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…
The practice was first noticed by two well-known American YouTubers popular among music enthusiasts: Rick Beato and Rhett Shull. Both run channels with millions of subscribers. Beato, a music educator and producer with more than 5 million subscribers, said he realized something was “off” in one of his recent videos.
“I thought I was imagining it, but my hair looked strange, and it almost looked like I was wearing makeup,” he said in a post.
Shull, a guitarist and creator, posted a video about the issue. “It looks like something AI-generated,” he said. “It bothers me because it could erode the trust I have with my audience.”
Complaints about odd changes to Shorts surfaced on social media as early as June, but only after Beato and Shull spoke out did YouTube confirm the experiment.
Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, acknowledged in a post on X that the company was running “a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
That explanation drew further criticism. Samuel Woolley, a disinformation expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said the company’s wording was misleading. “Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence,” he said. “This is AI.”
The controversy highlights a wider trend in which more of what people see online is pre-processed by AI before reaching them. Smartphone makers like Samsung and Google have long used AI to “enhance” images. Samsung previously admitted to using AI to sharpen moon photos, while Google’s Pixel “Best Take” feature stitches together facial expressions from multiple shots to create a single “perfect” group picture.
“What’s happening here is that a company is altering creators’ content and distributing it to the public without their consent,” Woolley said. Unlike Photoshop filters or social media effects, he warned, YouTube’s AI edits add another hidden layer between audiences and the media they consume—raising concerns about authenticity.
While Woolley warned of eroding public trust, Beato remained more optimistic. “YouTube is always working on new tools and experimenting,” he said. “They’re an industry leader, and I have nothing bad to say about them. YouTube changed my life.”
Still, critics say even minor retouching without disclosure sets a troubling precedent. YouTube is home not only to entertainment, but also to news, education, and informational content—areas where accuracy and authenticity matter.
The quiet rollout suggests a future in which AI may increasingly reshape digital media before users even press play.
Read the original article
Comments
By randycupertino 2025-12-062:228 reply A makeup influencer I follow noticed youtube and instagram are automatically adding filters to his face without permission to his videos. If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.
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!
The video shown as evidence is full of compression artifacts. The influencer is non-technical and assumes it's an AI filter, but the output is obviously not good quality anywhere.
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.
By popalchemist 2025-12-064:30 You obviously didn't watch the video, the claims are beyond the scope of compression and include things like eye and mouth enlargement, and you can clearly see the filter glitching off on some frames.
Someone in the comments explained that this effect was in auto translated videos. Meta and YT apparently use AI to modify the videos to have people match the language when speaking. Which is a nightmare on its own, but not exactly the same.
I've come across these auto translated videos while traveling, and actually found them quite helpful. Lot of local "authentic" content that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Its all kinds of annoying if you’re bilingual. Youtube now autotranslates ads served in my mother tongue to English and I have not found a way to turn it off.
Set your mother tongue to some esoteric language Google has not enough training data on. Then it defaults to the original language.
By beAbU 2025-12-078:26 This is how I got rid of ads on facebook!
By beezlewax 2025-12-0616:48 This is an incredibly annoying feature
By veeti 2025-12-0617:45 I have uBlock Origin.
I really hate them. Once again, Google have completely failed to consider multi-lingual people. Like Google search, even if you explicitly tell it what languages it should show results in, it's often wrong and only gives results in Russian when searching in Cyrillic, even for words that do not exist in Russian but do in the language defined in the settings.
Also the voice is pretty unemotional and nothing to do with the original voice. And it being a default that you can't even seem to disable...
By TRiG_Ireland 2025-12-0611:35 Last night, I came across a video with a title in English and an "Autodubbed" tag. I assumed it would be dubbed into English (my language) from some other language. But it wasn't. It was in French, and clearly the creator's original voice. The automatic subtitles were also in French. I don't know what the "Autodubbed" tag meant, but clearly something wasn't working.
I am by no means fluent in French, but I speak it well enough to get by with the aid of the subtitles, so that was fine. In an ideal world, I'd have the original French audio with English subtitles, but that did not appear to be an option.
As if that's a solution. I feel we need a "Falsehoods programmers believe about language" campaign.
By pwdisswordfishy 2025-12-078:591 reply Falsehoods Americans think about language.
