YouTube secretly tests AI video retouching without creators’ consent
www.ynetnews.com
Popular YouTubers Rick Beato and Rhett Shull discovered the platform was quietly altering their videos with AI; the company admits to a limited experiment, raising concerns about trust, consent and media manipulation
  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    15 minutes ago

    My rational thoughts are telling me this is just so Google can stream video at doo doo resolution to save their server bandwidth and get a simple AI model and upscaling filters on device to blow up the image to a suitable level.

    My emotional thoughts and conspiracy brain are telling me this is Google getting users used to AI slop by making legitimate human content look more like AI slop. I’ve noticed these filters occasionally and it really makes videos I know are real people more slop-like.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    18 minutes ago

    [rant]
    If you trust anything Google in '25 you’re a muppet. Or at least uninformed. Either way you’re part of the problem, and deserve to be treated as such.

    I get it’s impossible for some to completely de-googlefy their lives. Myself still use YouTube, either directly or through Piped. But there’s always that bloody risk Google will fuck with you and your digital belongings, that you need to take into account.

    So I don’t blame those two for publishing their videos in YouTube. I do blame them however for doing so exclusively. Just publish the same video across multiple platforms dammit — YouTube and PeerTube and Vimeo and Odysee and Dailymotion and everything else you find.

    inb4 “AcKsHyUaLlY Rick Beato uploaded it to Instagram too!” — it doesn’t count because:

    1. Meta is as trustable as Google; as in, may both die in a fire.
    2. Instagram is mostly focused on photos and brainrot videos (akin to TikTok). Not really a good place to share anything with more depth than a puddle.
    3. This is just a guess from my part, but odds are Rick Beato only shared the video there after realising something was off with the YouTube version of it.

    So my point still remains - they’re still putting all their eggs into the same basket.

    Someone might say “But that’s too hard! And the platforms have almost no user!”. Well… then don’t complain when Google goes like “A content creator is a user, not a human being. It’s fine to butcher its videos automatically, no need to ask its permission”. Just like it did.

    “AcKsHyUaLlY Ritchie was talking about user trust over the creator” - the same point still stands. Once you have multiple copies online you can reliably say “no, my content is genuine, it’s YouSlop doing this shit. If you want a more faithful version of the video hop into [insert alternative]”.

    Some days I really hate human short-sightedness.
    [/rant]