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!
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.
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.
Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.
To solve this problem of adding compute heavy processing to serving videos, they will need to cache the output of the AI, which uses up the storage you say they are saving.
Neural compression wouldn't be like HVEC, operating on frames and pixels. Rather, these techniques can encode entire features and optical flow, which can explain the larger discrepancies. Larger fingers, slightly misplaced items, etc.
Neural compression techniques reshape the image itself.
If you've ever input an image into `gpt-image-1` and asked it to output it again, you'll notice that it's 95% similar, but entire features might move around or average out with the concept of what those items are.
Google has already matched H.266. And this was over a year ago.
They've probably developed some really good models for this and are silently testing how people perceive them.
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.
Video compression operates on macroblocks and calculates motion vectors of those macroblocks between frames.
When you push it to the limit, the macroblocks can appear like they're swimming around on screen.
Some decoders attempt to smooth out the boundaries between macroblocks and restore sharpness.
The giveaway is that the entire video is extremely low quality. The compression ratio is extreme.
Though there is a LOT of room to subtly train many kinds of lossy compression systems, which COULD still imply they're doing this intentionally. And it looks like shit.
It looks like they're compressing the data before it gets further processed with the traditional suite of video codecs. They're relying on the traditional codecs to serve, but running some internal first pass to further compress the data they have to store.
I don't think that's actually what's up, but I don't think it's completely ruled out either.
A legal experiment for sure. Hope everyone involved can clear their schedules for hearings in multiple jurisdictions for a few years.
That doesn't include all of the transcoding and alternate formats stored, either.
People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS.
Google doesn't even say they'll keep your videos. They reserve the right to delete them, transcode them, degrade them, use them in AI training, etc.
It's a free service.
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.
"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
"Non-technical" isn't an insult.
What you call "well actually"ing is well within limits on a technical forum.
It is bad enough we can deepfake anyone. If we also pretend it was uploaded by you the sky is the limit.
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
No need to downplay it.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also, no one else can bear the shear amount of traffic and cost
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop
Examples:
https://blog.metaphysic.ai/what-is-neural-compression/
See this paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11379
Look at figure 5 and beyond.
Here's one such Google paper:
None of which overrides what the law says or can do.
> It's a free service
I've paid for it. Don't anymore, in large part because of crap like this reducing content quality.
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.