By baobun 2025-12-0711:08 That list would be incomplete. Americans at least don't tend to "helpfully" automatically proxy their whole site through Google Translate when they detect foreign IPs.
By sofixa 2025-12-0612:25 But I'm fluent in multiple, and wouldn't want a video in a language I'm fluent in to be shittily AI dubbed to another language.
By watwut 2025-12-0619:45 I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.
Provide option to turn on that bad quality dubbing for those few people that want it.
And for crist sake, be transparent instead of auto translating titles so I dont even know the video was not made that badly by its original author.
By xboxnolifes 2025-12-064:431 reply There are some very clear examples elsewhere. It looks as if youtube applied AI filters to make compression better by removing artifacts and smoothing colors.
> There are some very clear examples elsewhere.
Such as?
This seems like such an easy thing for someone to document with screenshots and tests against the content they uploaded.
So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening? If this is common, please share some examples (that aren't in Instagram reel format from non-technical influencers)
> So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening?
It's difficult for me to read this as anything other than dismissing this person's views as being unworthy of discussing because they are are "non-technical," a characterization you objected to, but if you feel this shouldn't be the top level comment I'd suggest you submit a better one.
Here's a more detailed breakdown I found after about 15m of searching, I imagine there are better sources out there if you or anyone else cares to look harder: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_sh...
To me it's fairly subtle but there's a waxy texture to the second screenshot. This video presents some more examples, some of them have are more textured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86nhP8tvbLY
Upscaling and even de-noising is something very different to applying filters to increase size of lips/eyes...
It's a different diagnosis, but the problem is still, "you transformed my content in a way that changes my appearance and undermines my credibility." The distinction is worth discussing but the people levying the criticism aren't wrong.
Perhaps a useful analogy is "breaking userspace." It's important to correctly diagnose a bug breaking userspace to ship a fix. But it's a bug if its a change that breaks userspace workflows, full stop. Whether it met the letter of some specification and is "correct" in that sense doesn't matter.
If you change someone's appearance in your post processing to the point it looks like they've applied a filter, your post processing is functionally a filter. Whether you intended it that way doesn't change that.
By hombre_fatal 2025-12-067:491 reply Well, this was the original claim: > If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.
No need to downplay it.
By maxbond 2025-12-068:06 I didn't downplay it, I just wasn't talking about that at all. The video I was talking about didn't make that claim, and I wasn't responding to the comment which did. I don't see any evidence for that claim though. I would agree the most likely hypothesis is some kind of compression pipeline with an upsampling stage or similar.
ETA: I rewatched the video to the end, and I do see that they pose the question about whether it is targeted at certain content at the very end of the video. I had missed that, and I don't think that's what's happening.
By DonHopkins 2025-12-0615:15 As a makeup technician who looks in the mirror a lot, he's technically skilled at recognizing his own face.
The TFA.
Rheet Shull's video is quite high quality and shows it.
When it was published I went to Youtube's website and saw Rick Beato's short video mentioned by him and it was clearly AI enhanced.
I used to work with codec people and have them as friends for years so what TFA is talking about is definitely not something a codec would do.
By bbarnett 2025-12-0615:18 In the best of gaslighting and redirection, Youtube invents a new codec with integrated AI, thus vastly complicating your ability to make this point.
After posting a cogent explanation as to why integrated AI filtering is just that, and not actually part of the codec, Youtube creates dozens of channels with AI-generated personalities, all explaining how you're nuts.
These channels and videos appear on every webpage supporting your assertions, including being top of results on search. Oh, and AI summaries on Google searxh, whenever the top is searched too.
This is an unfair analysis. They discuss compression artifacts. They highlight things like their eyes getting bigger which are not what you usually expect from a compression artifact.
If your compression pipeline gives people anime eyes because it's doing "detail enhancement", your compression pipeline is also a filter. If you apply some transformation to a creator's content, and then their viewers perceive that as them disingenuously using a filter, and your response to their complaints is to "well actually" them about whether it is a filter or a compression artifact, you've lost the plot.
To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way. Regardless of whether they are technical, they are living in a world increasingly intermediated by technology, and we should be listening to their feedback on it. They have to live with the consequences of our design decisions. If we believe them to be non-technical, we should extend a lot of generosity to them in their use of terminology, and address what they mean instead of nitpicking.
