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.
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.
It is bad enough we can deepfake anyone. If we also pretend it was uploaded by you the sky is the limit.
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.