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
People in the media business have long found their media sells better if they use photoshop-or-whatever to give their subjects bigger chests, defined waists, clearer skin, fewer wrinkles, less shiny skin, more hair volume.
Traditional manual photoshop tries to be subtle about such changes - but perhaps going from edits 0.5% of people can spot to bigger edits 2% of people can spot pays off in increased sales/engagement/ad revenue from those that don't spot the edits.
And we all know every tech company is telling every department to shoehorn AI into their products anywhere they can.
If I'm a Youtube product manager and adding a mandatory makeup filter doesn't need much compute; increases engagement overall; and gets me a $50k bonus for hitting my use-more-AI goal for the year - a little thing like authenticity might not stop me.
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.
https://blog.metaphysic.ai/what-is-neural-compression/
Instead of artifacts in pixels, you'll see artifacts in larger features.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11379
Look at figure 5 and beyond.
> This level of AI paranoia is getting annoying.
Lets be straight here, AI paranoia is near the top of the most propagated subjects across all media right now, probably for worse. If it's not "Will you ever have a job again!?" it's "Will your grandparents be robbed of their net worth!?" or even just "When will the bubble pop!? Should you be afraid!? YES!!!" and also in places like Canada where the economy is predictably crashing because of decades of failures, it's both the cause and answer to macro economic decline. Ironically/suspiciously it's all the same re-hashed redundant takes by everyone from Hank Green to CNBC to every podcast ever, late night shows, radio, everything.
So to me the target of one's annoyance should be the propaganda machine, not the targets of the machine. What are people supposed to feel, totally chill because they have tons of control?
The people fixated on "...but it made eyes bigger" are missing the point. YouTube has zero motivation to automatically apply "photo flattery filters" to all videos. Even if a "flattery filter" looked better on one type of face, it would look worse on another type of face. Plus applying ANY kind of filter to a million videos an hour costs serious money.
I'm not saying YouTube is an angel. They absolutely deploy dark patterns and user manipulation at massive scale - but they always do it to make money. Automatically applying "flattery filters" to videos wouldn't significantly improve views, advertising revenue or cut costs. Improving compression would do all three. Less bandwidth reduces costs, smaller files means faster start times as viewers jump quickly from short to short and that increases revenue because more different shorts per viewer/minute = more ad avails to sell.
>Automatically applying "flattery filters" to videos wouldn't significantly improve views, advertising revenue or cut costs.
You can't know this. Almost everything at YouTube is probably A/B tested heavily and many times you get very surprising results. Applying a filter could very well increase views and time spent on app enough to justify the cost.
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.
As it is, when a video has a catchy clickbait title, I screenshot the thumbnail and have ChatGPT give me the solution. Or I’ll copy the URL into a transcript fetcher and feed that into Gemini so I can ask specific questions.
He who clickbaits is demoted to the role of “Suggest a topic for me to ask ChatGPT about”.
Given the contrast between my usual logged-in Youtube feed, and the rampant sea of unfettered clickbait I see when I've been logged out on any particular device.
He who clickbaits is therefore demoted to the role of seldom or never being seen [by me] at all.
This makes sense: If the algorithm exists to increase viewership and engagement, then the algorithm therefore serves to show me stuff that I'll watch. It does not serve to present to me things that I will not watch.
And it works. I can't even find any clickbaity material right now to reference.
It's pretty great.
A lot of folks here hate AI and YouTube and Google and stuff, but it would be more productive to hate them for what they are actually doing.
But most people here are just taking this headline at face value and getting pitchforks out. If you try to watch the makeup guy’s proof, it’s talking about Instagram (not YouTube), doesn’t have clean comparisons, is showing a video someone sent back to him, which probably means it’s a compression artifact, not a face filter that the corporate overlords are hiding from the creator. It is not exactly a smoking gun, especially for a technical crowd.
That being said, I don't believe they should be doing anything like this without the creator's explicit consent. I do personally think there's probably a good use case for machine learning / neural network tech applied to the clean up of low-quality sources (for better transcoding that doesn't accumulate errors & therefore wastes bitrate), in the same way that RTX Video Super Resolution can do some impressive deblocking & upscaling magic[2] on Windows. But clearly they are completely missing the mark with whatever experiment they were running there.
[1] https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bj1qbwcklg
[2] compare https://i.imgur.com/U6vzssS.png & https://i.imgur.com/x63o8WQ.jpeg (upscaled 360p)
> "Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as something particularly egregious; it leads a viewer to see a reality that never existed, and that the creator never intended.
YouTube is not applying any "face filters" or anything of the sort. They did however experiment with AI upscaling the entire image which is giving the classic "bad upscale" smeary look.