> To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way.
I'm not critiquing their opinion that the result is bad. I also said the result was bad! I was critiquing the fact that someone on HN was presenting their non-technical analysis as a conclusive technical fact.
Non-technical is describing their background. It's not an insult.
I will be the first to admit I have no experience or knowledge in their domain, and I'm not going to try to interpret anything I see in their world.
It's a simple fact. This person is not qualified to be explaining what's happening, yet their analysis was being repeated as conclusive fact here on a technical forum
"The influencer is non-technical" and "It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum," to me, reads as a dismissal. As in, "these claims are not true and this person doesn't have the background to comment." Non-technical doesn't need to be an insult to be dismissive. You are giving us a reason not to down weight their perspective, but since the outcome is the same regardless of their background, I don't think that's productive.
I don't really see where you said the output was "bad," you said it was a compression artifact which had a "swimming effect", but I don't really see any acknowledgement that the influencer had a point or that the transformation was functionally a filter because it changed their appearance above and beyond losing detail (made their eyes bigger in a way an "anime eyes" filter might).
If I've misread you I apologize but I don't really see where it is I misread you.
The outcome is visible and not up for discussion, so is the fact that this is a problem for the influencer.
He's getting his compassionate nodding and emotional support in the comments over there.
I agree that him being non-technical shouldn't be discussion-ending in this case, but it is a valid observation, wether necessary or not.
By maxbond 2025-12-0620:07 I'm not commenting on Instagram, I'm not asking anyone to provide this random stranger with emotional support, and I'm not disputing that the analysis was non technical.
The difference is wether the effect is intentional or not.
"Non-technical" isn't an insult.
What you call "well actually"ing is well within limits on a technical forum.
From a technical standpoint it's interesting whether it's deliberate and whether it's compression, but it's not a fair criticism of this video, no. Dismissing someone's concerns over hair splitting is text book "well actually"ing. I wouldn't have taken issue to a comment discussing the difference from a perspective of technical curiosity.
By Aurornis 2025-12-065:44 > Dismissing someone's concerns
I agreed that the output was bad! I'm not dismissing their concerns, I was explaining that their analysis was not a good technical explanation for what was happening.
By reactordev 2025-12-062:301 reply I can hear the ballpoint pens now…
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.
That’s the rude awakening creators get on these platforms. If you’re a writer or an artist or a musician, you own your work by default. But if you upload it to these platforms, they own it more or less. It’s there in the terms of service.
What are they going to do though, go to one of the ten competing video hosting platforms?
By Bombthecat 2025-12-0611:45 Yeah, we decided there is only YouTube and only YouTube.
Also, no one else can bear the shear amount of traffic and cost
By mhdhn 2025-12-0611:43 nonexistent
By sodapopcan 2025-12-062:431 reply What if someone else uploads your work?
Section 230 immunity for doing whatever they want, as long as they remove it if you complain.
By mitthrowaway2 2025-12-065:131 reply Do they also remove it from the AI model weights they trained on it while it was uploaded?
By api 2025-12-0613:30 No.
By weird-eye-issue 2025-12-064:212 reply One of the comments on IG explains this perfectly:
"Meta has been doing this; when they auto-translate the audio of a video they are also adding an Al filter to make the mouth of who is speaking match the audio more closely. But doing this can also add a weird filter over all the face."
I don't know why you have to get into conspiracy theories about them applying different filters based on the video content, that would be such a weird micro optimization why would they bother with that
By eloisius 2025-12-067:25 I doubt that’s what’s happening too but it’s not beyond the pale. They could be feeding both the input video and audio/transcript into their transformer and it has learned “when the audio is talking about lips the person is usually puckering their lips for the camera” so it regurgitates that.
By Irishsteve 2025-12-0610:53 Some random team or engineer does it to get a promo.
By methuselah_in 2025-12-064:02 There is no option to turn that off? Or they even don't publish those things anywhere??
By adzm 2025-12-062:27 This is ridiculous
By heddelt 2025-12-0617:06 [flagged]
If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired. More likely it's product managers who barely know what's going on in their departments except that there's a word "AI" pinging around that's good for their KPIs and keeps them from getting fired.
> If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired.
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.
