YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Motives for AI Processing

  • Many argue the core goal is maximizing “perceived quality” and thus watch time, retention, and ad revenue, especially for Shorts.
  • Others speculate about:
    • Reducing storage/bandwidth via more compressible, denoised video.
    • Polluting scraped training data so competitors get only distorted video.
    • Gradually normalizing the “AI look” so future fully AI-generated content blends in.
  • A more mundane theory: an internal project that “kind of worked” got shipped because some metric improved.

Impact on Visual Quality

  • Several users say the effect is obvious on Shorts: a plasticky or painted look, thick “makeup,” or uncanny skin and fabric details, especially in TV/film clips and animation.
  • Some note this kind of look is already common from uploaders themselves, especially to avoid copyright detection.
  • Others who watched side‑by‑side comparisons mostly see mild sharpening/denoising and don’t consider it dramatic.

Compression, Storage, and Technical Framing

  • Some see this as just aggressive denoising to ease compression and reduce buffering, akin to an extra lossy step like a codec change.
  • Critics counter that it’s still an aesthetic change and in some cases degrades detail or distorts shapes (ears, wrinkles, animation line art).

Consent, Control, and Terms

  • A key complaint: YouTube altered appearance without notice, toggle, or attribution; creators who carefully light, shoot, and grade their work feel undermined.
  • Others respond that YouTube already recompresses, resizes, and tone‑maps everything; TOS explicitly allow derivative processing, so this is another step in that pipeline.
  • Line of disagreement: is this still “just rendering/compression” or is it “editing” the work?

Shorts, Auto‑Dubbing, and Enshitification

  • Many are already frustrated by:
    • Shorts being pushed everywhere and hard to hide.
    • Auto‑dubbing and auto‑translation of titles/audio in robotic voices, with no global off‑switch.
  • Some see these features, plus opaque moderation and monetization, as part of a broader pattern of hostility to both users and creators.

Broader Fears About AI and Authenticity

  • Commenters extrapolate to worries about:
    • Videos and, later, text being silently “polished” until everything feels samey and inauthentic.
    • Platforms eventually replacing human creators with fully synthetic personas and content.
  • Others dismiss this as AI panic: enhancement ML is already routine in phones and TVs, and concern is overblown given the small visual changes.

Reaction to YouTube’s Clarification

  • YouTube later called it a limited Shorts “experiment” using traditional ML (no GenAI, no upscaling) to unblur/denoise.
  • Some find that reasonable and comparable to smartphone post‑processing.
  • Others see it as classic “we’re just improving quality for you” spin and argue any such experiment should be opt‑in or at least clearly labeled.