YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission
113 comments
·August 24, 2025hliyan
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 it, but it feels like something is wearing the skin of what you wrote as a face.
dsign
The well is already poisoned. I'm refraining from hiring editors merely because I suspect there's a high chance they'll just use an LLM. All recent books I'm reading is with suspicion that they have been written by AI.
However, polished to a point that we humans start to lose our unique tone is what style guides that go into the minutiae of comma placement try do do. And I'm currently reading a book I'm 100% sure has been edited by an expert human editor that did quite the job of taking away all the uniqueness of the work. So, we can't just blame the LLMs for making things more gray when we have historically paid other people for it.
reactordev
There never been a better time to collect analog.
ta8645
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 technophobia has before.
bgwalter
DDT has been banned, nuclear reactors have been banned in Germany, many people want to ban internal combustion engines, supersonic flight has been banned.
Moreover, most people have more attachment to their own thoughts or to reading the unaltered, genuine thoughts of other humans than to a hole in the ground. The comment you respond to literally talks about the Orwellian aspects of altering someone's works.
carlosjobim
The only way to know for sure that something was written by a human: It contains racism, or any other opinion AIs are forbidden to express.
Now imagine the near future of the Internet, when all people have to do adapt to that in order to not be dismissed as AI.
delecti
Most of the big LLMs have those restrictions, but not all.
anon191928
Maybe it's time for people to realize that you create product inside a product. Those T&S didnt write themselves. Not defending them.
This is what tech bros in SV built and they all love it.
thisisit
Everything has to be produced on an assembly line. No mistakes allowed. Especially creativity. /s
lolc
> "You know, YouTube is constantly working on new tools and experimenting with stuff," Beato says. "They're a best-in-class company, I've got nothing but good things to say. YouTube changed my life."
My despondent brain auto-translated that to: "My livelihood depends on Youtube"
ThatMedicIsASpy
As a consumer they are the most hostile platform to consume a video the way I want. Not the way they want me to. I am also required to use an adblocker to disable all shorts.
BrenBarn
Maybe that statement was just an AI edit and he actually said "YouTube is an evil scourge upon the planet".
conradfr
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.
roenxi
I push back on the idea there is anything despondent there. If YouTube was enabling my lifestyle I'd be pretty happy about the situation and certainly not about to start piling public pressure on them. These companies get enough hate from roving bands of angry internet denizens.
Touching up videos is bad but it is hardly material to break out the pitchforks compared to some of the political manoeuvres YouTube has been involved in.
lomase
I mean is Rick Beato, he tries really hard to have the most polarizing opinion every single time.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
xkcd 2015 closer than you think due to the magical technology of money https://xkcd.com/2015/
null
yogorenapan
Wow, that xkcd really scares me. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It's definitely something that could realistically happen in the near future, maybe even mandated by the EU
Dilettante_
Google People[1] vibes
npteljes
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 this is an experiment, I guess that all this noise serves as a feedback to YouTube.
whamlastxmas
‘Member journalism? When any effort was actually made for news articles?
Waterluvian
Last week I went to buy a Philip K Dick eBook while on vacation. It was only $2 and my immediate thought was, “what are the odds this is some weird pirated version that’s full of errors? What if it’s some American version that’s been self-censored by Amazon to be approved by the government? What if it’s been AI enhanced in some way?”
Just the consideration of these possibilities was enough to shake the authenticity of my reality.
Even more unsettling is when I contemplate what could be done about data authenticity. There are some fairly useful practical answers such as an author sharing the official checksum for a book. But, ultimately, authenticity is a fleeting quality and I can’t stop time.
thisisauserid
You're obviously reading way too much Philip K Dick. You need to make it more about personal identity crisis though, not just reality in general.
Waterluvian
Alas, in this economy I cannot afford drug-induced paranoia.
Peritract
If AI is as wonderful and world-changing as people claim, it's odd that it's being inserted into products exactly like every other solution in search of a problem.
chinathrow
> 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?
npteljes
>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?
estimator7292
Someone at google needs this promotion to feel like a real man
rschiavone
They turned their brains off many years ago. Now it's all about AI, showing ads down our throats and keep children hooked to their iPads.
Mountain_Skies
PM to everyone else: what are you going to do, publish on Odysee?
As long as YouTube continues to be the Jupiter sized gorilla in the room, they're not going to care very much about what the plebes think.
vaenaes
[dead]
Springtime
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 heavily.
Perhaps this was done to optimize video encoding, since the less noise/surface detail there is the easier it is to compress.
alex1138
Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?
makeitdouble
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.
wolrah
> - shorts (they're fine in a separate space, just not in the timeline)
No they're not. Nothing that mandates vertical video has ever been fine nor ever will be. Tiktok, Reels, Shorts, all bad and should be destroyed.
Unless the action is primarily vertical, which is rarely ever the case, it's always been and always will be wrong.
Yes I will die on this hill. Videos that are worse to watch on everything but a phone and have bad framing for most content are objectively bad.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of short videos of course, but this "built for phones, sucks for everything else" trash needs to go away.
chii
> 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.
master-lincoln
SmartTube for Android TV can do that
FirmwareBurner
Use the Unhook extension
artninja1988
Just don't watch them?
moi2388
How does that remove them?
seb1204
Easy on the website. Very click and swipe intensive on the phone in my opinion. Shorts are front and centre of the app and the search screens. I don't see any feed of suggested videos anymore.
globular-toast
Just don't smoke/eat junk/do drugs etc. They put addictive shit in your face and force you to use their bloated interface to access the service.
djmips
If we take them at their word then it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy.
