https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_/?igsh=MTZybml2NDB...
The screenshots/videos of them doing it are pretty wild, and insane they are editing creators' uploads without consent!
To me, this clearly looks like a case of a very high compression ratio with the motion blocks swimming around on screen. They might have some detail enhancement in the loop to try to overcome the blockiness which, in this case, results in the swimming effect.
It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum. It should be a dead giveaway that this is a compression issue because the entire video is obviously highly compressed and lacking detail.
This is going to be a huge legal fight as the terms of service you agree to on their platform is “they get to do whatever they want” (IANAL). Watch them try to spin this as “user preference” that just opted everyone into.
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.
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.
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.
Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.
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.
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.
Why repeat the corporate line when at best it was a embarassingly foolish execution?
If you look at any samples, you'll see that this isn't some brilliant new AI compression technique. It was irresonsibly deployed slop that's ripe to cause a backlash against them.
And over time the AI content will improve enough where it becomes impossible and then the Great AI Swappening will occur.
Google isn't enhancing anything. They're compressing it.
Compressing videos could save Google an extremely large amount of money at YouTube scale.
Most of these shorts aren't even viewed more than a few times.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/05/ai-deepfakes...
edit: here's the effect I'm talking about with lossy compression and adaptive quantization: https://cloudinary.com/blog/what_to_focus_on_in_image_compre...
The result is smoothing of skin, and applied heavily on video (as Youtube does, just look for any old video that was HD years ago) would look this way
That would presumably be an easy smoking gun for some content creator to produce.
There are heavy alterations in that link, but having not seen the original, and in this format it's not clear to me how they compare.
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.
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.
> 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?
A lot of folks here hate AI and YouTube and Google and stuff, but it would be more productive to hate them for what they are actually doing.
But most people here are just taking this headline at face value and getting pitchforks out. If you try to watch the makeup guy’s proof, it’s talking about Instagram (not YouTube), doesn’t have clean comparisons, is showing a video someone sent back to him, which probably means it’s a compression artifact, not a face filter that the corporate overlords are hiding from the creator. It is not exactly a smoking gun, especially for a technical crowd.
I don't understand the justification for the expense or complexity.
That being said, I don't believe they should be doing anything like this without the creator's explicit consent. I do personally think there's probably a good use case for machine learning / neural network tech applied to the clean up of low-quality sources (for better transcoding that doesn't accumulate errors & therefore wastes bitrate), in the same way that RTX Video Super Resolution can do some impressive deblocking & upscaling magic[2] on Windows. But clearly they are completely missing the mark with whatever experiment they were running there.
[1] https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bj1qbwcklg
[2] compare https://i.imgur.com/U6vzssS.png & https://i.imgur.com/x63o8WQ.jpeg (upscaled 360p)
> "Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as something particularly egregious; it leads a viewer to see a reality that never existed, and that the creator never intended.
YouTube is not applying any "face filters" or anything of the sort. They did however experiment with AI upscaling the entire image which is giving the classic "bad upscale" smeary look.
Like I said, I think that's still bad and they should have never done it without the clear explicit consent of the creator. But that is, IMO, very different and considerably less bad than changing someone's face specifically.
Here's some other creators also talking about it happening in youtube shorts: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeautyGuruChatter/comments/1notyzo/...
another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjnQ-s7LW-g
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1mw0tuz/youtube_is...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
If you open the context of the comment, they are specifically talking about the bad, entire-image upscaling that gives the entire picture the oily smeary look. NOT face filters.
EDIT : same thing with the two other links you edited into your comment while I was typing my reply.
Again, I'm not defending YouTube for this. But I also don't think they should be accused of doing something they're not doing. Face filters without consent are a far, far worse offense than bad upscaling.
I would like to urge you to be more cautious, and to actually read what you brandish as proof.
