LogInIt's not GenAI, it's an experiment, the company argues.
Rick Beato
Video content creators always try to find the best image quality, but YouTube users don't have to worry: the platform will "fix" stuff for them – without asking.
As reported by BBC, musician Rick Beato, who has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube, noticed some slight changes in his videos, like something was not exactly right.
"I was like, 'Man, my hair looks strange', he said. "And the closer I looked, it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup. I thought, 'Am I just imagining things?'"
Another music creator, Rhett Shull, after hearing this, started examining his content and spotted the same phenomenon: "The more I looked at it, the more upset I got."
He provided two videos by Beato for comparison, and you can clearly see the difference side-by-side: one of them looks sharper, and not quite in a nice way – all thanks to YouTube's AI enhancements that target some Shorts.
As BBC mentioned, it's not only the sharp features: skin looks more defined in some places and smoother in others, wrinkles are more defined, "pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp."
The worst part of this bizarre behavior is that YouTube does it secretly, without checking for consent.
"If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening, I would have done it myself," Shull said. "But the bigger thing is it looks AI-generated. I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet. It could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience in a small way. It just bothers me."
This is not a new problem, according to internet users. In this post, created in June, you will see the details of the issue really well.
Ulincsys
TechLinked
Faced with the scrutiny, YouTube's head of editorial and creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, came clean on X/Twitter, admitting that the company has been "running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing."
"YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features."
At the same time, he said there's "no GenAI, no upscaling," which ruffled some feathers, but Ritchie explained that he is simply "precise about the terminology":
"GenAI typically refers to technologies like transformers and large language models, which are relatively new. Upscaling typically refers to taking one resolution (like SD/480p) and making it look good at a higher resolution (like HD/1080p).
"This isn't using GenAI or doing any upscaling. It's using the kind of machine learning you experience with computational photography on smartphones, for example, and it's not changing the resolution."
He added that the tech is "similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video," but Samuel Woolley, the Dietrich chair of disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, disagrees: "You can make decisions about what you want your phone to do, and whether to turn on certain features. What we have here is a company manipulating content from leading users that is then being distributed to a public audience without the consent of the people who produce the videos."
Moreover, he believes that disowning AI and insisting it's machine learning instead is "an attempt to obscure the fact that they used AI because of concerns surrounding the technology. Machine learning is in fact a subfield of artificial intelligence."
The entire situation is concerning because who knows where else we will not be given a choice. As any dystopia can tell you, saying something is for your own good and convenience is the best way of stripping away rights and power.
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