Videos are expensive to store, but generative AI is expensive to run. That will cost them more than storage allegedly saved.
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.
By echelon 2025-12-063:08 https://c3-neural-compression.github.io/
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.
By hatmanstack 2025-12-063:001 reply If you want insight into why they haven't deleted "old garbage" you might try, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff. Pretty enlightening.
I'm pretty sure those 12 year olds uploading 24 hour long Sonic YouTube poops aren't creating value.
By theendisney 2025-12-064:57 1000 years from now those will be very important. A bit like we are now wondering what horrible food average/poor people ate 1000 years ago.
I’m afraid to search… what exactly is a “24 hour long sonic Youtube poop?”
By echelon 2025-12-0617:08 It's safe for work (usually), just silly kid nonsense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop
Examples:
What type of compression would change the relative scale of elements within an image? None that I'm aware of, and these platforms can't really make up new video codecs on the spot since hardware accelerated decoding is so essential for performance.
Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.
> What type of compression would change the relative scale of elements within an image?
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.
By echelon 2025-12-0617:45 They're doing something with neural compression, not classical techniques.
https://blog.metaphysic.ai/what-is-neural-compression/
See this paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11379
Look at figure 5 and beyond.
Here's one such Google paper:
By eloisius 2025-12-067:28 One that represented compressed videos as an embedding that gets reinflated by having gen AI interpret it back into image frames.
AI models are a form of compression.
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.
Maybe such a thing could exist in the future, but I don't think the idea that YouTube is already serving a secret neural video codec to clients is very plausible. There would be much clearer signs - dramatically higher CPU usage, and tools like yt-dlp running into bizarre undocumented streams that nothing is able to play.
By planckscnst 2025-12-063:361 reply If they were using this compression for storage on the cache layer, it could allow more videos closer to where they serve them, but they decide the. Back to webm or whatever before sending them to the client.
I don't think that's actually what's up, but I don't think it's completely ruled out either.
That doesn't sound worth it, storage is cheap, encoding videos is expensive, caching videos in a more compact form but having to rapidly re-encode them into a different codec every single time they're requested would be ungodly expensive.
By throwaway5465 2025-12-068:56 The law of entropy appears true of TikToks and Shorts. It would make sense to take advantage of this. That is to say, the content becomes so generic that it merges into one.
By LoganDark 2025-12-064:03 Storage gets less cheap for short-form tiktoks where the average rate of consumption is extremely high and the number of niches is extremely large.
By echelon 2025-12-063:30 A new client-facing encoding scheme would break utilization of hardware encoders, which in turn slows down everyone's experience, chews through battery life, etc. They won't serve it that way - there's no support in the field for it.
It looks like they're compressing the data before it gets further processed with the traditional suite of video codecs. They're relying on the traditional codecs to serve, but running some internal first pass to further compress the data they have to store.
By justinclift 2025-12-064:15 The resources required for putting AI <something> inline in the input (upload) or output (download) chain would likely dwarf the resources needed for the non-AI approaches.
By jazzyjackson 2025-12-062:43 Totally. Unfortunately it's not lossless and instead of just getting pixelated it's changing the size of body parts lol
By glitchc 2025-12-063:09 Probably compression followed by regeneration during decompression. There's a brilliant technique called "Seam Carving" [1] invented two decades ago that enables content aware resizing of photos and can be sequentially applied to frames in a video stream. It's used everywhere nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me that arbitrary enlargements are artifacts produced by such techniques.
By Groxx 2025-12-063:23 I largely agree, I think that probably is all that it is. And it looks like shit.
Though there is a LOT of room to subtly train many kinds of lossy compression systems, which COULD still imply they're doing this intentionally. And it looks like shit.
By j45 2025-12-064:31 It could be, but if compression is codecs, usually new codecs get talked about on a blog.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-12-063:371 reply > This is an experiment
A legal experiment for sure. Hope everyone involved can clear their schedules for hearings in multiple jurisdictions for a few years.
As soon as people start paying Google for the 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour (2022 figure), then they can dictate what forms of compression and lossiness Google uses to save money.
That doesn't include all of the transcoding and alternate formats stored, either.
People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS.
Google doesn't even say they'll keep your videos. They reserve the right to delete them, transcode them, degrade them, use them in AI training, etc.
