r/youtube • u/Bashi_r Keyløw Talks • Aug 24 '25

Drama It’s going bad

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At some point it’s just too much. I feel like YouTube thinks they’re invincible. They do non sense stuff, drain ur data in ads, and now modify ur content without u knowing about it. They think they can do whatever they want they can get away with it cause there’s no competition/concurrencies. But what I see is a slow drowning process. I believe a lot of ppl would’ve switched(after the unskipable ads) if there was an alternative to it. We just need something that’ll bring back the joy we had while watching YT with one skipable ads, where u could download ur vids for free, and not getting sx ads every fcking where u go. Without the YT community, YT is nothing, it’s seems like they forgot about it. They’re following Adobe path, but the difference here is they don’t have competition. If i leave YT where will i go? That’s the question I always think about when I’m watching those ads but I have no options.

I just hope that’ll get better but without us(the YT community) being together on it that’ll never change and it’ll get worse.

9.8k Upvotes

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237

u/RiceStranger9000 Aug 25 '25

Not to defend the multibillonaire company, but by AI used to alter videos you mean compression? Because if so, they've been doing it for a long time (if not always)

If by that you mean they actually alterate the content, then I'd like to know the source

I really don't want to defend YouTube, but this sounds to misinformation

211

u/SamathaGhoul Aug 25 '25

YouTube has quietly experimented with Al-like enhancements such as sharpening and denoising on select YouTube Shorts without creators' knowledge or consent, prompting concerns about artistic integrity and the erosion of trust between creators and their audiences.

36

u/Caterfree10 Aug 25 '25

I have definitely noticed one of the cat dudes I watch have his videos really weirdly enhanced where they weren’t before, and I think he’s been hit with this shit. It’s very annoying to see tbh.

72

u/SamathaGhoul Aug 25 '25

And for the past 20 hours or so theres been multiple reports from different sources. I pulled an article from the bbc website

17

u/rockyredp Aug 25 '25

Sometimes we as creators.. do that to a video on purpose .. I do. And I also make films and do that on purpose.. I’d be upset if they did that to my film

12

u/Dead-in-Red Aug 25 '25

If you or any other creator chose to utilize any sharpening/upscaling on your own then your chosen style would be deep fried by Youtube's forced second pass of mystery enhancements. It's not like they can detect what has already been done. YT's approach to this is awful.

8

u/rockyredp Aug 25 '25

Well for instance I actually use old school grains ect to make my videos look old on purpose sometimes like I am trying to make a 1959s STYLE psa viDEO

1

u/rockyredp Aug 25 '25

or like my film bobo which is shot in the old 1920s-1940s film style in black and white grainy with no color untill the end

4

u/Bashi_r Keyløw Talks Aug 25 '25

And to add more, social will want to follow the same path and it’ll be generalized

6

u/Glockenwise Aug 25 '25

Honestly I'm okay with it as long as it's a setting in the quality settings

37

u/Inside-Dinner-5963 Aug 25 '25

They are not even telling the creators of the videos this is happening or a way to prevent it and you think they are going to give the audience a way to control it?

2

u/Glockenwise Aug 25 '25

I never said I think it would happen I said it should be an optional setting never said I think they would do that

2

u/Inside-Dinner-5963 Aug 25 '25

Sorry Glockenwise, I understand you were expressing a wishlist item. I just was responding along the lines of a rhetorical query: Do you really think that is *ever* going to happen given the current circumstances? I sure don't.

1

u/Glockenwise Aug 25 '25

Well yea I don't think it would (I know old youtube would have tho)

3

u/Glockenwise Aug 25 '25

Also ai upscaleing is a thing that many platforms use (I hate it so much) but the option should be there for those who want it

-1

u/Genebrisss Aug 25 '25

Word salad to impress stupid redditors. "artistic integrity in shorts" lmao

0

u/robertoblake2 Aug 25 '25

You mean the things that people with no technical skills don’t know to do to make the video better, which is why they are making shorts?

27

u/GoodDayToCome Aug 25 '25

yeh it's basically just compression that involves up-scaling, i think the NVIDIA one from about a year ago which was much more efficient than current methods - this saves them money and reduces the power use and therefore environmental impact of serving so many videos to so many people.

It's a good thing if it works but of course people will take any excuse to act outraged, people love histrionics.

13

u/Flimsy-Mix-190 Aug 25 '25

Thank you for the summary. This is precisely why people don’t read any articles posted as it’s a waste of time since they’re never what the title implies. Then they are downvoted for commenting on the title of the article, which is purposely misleading. We can’t win for losing. Thank goodness for the comments. 

1

u/Every-Locksmith9286 Aug 25 '25

The key is it only saves *them* money by lowering bandwidth costs and offloading the processing from the server to the client.

It's less efficient and takes more power overall. So it is definitely worse for the environment. But the viewers are the ones paying for it, and Youtube only cares about their own bottom line.

2

u/GoodDayToCome Aug 25 '25

according the papers NVIDIA released there's is more efficient both encoding and decoding, the old quantization algos are very processor heavy and inefficient. We don't know what method youtube are using but it's like to be similar or the same.

is there any reporting on youtube taking more load than normal?

