YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission

A chill ran down my spine as I imagined this being applied to the written word online: my articles being automatically "corrected" or "improved" the moment I hit publish, any book manuscripts being sent to editors being similarly "polished" to a point that we humans start to lose our unique tone and everything we read falls into that strange uncanny valley where everything reads ok, you can't quite put your finger on it, but it feels like something is wearing the skin of what you wrote as a face.

The well is already poisoned. I'm refraining from hiring editors merely because I suspect there's a high chance they'll just use an LLM. All recent books I'm reading is with suspicion that they have been written by AI.

However, polished to a point that we humans start to lose our unique tone is what style guides that go into the minutiae of comma placement try do do. And I'm currently reading a book I'm 100% sure has been edited by an expert human editor that did quite the job of taking away all the uniqueness of the work. So, we can't just blame the LLMs for making things more gray when we have historically paid other people to do it.

There's a YouTuber named Fil Henley (https://www.youtube.com/@WingsOfPegasus) who has been covering this for some years, now. Xe regularly comments on how universal application of pitch correction in post as an "industry standard" has dragged the great singers of yore down to the same level of mediocrity as everyone else.

Xe also occasionally reminds people that, equal temperament being what it is, this pitch correction is actually in a few cases making people less well in tune than they originally were.

It certainly removes unique tone. Yesterday's was a pitch corrected version of a performance by John Lennon from 1972, that definitely changed Lennon's sound.