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!

Probably to reduce storage costs

Perceived quality? They tried to pull an "everything 4k@60Hz" for their 360p@30Hz low poly Stadia content as well.

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.

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.

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.

xkcd 2015 closer than you think due to the magical technology of money https://xkcd.com/2015/

I mean is Rick Beato, he tries really hard to have the most polarizing opinion every single time.

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.

Maybe that statement was just an AI edit and he actually said "YouTube is an evil scourge upon the planet".

> It's most glaringly obvious in TV shows. Scenes from The Big Bang Theory look like someone clumsily tries to paint over the scenes with oil paint. It's as if the actors are wearing an inch thick layer of poorly applied makeup.

This might be the uploaders doing to avoid copyright strikes.

There are shorts blocker addons available.

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.

Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?

> 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.

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.

Those translations are not only unwanted but also ridiculously bad (which is part of the reason why they're unwanted, I guess). I have to translate back to the original English, as far as that's even possible, to get an idea of what the video might be about.

Who in his right mind thought this was a good idea??

I have a Firefox extension which tries to suppress the translations, but it only works for the main view, not for videos in the sidebar. It's better than nothing.

The "can not turn off" part is the most jarring. Seriously, did none of Californian PMs hear about the concept of "being multilingual" and not needing to translate non-English content?

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By the way, this reminds me also of another stupid Google thing related to languages:

Say your Chrome is set to English. When encountering another language page, Chrome will (since a decade ago or so) helpfully ask you to auto-translate by default. When you click a button "Never translate <language>", it will add language to the list which is sent out to every HTTP request the browser makes via `Accept-Language` header (it's not obvious this happens unless you're the kind of person who lives in DevTools and inspects outgoing traffic).

Fast-forward N years, Chrome privacy team realizes this increases fingerprinting surface, making every user less unique, so they propose this: "Reduce fingerprinting in Accept-Language header information" (https://chromestatus.com/feature/5188040623390720)

So basically they compensate for one "feature" with another, instead of not doing the first thing in the first place.

Nobody asked for it and you can't find discourse on the subject or give it a name, I've never had a feature made me feel more gas-lit. And I pay for premium dammit.

This one is the worst. I can't imagine the thought process behind it. How on earth it was seen as a wanted feature, and especially without a simple way to disable it? This feels like they used AI to code this AI thing in.

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.

> 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.

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.