Is YouTube secretly applying an AI filter to Shorts without telling creators? I recently noticed my videos looked strange and smeary on YouTube compared to Instagram, almost like a cheap deep fake. In this video, I investigate what’s going on and why I believe it’s a massive problem for everyone on this platform.
After talking with Rick Beato and seeing discussions on Reddit about the same “oil painting” effect on videos from creators like Hank Green, it’s clear there is some kind of non-consensual AI upscaling being applied to our content. For me, this is a huge issue that threatens to erode the most important thing a creator has: the trust of their audience.
Experimenting with AI-assisted compression and reconstruction to save memory I would guess. Only matters for few people, most are not able to spot the artifacts anyway.
As the video demonstrates, the creators are part of those “few people” though and so are probably other people showing up in those videos. Many of them care about picture quality and/or what they themselves look like on the screen. They don’t want AI to mess with their videos without neither being informed, nor having any way to influence the outcome.
Of couse. But that’s already the nitpicking region. Not even one percent of the entire population can see or hear the difference. I get that the main problem isn’t the artifacts, it’s changing the content without notifying the creators or viewers. But there is nothing we can do about that aside from not uploading any content to such platforms anymore or hosting our content ourselves. They won’t stop, they’re just about to get things started and it’s going to get much worse.
This is like when Xerox sometimes copied numbers wrong because their error correction algorithms were flawed
Yes. And did it hurt Xerox? Did it have any consequences? Of course not. They keep going as if nothing ever happened. This is how every large company works. Or anything that involves a larger group of people. If you distribute responsibility enough it ultimately disappears completely.
https://dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
Sometimes it lead to class action lawsuits
But does Xerox still exist as a company? Of couse. If you worked with them and their machines you know how long the list of their fuckups is. You know how it only keeps getting larger.
Youtube is actively gunning for a top spot among the short form video giants, enough noise and pushback to doing this nonconsensually from large creators (who also stop posting shorts in the meanwhile) is likely to seriously hamstring that effort, which means lost money, which means youtube can be forced to care. They’re more vulnerable to this than, say, tiktok, who’s already at the top.
But how many people in the world will stop uploading videos realistically because of this? That would be such a small number it could barely be visualized by data analysts, it would drown in the noise. And if every video platform ends up doing the same shit, not leaving a single alternative?