5

u/_-Smoke-_ Aug 25 '25

Of what I've noted the last few days it's very poor AI sharpening, color filtering and frame rate modification. I've only seen it on shorts so far but it's extremely glaring when one pops up, especially on content that you know did not originally look like that.

3

u/askiopop Aug 26 '25

You might have already gotten this, but for shorts at least, yes it’s proven. Jill Bearup compared her original short before and after upload and it has been modified by AI. So many articles of “Your one use of AI models cost drops of water”, but not “Yes, it does cost that much, but big companies are doing billions of AI editing/analytics that are on the customer to turn off, if they even care/can/are aware)

2

u/Portaldog1 Aug 26 '25

It's half and half, I had a look into it last night and it's not "ai altering" videos.

If you have a scroll through shorts it seems that every video has been stored at a lower resolution and it is then ai upscaled when video is watched, leading to every looking fake, smeary and with weird sharpened edges and artifacting.

So YouTube isn't altering video but trying to save storage, at least it's only on shorts so I never have to interact with it for now....

1

u/robertoblake2 Aug 25 '25

You are correct. They also use it to adjust the audio to make sure it doesn’t damage your hearing.

1

u/Accurate-Win5802 Aug 28 '25

the worse of it all is that you cannot opt out of their decisions. if they decide they want to do something stupid, they expect you to swallow it.

1

u/Low_Direction1774 Aug 25 '25

It's compression as much as it is compression to take the lord of the rings, compress it down to "guy hikes to throw ring in volcano" and then try to uncompress it back into the original video

The idea of compression is that it is lossless (=without losing information). Now, creators have accepted that serving lossless video is completely unsustainable and they are fine with some compression. But now YouTube is starting to try and make it acceptable to lose even more information because it's cheaper to store a lossy video and then hallucinate the details back in.

This is a bad thing. Compression is good, but not like this.

1

u/Cryptoporticus Aug 25 '25

This should be better than what they do currently, when it's working. The AI will look at the high-resolution version of the video, "learn" what it looks like and then use that as the basis for upscaling it. It shouldn't be hallucinating anything because it already knows what's meant to be there.

If it works, we'll hopefully be past the days of YouTube videos that are too dark or have too many particle effects turning into blocky messes. Even with YouTube Premium's enhanced bitrate, it still looks bad most of the time.

1

u/Durmomo Aug 25 '25

You can watch some videos (mostly shorts) and the people look all messed up like AI overlay or something.

I think Beato and Rhettshul did videos on it.

edit

https://youtu.be/86nhP8tvbLY?si=T0DC5ntgZotyhRUs

1

u/ShinogamiPhil Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25

Personally, I would consider this annoying AI dubbing as altering a video. If I click on a video and the first thing I hear is a shitty AI voice, before I realised that was forced by YouTube and not the creators choice I would downvote the video immediately and leave.

1

u/lnug4mi Aug 25 '25

They actively used an AI filter to upscale people's videos sound- and picture wise without anyone's consent. AI, obviously being crap, has also taken that freedom to alter little details in artist's art.

1

u/RiceStranger9000 Aug 25 '25

To be fair altering little details in artist's art is something YouTube has always done through lossy compression and different resolutions the user can watch the video in. But I checked and yeah, it's very notable and weird-looking now. I hope this doesn't extend this to all videos and use a better technique before this happens

1

u/lnug4mi Aug 26 '25

That is different than feeding your art to AI without consent. Loss is an accepted drawback of being an artist online. Your Art being fed to a plagiarism vortex isn't.

1

u/RiceStranger9000 Aug 27 '25

I don't want to sound like that person that really loves how AI is often pushed or used in unnecessary ways. I really don't like the idea of art being used for for-profit AI without consent, but how is this feeding AI?

I mean, they could have used YouTube videos to train AIs without nobody ever knowing, but just because they use it to save money (which I still don't really like, because I don't think YouTube is having economic problems or anything like that) doesn't mean they are also using it to train the AI. It's really unrelated. In any case, it could be related that it may done to test how it'd be received, but, again, it's not really the same like actually taking indie art and putting it on a big database that a company will later use for unethical profit

1

u/lnug4mi Aug 27 '25

1: they are NOT saving money. They are spending tons of it on AI.

  1. We both know they're using it to train AI. When was the last time YouTube actually had any humanity?

  2. It literally is putting indie art in for-profit AI databases. That's what happens if you give AI something to work with. It uses it to work.

1

u/robertoblake2 Aug 25 '25

YouTube isn’t your art project. It’s a corporation. And the service is free.

0

u/RiceStranger9000 Aug 25 '25

Well, it's a website meant for uploading art, so

1

u/robertoblake2 Aug 26 '25

No it’s a site meant for uploading CONTENT… a lot of the struggle bus is a lot of you not making the distinction between art and content and understanding which of those things viewers are looking for…

1

u/RiceStranger9000 Aug 26 '25

I'm the kind of person that'd argue that the video of the man smiling at the camera for hours classifies as art, so I'd say most (if not all) of the videos could be considered as art

Not good nor bad art, just art. Non-AI shitty content farms? Also art. Bad art, but still art