Like I said, I think that's still bad and they should have never done it without the clear explicit consent of the creator. But that is, IMO, very different and considerably less bad than changing someone's face specifically.
Here's some other creators also talking about it happening in youtube shorts: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeautyGuruChatter/comments/1notyzo/...
another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjnQ-s7LW-g
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1mw0tuz/youtube_is...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
If you open the context of the comment, they are specifically talking about the bad, entire-image upscaling that gives the entire picture the oily smeary look. NOT face filters.
EDIT : same thing with the two other links you edited into your comment while I was typing my reply.
Again, I'm not defending YouTube for this. But I also don't think they should be accused of doing something they're not doing. Face filters without consent are a far, far worse offense than bad upscaling.
I would like to urge you to be more cautious, and to actually read what you brandish as proof.
There’s already popular subreddits (something blursed ai I think) where people upload this type of content and it’s getting decent engagement it seems
It seems like a minor difference, but the undifferentiated unlabeled short form addiction feed is much worse.
Reddit has been heading that way though. It hasn’t gone all in yet.
And over time the AI content will improve enough where it becomes impossible and then the Great AI Swappening will occur.
And what for? Tiktok creators already generate content for them
There’s a component of people around here who will shrug or even cheer. That’s because we are losing any belief in compassion or optimism about uplifting humanity. When I really think about it, it’s terrifying.
We are headed for a world where normal people just step over the dying, and where mass exploitation of the “weak” gets a shrug or even approval. Already there in some areas and sectors.
Is this the world you want, folks? Unfortunately I’ve met a disturbing number of people who would say yes.
Now consider that this includes children, whose childhood is being stolen by chum feeds. This includes your own relatives. This includes your friend who maybe has a bit of an addictive personality who gets sucked into gambling apps and has their life ruined. Or it’s you, maybe, though I get the sense there’s a lot of “high IQ” people who think they can’t be conned.
It's like society doesn't exist any more, and adults not having to jump through some hoops to so they can wank off is a price kids have to pay by having hardcore porn easily accessible or a miss-click away.
It's defended with some nonsense about their privacy or "rights". Or a straw man where suddenly all information becomes "censored".
LLM/generative "content" is going to make online culture even worse (if that even seems possible).
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/05/ai-deepfakes...
I don't understand the justification for the expense or complexity.
The key section:
> Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, acknowledged in a post on X that the company was running “a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
So the "AI edits" are just a compression algorithm that is not that great.
It looks like quality cleanup, but I can’t imagine many creators aren’t using decent camera tech and editing software for shorts.
And as you say, arbitrarily applying quality cleanup is making assumptions of the quality and creative intent of the submitted videos. It would be one thing if creators were uploading raw camera frames to YouTube (which is what smartphone camera apps are receiving as input when shooting video), but applying that to videos that have already been edited/processed and vetted for release is stepping over a line to me. At the very least it should be opt-in (ideally with creators having the ability to preview the output before accepting to publish it).
So counterintuitively, noise reduction improves compression ratios. In fact many video codecs are about determining which portion of the video IS noise that can be discarded, and which bits are visually important...
Or to put it another way, to me it would be similarly disingenuous to describe e.g. dead code elimination or vector path simplification as "just a compression algorithm" because the resultant output is smaller than it would be without. I think part of what has my hackles raised is that it claims to improve video clarity, not to optimise for size. IMO compression algorithms do not and should not make such claims; if an algorithm has the aim (even if secondary) to affect subjective quality, then it has a transformative aspect that requires both disclosure and consent IMO.
It's in the loop of the compression and decompression algorithm.
Video compression has used tricks like this for years. For example, reducing noise before decode and then adding it back in after the decode cycle. Visual noise doesn't need to be precise, so it removing it before compression and then approximating it on the other end saves a lot of bits.
I think the first comment is why they would position noise reduction as being both part of their compression and a way to improve video clarity.
And then the discourse is so riddled with misnomers and baited outrage that it goes nowhere.
The other example in submitted post isn't 'edits to videos' but rather the text descriptions of automated captions. The Gemini/AI engine not being very good at summarizing is a different issue.
Strongly recommend. We’ll get local AIs that can skip the cruft soon enough anyway.
You can see it on many MANY channel thumbnails now. At least with the people I follow. I'm not a fan.
Picking out the most relevant frame in the video was better.
I just completely despair. What the fuck happened to the internet? Absolutely none of these CEOs give a shit. People need to face real punishments
It's the other way around isn't it? "AI" is a subset of ML.
No, gen AI is a subset of machine learning.
