YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

Youtube says this was done for select Youtube Shorts as a denoising process. However most popular channels on Youtube, which seem to be the pool selected for this experiment, typically already have well lit and graded videos shouldn't benefit much from extra denoising from a visual point of view.

It's true though that aggressive denoising gives things an artificially generated look since both processes use denoising heavily.

Perhaps this was done to optimize video encoding, since the less noise/surface detail there is the easier it is to compress.

Can I just start a petition to remove Shorts entirely?

Just don't watch them?

Just don't smoke/eat junk/do drugs etc. They put addictive shit in your face and force you to use their bloated interface to access the service.

The worst thing for me is they don't show the channel names. So much of the channels pushing Star Wars shorts are quite obvious bot names, and it's hard to filter these from legitimate SW content creators who are, on top of that, all using the same damn AI voice.

If I hear an AI voice I click the little menu button with three dots, then click don't show this channel or whatever it says.

The Venn diagram of AI voice users and good content creators is pretty close to two separate circles. I don't really care about the minority in the intersection.

Except that now Youtube also "helpfully" auto-dub legitimate videos in other languages (along with translating the titles) by default, so even the 'AI voice' isn't a good signal for gauging if it's quality content or not.

As a french-speaking person, I now find myself seeing french youtubers seemingly posting videos with english titles and robotic voice, before realizing that it's Youtube being stupid again.

What's more infuriating is that it's legitimately at heart a cool feature, just executed in the most brain-dead way possible, by making it opt-out and without the ability to specify known languages.