QuantumNomad_
> it's just an extension of technology to optimize video... and it's called AI because buzzwords and hence controversy.
The controversy is that YouTube is making strange changes to the videos of users, that make the videos look fake.
YouTube creators put hours upon hours on writing, shooting and editing their videos. And those that do it full time often depend on YouTube and their audience for income.
If YouTube messes up the videos of creators and makes the videos look like they are fake, of course the creators are gonna be upset!
zozbot234
> Perhaps this was done to optimize video encoding, since the less noise/surface detail there is the easier it is to compress.
If so it's really just another kind of lossy compression. No different in principle from encoding a video to AV-1 format.
Springtime
Given the denoising is said to be aggressive enough to be noticeable on already compressed video I think criticism of it is fair. Just that it should be distinguished from something like Tiktok's 'beautifier' modifications, which from titles like the BBC's come to mind.
ollysb
I've seem some game of thrones clips recently in youtube shorts which looked like they'd been generated by ai. I couldn't understand why anyone would have done that to the original good looking material. The only thing I could think was that it was some kind of copyright evasion.
pnt12
As a fan of the early seasons, I get lots of suggestions for Got clips. I assume that's done by the author to get around copy right blocks. Quite often they also add music, which would make it easier to get around sound detection.
I haven't noticed it outside copyrighted material, so it's probably intentional.
Gigachad
The most charitable interpretation is it’s a very aggressive form of video compression. Denoising to reduce data and speed up video loads.
Cthulhu_
Isn't this similar to what e.g. Instagram and co have done for ages? Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras.
Frieren
> Even smartphones do it automatically for you, digital post-processing to compensate for the limitations of the cameras.
The level of post-processing matters. There is a difference between color grading an image and removing wrinkles from a face.
The line is not cut clear but these companies are pushing the boundaries so we get used to fake imagery. That is not good.
ricardobeat
I’ve been using Instagram since the beginning and don’t think it has ever applied any kind of filter or AI upscaling, unrequested.
Maybe you’re thinking of TikTok and samsung facial smoothing filters? Those are a lot more subtle and can be turned off.
jszymborski
So I feel like article doesn't address the "why" of it all. Why auto AI upscale?
hleszek
Maybe it's to make it more difficult to train AI video models from YouTube. Think about it, they have the raw footage so could use it if they want, but competitors using scrapers will have slightly distorted video sources.
michaelt
Here's how I imagine it went:-
1. See that AI upscaling works kinda well on certain illustrations.
2. Start a project to see if you can do the same with video.
3. Develop 15 different quality metrics, trying to capture what it means when "it looks a bit fake"
4. Project's results aren't very good, but it's embarrassing to admit failure.
5. Choose a metric which went up, declare victory, put it live in production.
fcpguru
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!
avasan
Is the visual quality really boosted? It seems to give a very distinctive, almost uncanny-valley look to the video.
tovej
AI upscale does not improve quality imo, I'd much prefer to watch grainy vhs originals to AI upscaled ones that insert weird shapes in the image.
This is especially bad in animation, where the art gets visibly distorted.
justsomehnguy
There are people out there who can vote and can (sometimes) buy and drink alcohol and who never used VHS in any capacity.
And a new generation what is trained on a constantly enabled face filters and 'AI'-upscaled slop is already here.
hulitu
> Boost visual quality
So to make edible stuff from shit.
therein
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.
Maken
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.
artemisart
> 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.
antiloper
There's also the on-by default, can't be disabled, auto-dubbing YouTube performs on every video that's not in the single browser's language. The dubbing quality is poor for the same reason, to intentionally expose viewers to AI content.
It's 100% a push to remove human creators from the equation entirely.
anal_reactor
That's exactly it. All social media platforms are experimenting with replacing humans with AI.
josefx
Perceived quality? They tried to pull an "everything 4k@60Hz" for their 360p@30Hz low poly Stadia content as well.
pier25
Probably to reduce storage costs
avasan
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?
pier25
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.
kace91
The recent sinking in quality of youtube as a platform has been awful to watch.
Just a couple days ago I got an ad with a Ned Flanders singing about the causes of erectyle dysfunction (!), a huge cocktail of copyright infringement, dangerous medical advice and AI generated slop. Youtube answered the report telling me they've reviewed and found nothing wrong.
The constant low quality, extremely intertwined ads start to remind me of those of shady forums and porn pages of the nineties. I'm expecting them to start advertising heroine now they've decided short term profits trump everything else.
When you upload a video to YT, it's heavily compressed. Your pristine creation is converted 10 ways to Sunday, which then can be played back in a variety of formats, speeds, and platforms. Long before you even uploaded that video, you agreed to this process, by agreeing to Youtube's T&C's.
People may be upset, and I get that. But it's not like the videos were in their original format anyway. If you want to maintain perfect video fidelity, you wouldn't choose YouTube. You chose YouTube because it's the path of least resistance. You wanted massive reach and a dead simple monetization route.