I'm huge into makeup, and I watch a lot of beauty content on YouTube because I want to see how certain makeup looks and performs before I buy it. This AI bullshit defeats the purpose of demonstrating makeup.
From what I've seen so far, the case here seems to be that it's only being done to shorts, and what's happening is that they're being permanently stored at a lower quality and size and are then upscaled on the fly. I mean... it feels kinda fair to me. Theres a good reason YouTube has so little competition, and it's because how hard and expensive maintaining a service like this is. They're always trying to cut costs, and storage is gonna be a big cost. Personally, I'm glad it's just shorts for now. It absolutely shouldn't be happening to people who are paying for the service or making money for it, though.
I mean yeah, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. But if it actually was reasonable, wouldn't they just inform the uploader?
Or give an option to toggle. Surely letting people turn it off would save them even more resources, if they don't have to bother with upscaling the video in the first place.
It likely costs them less to upscale than it does to store and serve a full sized video, so they're not giving the uploader the choice.
Storage is very cheap. This only makes sense if they actually do the upscaling client side
It's not so much that they down- and upscale the video of shorts, their algorithm changes the look of people. It warps skin and does a strange sort of sharpening that makes things look quite unreal and almost plastic.
It is a filter that evens the look with images generated by, say, grok or one of the other AI filters.
In a year people will think that "AI-look" is a normal video look, and stuff generated with it is what humans can look like. We will see crazed AI-fashion looks popping up.
Yeah, upscaling can generate artefacts and such.
It would not make any sense for them to be upscaled on the fly. It's a computationally intensive operation, and storage space is cheap. Is there any evidence of it being done on the fly?
It’s not that computationally intensive to upscale frames. TVs have been doing it algorithmically for ages and looking good doing it. Hell, nVidia graphics cards can do it for every single frame of high end games with DLSS. Calling it “AI” because the type of algorithm it’s using is just cashing in on the buzzword.
(Unless I’m misunderstanding what’s going on.)
You are right that nvidia cards can do it for games using DLSS. Nvidia also has a version called RTX video that works for video. But are they could to be dedicating hardware for playback every single time a user requests to play a short? That is significantly different than just serving a file to the viewer. If they had all of these Nvidia cards laying around, they surely have better things that they could use them for. To be clear here, the ONLY thing I am taking issue with is a comment that it seems that youtube may be upscaling videos on the fly (as opposed to upscaling them once when they are uploaded, and then serving that file 1 million times). I'm simply saying that it makes a hell of a lot more sense any day of the week to upscale a file one time than to upscale it 1 million times.
My video card deffo heats up more when watching youtube over peertube. I'm pretty sure they're using my graphics card for upscaling.
It would make sense if it's a scheme to inject ads directly into the stream so adblockers wouldn't work anymore.
They could do that without upscaling. Upscaling every video only fly would cost an absolute shit ton of money, probably more than they would be making from the ad. There is no scenario where they wouldn't just upscale it one time and store it.
Knowing Google, they care more about blurring the lines between AI and reality to confuse and force it onto people than they do about saving a few dollars on storage costs.
Yep.
It's all about control and manipulation.
They love reminding us who is really in charge.
Well, who would have doubted it? Fuck, 1984 is already here.
Nice
(linked from the article about a Netflix series upscale)
Seems like this should be illegal, Google should be broken up, and its leadership imprisoned
I’m down for a breakup but I don’t see how we could twist this into illegality.
You could probably make it illegal to alter people's videos without their explicit consent. But also the Republicans have shown us that laws mean what the people in charge want
without their explicit consent.
By signing up to this service you agree to allow us to alter or modify your content as we require for efficient operation or to increase content engagement
You can make that kind of thing illegal. I think "shrink wrap eulas" are dubious. Rule that fine print with a bunch of other stuff doesn't count as explicit. Like there are rules now about cookie acceptance that has changed how the web works, and most sites don't try to hide the cookie thing because that's against the rules.
We wouldn't need so many damn laws to prevent shitty companies from doing shitty things if we could just become the kind of society that doesn't support shitty companies. The cookie thing is a great example of how a well–intentioned regulation made the internet an even more irritating place to be.
I suppose. But have you tried to get people to care about things? It's stupid hard. I can't get most of my friends to stop using Twitter, which is a pretty low stakes change. Nevermind something like "eat less meat" or "walk instead of drive sometimes"
If you can make people care, you can solve a lot of problems
I have tried, and writing my last comment actually brought a lot of repressed rage out. I've been too lenient on my friends and family who continue to use things like Facebook and X, because I didn't want to be that opinionated, ideological snore who won't shut up about how Facebook is the world's most prolific purveyor of hate speech, propping up the Trump administration, Israel, LGBT hate groups, the Rohingya genocide, housing discrimination, abortion witch hunts, blah blah blah. But the thing is that these are true things, and people should be appalled enough to never touch a Meta product again, even if it means teaching an elderly family member to learn a new group messaging app.
So I'm back to being a loudmouth bitch who scolds people for using Facebook. And X. But I probably don't stand a chance with Google.
I kinda doubt you’d be able to write a law that would actually have the effect you’re looking for. In the case of what you just wrote, all YouTube would need to do is write into their ToS that by uploading to their platform you’ve given them explicit permission to alter the video for purposes of storage space or increasing/decreasing quality.
I think you're under estimating what the law can do, probably because most of the time it's used to bolster rich assholes.
It might not be currently illegal but I think there should be a law defining "crimes against society" that only applies to corporations and politicians. It could be vague like "disorderly conduct" but just for corpos and politicians and would include things like lying to the public and could have punishments like corpos losing their business license (death) and banishment to the moon/sun for politicians.
Overly vague laws are never a good thing.
We say that so often, it's lost meaning.
It's very likely to do with compression codecs to save money.
I KNEW THOSE SHORTS I'VE BEEN WATCHING HAD THE "AI LOOK" GOD-DAMNIT! With the smooth faces and the weird plastic looking contrast.
Well, youtube is not even intended to host quality content anymore, but besides that, this appears to just be visual tweaks. This title is trying to be vague enough that one could assume it's tweaking the content itself which would be of real concern. It's not doing that (for now). Video graphics seems like an awefully minor thing to be screaming about AI over. Especially when AI has actual reprocussions in the knowledge accuracy sector.
From what I've heard this mostly happens on YT Shorts, and the AI upscaling they're doing is making people look like plastic and uncanny as hell.
I haven't noticed on normal videos, since that's pretty much all I watch.
yucky, shorts lol
Counterpoint: no they couldn’t.
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