zlacker

The examples shown in the links are not filters for aesthetics. These are clearly experiments in data compression

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.

>>echelo+(OP)
Why would data compression make his eyes bigger?

>>echelo+(OP)
"My, what big eyes you have, Grandmother." "All the better to compress you with, my dear."

>>randyc+T
Because it's a neural technique, not one based on pixels or frames.

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.

>>echelo+(OP)
Whatever the purpose, it's clearly surreptitious.

> 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?

>>echelo+J2
Like a visual version of psychoacoustic compression. Neat. Thanks for sharing.

>>echelo+(OP)
Activism fatigue is a thing today.

>>echelo+(OP)
Agreed. It looks like over-aggressive adaptive noise filtering, a smoothing filter and some flavor of unsharp masking. You're correct that this is targeted at making video content compress better which can cut streaming bandwidth costs for YT. Noise reduction targets high-frequency details, which can look similar to skin smoothing filters.

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.

>>mrandi+Vn
I agree I don't really think there's anything here besides compression algos being tested. At the very least, I'd need to see far far more evidence of filters being applied than what's been shared in the thread. But having worked at social media in the past I must correct you on one thing

>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.