YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

I've seem some game of thrones clips recently in youtube shorts which looked like they'd been generated by ai. I couldn't understand why anyone would have done that to the original good looking material. The only thing I could think was that it was some kind of copyright evasion.

As a fan of the early seasons, I get lots of suggestions for Got clips. I assume that's done by the author to get around copy right blocks. Quite often they also add music, which would make it easier to get around sound detection.

I haven't noticed it outside copyrighted material, so it's probably intentional.

The most charitable interpretation is it’s a very aggressive form of video compression. Denoising to reduce data and speed up video loads.