Other subfields of AI include things like search, speech and language understanding, knowledge representation, and so on. There’s a lot more to AI than machine learning and a lot more to machine learning than LLMs (“gen AI”).
I wonder if it will end up being treated as part of a codec instead of edits to the base film, and can then be re-run to undo the video's?
It feels like there needs to be a way to verify that what you uploaded is what's on the site.
There is no way Google thinks it's in their interest to serve up clean data to anyone but themselves.
ffmpeg -i source.mkv -i suspect.mkv -filter_complex "blend=all_mode=difference" diff_output.mkv
I saw these claims before but still have not found someone to show a diff or post the source for comparison. It would be interesting.
Edit: The changes made by the ai are a lot more vissible in the higher quality video uploaded to patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/136994036 (this was also linked in the pinned comment on the youtube video)
Also, minus 100 points to Jill for being happy about being able to use AI to automatically edit out all the silence from her videos. That's far more annoying than any barely perceptible visual artifacts.
Why do people think wall-of-text videos are good?
We need more people experimenting with creating a better platform for content creators. Not least so people like Beato, but not as well known, don't constantly get harassed by fraudulent and incorrect copyright infringement claims.
OR they need to justify the mountain of money they burned on AI somehow.
Also there are alternatives to Youtube in the Fediverse like PeerTube.
I have a funny attitude towards Google: I am a big privacy nut, have read the principle books on privacy, etc. That said, usually running all Google web properties in DuckDuckGo web browser, I tweak my privacy settings, etc. and then still use Google properties.
YouTube is probably the highest value Google property for me (despite Gemini use, love using Google Cloud Platform, etc.)
I find that the availability of an infinite number of Qi Gong exercise videos, philosophy, tiny bit of politics, science, and nature videos that is it almost infinitely better than HBO, Netflix, etc. I am a paid subscriber to all these services so I am comparing Apples to Apples here.
I do hate spending 10 seconds opening a video and realizing that it was created artificially, but I immediately stop watching it so the overhead isn’t too bad.
One new feature I really like is if I am watching a long philosophy or science video, I paste the URI into Gemini and ask for a summary and to use what Gemini knows about me to suggest ways the material jives with my specific interests. After watching a long video it is very much worth my time getting a summary and comments that also pull in other references.
Sorry for the noisy reply here, but I am saying to use Google properties mindfully, balancing pros and cons, and just use the parts that are useful and only open up sharing private information when you get something tangible for it.
The videos on the start page are still misaligned. Which looks almost hilariously amateurish.
randycupertino•2mo ago
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!
adzm•2mo ago
reactordev•2mo ago
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•2mo ago
sodapopcan•2mo ago
benoau•2mo ago
mitthrowaway2•2mo ago
api•2mo ago
gessha•2mo ago
mhdhn•2mo ago
Bombthecat•2mo ago
Also, no one else can bear the shear amount of traffic and cost
Aurornis•2mo ago
To me, this clearly looks like a case of a very high compression ratio with the motion blocks swimming around on screen. They might have some detail enhancement in the loop to try to overcome the blockiness which, in this case, results in the swimming effect.
It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum. It should be a dead giveaway that this is a compression issue because the entire video is obviously highly compressed and lacking detail.
maxbond•2mo ago
If your compression pipeline gives people anime eyes because it's doing "detail enhancement", your compression pipeline is also a filter. If you apply some transformation to a creator's content, and then their viewers perceive that as them disingenuously using a filter, and your response to their complaints is to "well actually" them about whether it is a filter or a compression artifact, you've lost the plot.
To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way. Regardless of whether they are technical, they are living in a world increasingly intermediated by technology, and we should be listening to their feedback on it. They have to live with the consequences of our design decisions. If we believe them to be non-technical, we should extend a lot of generosity to them in their use of terminology, and address what they mean instead of nitpicking.
panxyh•2mo ago
"Non-technical" isn't an insult.
What you call "well actually"ing is well within limits on a technical forum.
maxbond•2mo ago
Aurornis•2mo ago
I agreed that the output was bad! I'm not dismissing their concerns, I was explaining that their analysis was not a good technical explanation for what was happening.
Aurornis•2mo ago
I'm not critiquing their opinion that the result is bad. I also said the result was bad! I was critiquing the fact that someone on HN was presenting their non-technical analysis as a conclusive technical fact.
Non-technical is describing their background. It's not an insult.
I will be the first to admit I have no experience or knowledge in their domain, and I'm not going to try to interpret anything I see in their world.
