YouTube caught making AI-edits to videos and adding misleading AI summaries
41 comments
·December 6, 2025randycupertino
reactordev
I can hear the ballpoint pens now…
This is going to be a huge legal fight as the terms of service you agree to on their platform is “they get to do whatever they want” (IANAL). Watch them try to spin this as “user preference” that just opted everyone into.
api
That’s the rude awakening creators get on these platforms. If you’re a writer or an artist or a musician, you own your work by default. But if you upload it to these platforms, they own it more or less. It’s there in the terms of service.
null
sodapopcan
What if someone else uploads your work?
echelon
This is an experiment in data compression.
jazzyjackson
Totally. Unfortunately it's not lossless and instead of just getting pixelated it's changing the size of body parts lol
plorg
If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired. More likely it's product managers who barely know what's going on in their departments except that there's a word "AI" pinging around that's good for their KPIs and keeps them from getting fired.
echelon
> If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired.
Seriously?
Then why is nobody in this thread suggesting what they're actually doing?
Everyone is accusing YouTube of "AI"ing the content with "AI".
What does that even mean?
Look at these people making these (at face value - hilarious, almost "cool aid" levels of conspiratorial) accusations. All because "AI" is "evil" and "big corp" is "evil".
Use occam's razor. Videos are expensive to store. Google gets 20 million videos a day.
I'm frankly shocked Google hasn't started deleting old garbage. They probably should start culling YouTube of cruft nobody watches.
jsheard
What type of compression would change the relative scale of elements within an image? None that I'm aware of, and these platforms can't just make up new codecs on the spot since they rely on browser/hardware decoders.
Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.
swatcoder
[delayed]
adzm
This is ridiculous
data-ottawa
Are these AI filters, or just applying high compression/recompressing with new algorithms (which look like smoothing out details)?
edit: here's the effect I'm talking about with lossy compression and adaptive quantization: https://cloudinary.com/blog/what_to_focus_on_in_image_compre...
The result is smoothing of skin, and applied heavily on video (as Youtube does, just look for any old video that was HD years ago) would look this way
randycupertino
It's filters, I posted an example of it below. Here is a link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_/?igsh=MTZybml2NDB...
data-ottawa
It's very hard to tell in that instagram video, it would be a lot clearer if someone overlaid the original unaltered video and the one viewers on YouTube are seeing.
That would presumably be an easy smoking gun for some content creator to produce.
There are heavy alterations in that link, but having not seen the original, and in this format it's not clear to me how they compare.
randycupertino
you can literally see the filters turn on and off making his eyes and lips bigger as he moves his face. It's clearly a face filter.
ares623
The time of giving these corps the benefit of the doubt is over.
echelon
The examples shown in the links are not filters for aesthetics. These are clearly experiments in data compression
These people are having a moral crusade against an unannounced Google data compression test thinking Google is using AI to "enhance their videos". (Did they ever stop to ask themselves why or to what end?)
This level of AI paranoia is getting annoying. This is clearly just Google trying to save money. Not undermine reality or whatever vague Orwellian thing they're being accused of.
randycupertino
Why would data compression make his eyes bigger?
AmbroseBierce
Talking about AI, Google, and shady tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if soon we discover they are purposefully adding video glitches (deformed characters and so on) in the first handful of iterations when using Veo video generation just so people gets use to trying 3 or 4 times before they getting a good one.
VTimofeenko
Well the current models that cost per output sure love wasting those tokens on telling me how I am the greatest human being ever that only asks questions which get to the very heart of $SUBJECT.
TazeTSchnitzel
The AI filter applied server-side to YouTube Shorts (and only shorts, not regular videos) is horrible, and it feels like it must be a case of deliberate boiling the frog. If everyone gets used to overly smooth skin, weirdly pronounced wrinkles, waxy hair, and strange ringing around moving objects, then AI-generated content will stand out less when they start injecting it into the feed. At first I thought this must be some client-side upscaling filter, but tragically it is not. There's no data savings at all, and there's no way for uploaders or viewers to turn it off. I guess I wasn't cynical enough.
echelon
Do you know how much data YouTube is having to store at scale?
Google isn't enhancing anything. They're compressing it.
Compressing videos could save Google an extremely large amount of money at YouTube scale.
Most of these shorts aren't even viewed more than a few times.
api
I’ve been saying for a while that the end game for addictive short form chum feeds like TikTok and YouTube Shorts is to drop human creators entirely. They’ll be AI generated slop feeds that people will scroll, and scroll, and scroll. Basically just a never ending feed of brain rot and ads.
bitwize
Yes, but what happens when the AIs themselves begin to brainrot (as happens when they are not fed their usual sustenance of information from humans and the real world)?
muppetman
They're heating the garbage slightly before serving it? Oh no.
windex
There are entire fake persona videos these days. Leading scientists, economists, politicians, tech guys, are being impersonated wholesale on youtube.
chao-
I learned to ignore the AI summaries after the first time I saw one that described the exact OPPOSITE conclusion/stance of the video it purported to summarize.
koolba
What’s the point of doing this?
I don't understand the justification for the expense or complexity.
stevenalowe
Every YT short looks AI-ified and creepy now
choilive
What PM thought this was a good idea? This has to be the result of some braindead we need more AI in the product mandate
jeeeb
I really hate all the AI filters in videos. It makes everyone look like fake humans. I find it hard to believe that anyone would actually prefer this.
superkuh
The citation chain for these mastodon reposts resolves to the Gamers Nexus piece on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE
A makeup influencer I follow noticed youtube and instagram are automatically adding filters to his face without permission to his videos. If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_/?igsh=MTZybml2NDB...
The screenshots/videos of them doing it are pretty wild, and insane they are editing creators' uploads without consent!