It's a free service.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-12-0619:34 > People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS
None of which overrides what the law says or can do.
> It's a free service
I've paid for it. Don't anymore, in large part because of crap like this reducing content quality.
By theendisney 2025-12-065:00 Its not the same when you publish something on my platform as when i publish something and put your name on it.
It is bad enough we can deepfake anyone. If we also pretend it was uploaded by you the sky is the limit.
By 7bit 2025-12-0610:42 That's the difference between the US and European countries. When you have SO MUCH POWER like Google, you can't just go around and say ItSaFReeSeRViCe in Europe. With great power comes great responsibility, to say it in American words.
"They're free to do whatever they want with their own service" != "You can't criticize them for doing dumb things"
By rightbyte 2025-12-0612:37 Ye it is such a strange and common take. Like, "if you don't like it why complain?".
By Bombthecat 2025-12-0611:43 That's actually hilarious
By TazeTSchnitzel 2025-12-062:346 reply The AI filter applied server-side to YouTube Shorts (and only shorts, not regular videos) is horrible, and it feels like it must be a case of deliberate boiling the frog. If everyone gets used to overly smooth skin, weirdly pronounced wrinkles, waxy hair, and strange ringing around moving objects, then AI-generated content will stand out less when they start injecting it into the feed. At first I thought this must be some client-side upscaling filter, but tragically it is not. There's no data savings at all, and there's no way for uploaders or viewers to turn it off. I guess I wasn't cynical enough.
By dotancohen 2025-12-069:061 reply Have you tried viewing the short in the normal YouTube UI? Just copy the short's unique identifier from the URL and replace the unique identifier in any normal UI YouTube video.
By amarshall 2025-12-0611:47 It’s easier than that. Replace shorts with watch in the URL.
By absoluteunit1 2025-12-064:29 Wow - I had not considered this as the intention.
I’ve been saying for a while that the end game for addictive short form chum feeds like TikTok and YouTube Shorts is to drop human creators entirely. They’ll be AI generated slop feeds that people will scroll, and scroll, and scroll. Basically just a never ending feed of brain rot and ads.
There's already a huge number of AI generated channels in youtube. The only difference is that they're uploaded by channel owners. What's is gonna happen very quickly (if not already) is that Youtube itself will start "testing" AI content that it creates on what will look like new channels. In a matter of a few years they'll promote this "content" to occupy most of the time and views in the platform.
By SaberTail 2025-12-065:54 And then they'll start feeding in data like gaze tracking, and adjust the generated content in real time to personalize it to be maximally addictive for each viewer.
By eagleinparadise 2025-12-063:17 I buy into this conspiracy theory, it's genius. It's literally a boiling the frog kind of strategy against users. Eventually, everyone will get too lazy to go through the mental reasoning of judging every increasingly piece of content as "is this AI" as you mentally spend energy trying to find clues.
And over time the AI content will improve enough where it becomes impossible and then the Great AI Swappening will occur.
By mapmeld 2025-12-064:35 Meta already teased making this ("Vibes") in September. Also OpenAI's homepage for their Sora tool is a bunch of AI video shorts.
By add-sub-mul-div 2025-12-063:43 Perhaps the shorter/dumber the medium and format, the less discerning an audience it attracts. We're seeing a split between people who reject the idea of content without the subtext of the human creation behind it, and people who just take content for what it is on the surface without knowing why it should matter how it was created.
By port11 2025-12-068:39 Whenever we open YouTube to play a song for our toddler, we see at least 90% slop Shorts. It's disgusting.
I think this will backfire and kill any service that mass implements it. The human to human nature of video is important to the engagement. Even if it becomes such that you can't tell on individual videos, eventually they'll become known for just being AI slop farms as a whole (something that I'm seeing have a lot of backlash)
And what for? Tiktok creators already generate content for them
Like other things the market will bisect. Discerning people who are self aware and resist addiction and are put off by this stuff are already jumping ship from these platforms. They’ll be hypnosis machines for everyone else.
There’s a component of people around here who will shrug or even cheer. That’s because we are losing any belief in compassion or optimism about uplifting humanity. When I really think about it, it’s terrifying.
We are headed for a world where normal people just step over the dying, and where mass exploitation of the “weak” gets a shrug or even approval. Already there in some areas and sectors.