It's a simple fact. This person is not qualified to be explaining what's happening, yet their analysis was being repeated as conclusive fact here on a technical forum
maxbond•2mo ago
I don't really see where you said the output was "bad," you said it was a compression artifact which had a "swimming effect", but I don't really see any acknowledgement that the influencer had a point or that the transformation was functionally a filter because it changed their appearance above and beyond losing detail (made their eyes bigger in a way an "anime eyes" filter might).
If I've misread you I apologize but I don't really see where it is I misread you.
panxyh•2mo ago
He's getting his compassionate nodding and emotional support in the comments over there.
I agree that him being non-technical shouldn't be discussion-ending in this case, but it is a valid observation, wether necessary or not.
maxbond•2mo ago
popalchemist•2mo ago
xboxnolifes•2mo ago
Aurornis•2mo ago
Such as?
This seems like such an easy thing for someone to document with screenshots and tests against the content they uploaded.
So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening? If this is common, please share some examples (that aren't in Instagram reel format from non-technical influencers)
maxbond•2mo ago
It's difficult for me to read this as anything other than dismissing this person's views as being unworthy of discussing because they are are "non-technical," a characterization you objected to, but if you feel this shouldn't be the top level comment I'd suggest you submit a better one.
Here's a more detailed breakdown I found after about 15m of searching, I imagine there are better sources out there if you or anyone else cares to look harder: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_sh...
To me it's fairly subtle but there's a waxy texture to the second screenshot. This video presents some more examples, some of them have are more textured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86nhP8tvbLY
ffsm8•2mo ago
maxbond•2mo ago
Perhaps a useful analogy is "breaking userspace." It's important to correctly diagnose a bug breaking userspace to ship a fix. But it's a bug if its a change that breaks userspace workflows, full stop. Whether it met the letter of some specification and is "correct" in that sense doesn't matter.
If you change someone's appearance in your post processing to the point it looks like they've applied a filter, your post processing is functionally a filter. Whether you intended it that way doesn't change that.
hombre_fatal•2mo ago
No need to downplay it.
maxbond•2mo ago
ETA: I rewatched the video to the end, and I do see that they pose the question about whether it is targeted at certain content at the very end of the video. I had missed that, and I don't think that's what's happening.
DonHopkins•2mo ago
whstl•2mo ago
Rheet Shull's video is quite high quality and shows it.
When it was published I went to Youtube's website and saw Rick Beato's short video mentioned by him and it was clearly AI enhanced.
I used to work with codec people and have them as friends for years so what TFA is talking about is definitely not something a codec would do.
b112•2mo ago
After posting a cogent explanation as to why integrated AI filtering is just that, and not actually part of the codec, Youtube creates dozens of channels with AI-generated personalities, all explaining how you're nuts.
These channels and videos appear on every webpage supporting your assertions, including being top of results on search. Oh, and AI summaries on Google searxh, whenever the top is searched too.
cromka•2mo ago
veeti•2mo ago
sofixa•2mo ago
Also the voice is pretty unemotional and nothing to do with the original voice. And it being a default that you can't even seem to disable...
TRiG_Ireland•2mo ago
I am by no means fluent in French, but I speak it well enough to get by with the aid of the subtitles, so that was fine. In an ideal world, I'd have the original French audio with English subtitles, but that did not appear to be an option.
jack_pp•2mo ago
sofixa•2mo ago
watwut•2mo ago
Provide option to turn on that bad quality dubbing for those few people that want it.
And for crist sake, be transparent instead of auto translating titles so I dont even know the video was not made that badly by its original author.
hulitu•1mo ago
For Silicone Valey, it is difficult to comprehend, that people may be speaking more than 1 language. That's why you get programs in other languages than intended (phone set to English - get the English version of app) or they "offer" ( ok/not now) to translate.
baobun•2mo ago
pwdisswordfishy•2mo ago
baobun•2mo ago
machomaster•2mo ago
hulitu•1mo ago
bootsmann•2mo ago
beezlewax•2mo ago
veeti•2mo ago
taegee•2mo ago
beAbU•2mo ago
machomaster•2mo ago
account42•2mo ago
Hmmmmm.
methuselah_in•2mo ago
weird-eye-issue•2mo ago
"Meta has been doing this; when they auto-translate the audio of a video they are also adding an Al filter to make the mouth of who is speaking match the audio more closely. But doing this can also add a weird filter over all the face."
I don't know why you have to get into conspiracy theories about them applying different filters based on the video content, that would be such a weird micro optimization why would they bother with that
eloisius•2mo ago
Irishsteve•2mo ago
machomaster•2mo ago
Assuming that they did something technically impressive, but stupid again is not a conspiracy, but a reasonable assumption based on previous behavior.
Bombthecat•2mo ago
ThePowerOfFuet•2mo ago
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_