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YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

(www.bbc.com)
296 points jakub_g | 5 comments | 24 Aug 25 10:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.569s | source
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jszymborski ◴[24 Aug 25 12:39 UTC] No.45003810[source]▶
So I feel like article doesn't address the "why" of it all. Why auto AI upscale?
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1. pier25 ◴[24 Aug 25 16:13 UTC] No.45005376[source]▶
Probably to reduce storage costs
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2. avasan ◴[25 Aug 25 03:29 UTC] No.45009924[source]▶
But the upscaling isn't applied live/on viewing, right? The video being upscaled is still stored on their server and then streamed. How does it reduce storage costs?
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3. pier25 ◴[25 Aug 25 03:35 UTC] No.45009963[source]▶
Do you know that for a fact?

Maybe Google has done the math and realized it's cheaper to upscale in realtime than store videos at high resolution forever. Wouldn't surprise me considering the number of shorts is probably growing exponentially.

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4. artemisart ◴[25 Aug 25 10:51 UTC] No.45012471{3}[source]▶
The economics don't make sense, each video is stored ~ once (+ replication etc. but let's say O(1)) but viewed n times, so server-side upscaling on the fly is way too costly and currently not good enough client-side.
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5. pier25 ◴[25 Aug 25 19:03 UTC] No.45017659{4}[source]▶
Are you considering that the video needs to be stored for potentially decades?

Also shorts seem to be increasing exponentially... but Youtube viewership is not. So compute wouldn't need to increase as fast as storage.

I obviously don't know the numbers. Just saying that it could be a good reason why Youtube is doing this AI upscaling. I really don't see why otherwise. There's no improvement in image quality, quite the contrary.