Is this the world you want, folks? Unfortunately I’ve met a disturbing number of people who would say yes.
Now consider that this includes children, whose childhood is being stolen by chum feeds. This includes your own relatives. This includes your friend who maybe has a bit of an addictive personality who gets sucked into gambling apps and has their life ruined. Or it’s you, maybe, though I get the sense there’s a lot of “high IQ” people who think they can’t be conned.
By phatfish 2025-12-0710:48 Yup, online culture is utter trash, and kids are sucked in the most. As seen on HN as well with overwhelming rejection of applying age restrictions to porn sites.
It's like society doesn't exist any more, and adults not having to jump through some hoops to so they can wank off is a price kids have to pay by having hardcore porn easily accessible or a miss-click away.
It's defended with some nonsense about their privacy or "rights". Or a straw man where suddenly all information becomes "censored".
LLM/generative "content" is going to make online culture even worse (if that even seems possible).
By ohhellnawman 2025-12-0618:55 [dead]
Yes, but what happens when the AIs themselves begin to brainrot (as happens when they are not fed their usual sustenance of information from humans and the real world)?
Have you seen what people watch on these things? It won’t matter. In fact, the surreal incoherent schizo stuff can work well for engagement.
By absoluteunit1 2025-12-064:321 reply > the surreal incoherent schizo stuff can work well for engagement.
There’s already popular subreddits (something blursed ai I think) where people upload this type of content and it’s getting decent engagement it seems
By api 2025-12-0613:30 That’s a little different. It’s people playing with AI, which is fine.
It seems like a minor difference, but the undifferentiated unlabeled short form addiction feed is much worse.
Reddit has been heading that way though. It hasn’t gone all in yet.
By rhetocj23 2025-12-063:11 [dead]
By UltraSane 2025-12-064:55 I think they are doing it so they can mask the extreme compression they are doing to YouTube shorts.
By nsoqm 2025-12-069:16 Smoothing skin does give important data savings. Smooth blocks take up much less space than detailed blocks. Which makes me believe these are nothing but compression artefacts.
The conspiracy theory that this is done to make people get used to AI content is the kind of bs that would be derided and flagged otherwise… but since it is anti-tech, it’s fine. Shows how the site is going.
An amateur tip that I sometimes use after I reencode something to check what i lost:
ffmpeg -i source.mkv -i suspect.mkv -filter_complex "blend=all_mode=difference" diff_output.mkv
I saw these claims before but still have not found someone to show a diff or post the source for comparison. It would be interesting.
Jill Bearup posted a video about this a while ago, showing a short and the original side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd692naF-Cc (note the short is shown at 0:31)
Edit: The changes made by the ai are a lot more vissible in the higher quality video uploaded to patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/136994036 (this was also linked in the pinned comment on the youtube video)
It must be my eyes and the small screen on my phone. I couldn’t find any differences in the video on Patreon, which was annoying enough to watch with the actual comparison clip being just a couple of seconds or so, and I had to rewind and check again. I wish it had shown more of the comparisons. Most of the current video was just commentary.
By gblargg 2025-12-075:26 Same here, on a big screen, I don't see anything notable. I really hope this isn't a mass delusion because YouTube started applying a sharpness ("edge enhancement") filter to videos to make them look sharper. It sure looks like that to me, because I hate this filter and how so many movie transfers have it added, with the ringing at the edges this filter leaves.
By sgerenser 2025-12-0613:24 The before/after on this just looks like compression artifacts/smoothing to me.
By sgerenser 2025-12-0617:08 It’s because you’re looking for some kind of “smoking gun” AI transformation. In reality it just looks like the YouTube one is more compressed and slightly blurred. Some people are apparently just learning that YouTube recompresses videos.
By IshKebab 2025-12-0622:37 Yeah I also can't see the difference on the high quality video. I am on my phone though tbf.
Also, minus 100 points to Jill for being happy about being able to use AI to automatically edit out all the silence from her videos. That's far more annoying than any barely perceptible visual artifacts.
Why do people think wall-of-text videos are good?
By rpastuszak 2025-12-069:52 Hehe, I occasionally use a similar approach for visual regression testing: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/visual-snapshot-tests-cheap...
By jbaber 2025-12-069:57 Thank you for this good idea and oneliner.
