian. I'm not sure how this nets out in terms of the overall population of technology users, but it's a large chunk of people!
P.S. For what it's worth, I downvoted you because you said "I'll be downvoted for this", not because I thought the rest of your comment was bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
amanaplanacanal
Average American is monolingual, anyway.
kjkjadksj
60 million people in the US are spanish speakers.
tavavex
> Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language
Everything I can find online claims that ~40% of the world, if not more, is at least bilingual. It's not some crazy rare single-digit percentage trait. In some nations, multilingualism is near-universal. Do you think it's reasonable for a company like YouTube to deliver a frankly hot garbage experience with no opt-out to about half of its userbase, if not more? That's billions of people we're talking about here.
thrance
> small percentage of users speak more than one language.
Are you paid by Google to astroturf us into being accepting of their laziness? We're only asking them to allow us to specify two languages in the YouTube app, nothing more.
> Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.
Really? I happened to check this today and found no such features.
lm28469
The best part is that the TTS is somehow worse than what elevenlab had 3 years ago
stephen_g
Absolutely, I really wish you could opt-out of the auto-dubbing instead of having to select the audio manually. I'd take poorly translated auto-transcribed subtitles with the original audio basically every time over the badly auto-dubbed audio.
thrance
Or at the very least, allow us to opt-out. This automatic enabling of AI dubbing for videos in a language I can understand is maddening.
JohnTHaller
I started watching a video that was using this on desktop. I down-voted it immediately because I figured it was AI slop, as so much of YouTube is today.
NoPicklez
This has happened with articles circulating about Will Smith and his recent concert video looking AI generated.
Supposedly his video uploaded to Youtube shorts looked heavily AI generated compared to the same video uploaded to Instagram, despite the crowds and couples in the shorts being real people that were also photographed.
Workaccount2
What would be the goal here?
Technical? Some kind of super compression-decompression scheme? Model tuning to see how people react? Is there a stupid "Upscale with AI" slider that is new and default turned on?
atrettel
I think the compression idea is the most plausible, but it still doesn't make complete sense. Unless the compression scheme significantly reduced the size, I don't see why YouTube would implement something so lossy, especially without warning people beforehand.
Gigachad
Removing noise and smoothing the video would reduce the size. While also giving it that AI dream look.
zb3
Or to get promoted :)
anal_reactor
They just throw shit at everything and see what sticks. Truth is, AI does and will revolutionalize some aspects of our lives, it's just not clear what specifically. It's like we're in this weird phase when during dotcom bubble everyone tried to make everything online. Most ideas are pure unadulterated poop, but someone will indeed hit the jackpot.
OptionKitchen
I suspect they want to make natural videos look slightly more artificial so that AI generated content will look less unnatural. "close the uncanny valley" so to speak
atleastoptimal
For every erudite AI-skeptic who decries the overuse of AI and the muddy, oversaturated style AI image and upscaling models propagate, there are 10 reliable ad-watching product-purchasing users who love that aesthetic and their consumer behavior will drive towards that aesthetic being used more (for good reason, that look was fine tuned to match their preferences).
explodes
Hmm. I've been watching some old shows taken from VHS and some of them look like cursed AI upscale. One series was titled as AI upscale, and another wasn't. Both looked a bit rough. Wonder if this is why.
htrp
Google is behind on getting human feedback data and is incorporating this anywhere they can (SGE, Gemini in Gmail, Video in Youtube).
userbinator
That description sounds like what happens when the compression level of H.265 is turned up all the way. It's great for certain types of content (anime...) but not others.
jgalt212
This must be great for Google's Cloud business.
burnt-resistor
If YT ads were honest: Corporate technofeudalism: now with 30% less consent and only 10% more suck.
karmakaze
I hate it. Similar to "Remastered" on Spotify that makes everything sound the same, which I hate far more.
a57721
I think remasters are uploaded by the record labels, it's not some kind of algorithm run by Spotify.
It has loudness normalization, which can be turned off in the settings.
SoftTalker
"Remastered" = "Set loudness to 11."
They've also introduced automatic dubbing for foreign language videos. While this can be useful, I'd prefer it to be opt-in like how you can select the language for subtitles.