Knowing Google, they care more about blurring the lines between AI and reality to confuse and force it onto people than they do about saving a few dollars on storage costs.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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I'm huge into makeup, and I watch a lot of beauty content on YouTube because I want to see how certain makeup looks and performs before I buy it. This AI bullshit defeats the purpose of demonstrating makeup.
“AI”
Sharpening, Denoising and upscaling barely count as machine learning. They don’t require AI neural networks.
They don’t require AI neural networks.
Sharpening and denoising don't. But upscalers worth anything do require neural nets.
Anything that uses a neural network is the definition of AI.
Not true
Company I used to work for had excellent upscalers running on FPGAs that they developed 20+ years ago.
The algorithms have been there for years, just AI gives it bit of marketing sprinkle to something that has been a solved problem for years.
Well, the algorithms that make up many neural networks have existed for over 60 years. It's only recently that hardware has been able to make it happen.
AI gives it bit of marketing sprinkle to something that has been a solved problem for years.
Not true and I did say "any upscaler that's worth anything". Upscaling tech has existed at least since digital video was a thing. Pixel interpolation is the simplest and computationally easiest method. But it tends to give a slight hazy appearance.
It's actually far from a solved problem. There's a constant trade-off beyond processing power and quality. And quality can still be improved by a lot.
Depends on what you're trying to upscale.
Sharpening is a simple convolution, doesn't even count as ML.
I really hate that everything gets the AI label nowadays
The “ai bad” brainrot has everyone thinking that any algorithm is AI and all AI is ChatGPT.
just today someone told me that Vocaloid was also AI music, they are either too dumb to make some basic fact-checking or true believers trying to hype up AI by any means necessary
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But you can use AI for that
This is shitty journalism that massively distorts what actually happened. It's just traditional video filters, and AI panic.
There is no AI panic. There is a distrust against the intention of the companies pushing it. Can you trust Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic etc?
There is an AI panic, just like there was a microprocessor panic 50 years ago. Distrust and panic are different things. There is also AI distrust. There is also an AI revolution, an AI bubble, and a whole new AI epoch. There's lots of AI shit going on right now, and panic is certainly one of them.
This article is AI panic because it's what we would call a hallucination if an LLM wrote it. There is no AI in this story. People in a panic often jump at nothing.
It's very likely to do with compression codecs to save money.
Ostensibly, yes. Just like the Patriot Act was to fight terrorism.
Nice
(linked from the article about a Netflix series upscale)
Seems like this should be illegal, Google should be broken up, and its leadership imprisoned
I’m down for a breakup but I don’t see how we could twist this into illegality.
You could probably make it illegal to alter people's videos without their explicit consent. But also the Republicans have shown us that laws mean what the people in charge want
without their explicit consent.
By signing up to this service you agree to allow us to alter or modify your content as we require for efficient operation or to increase content engagement
You can make that kind of thing illegal. I think "shrink wrap eulas" are dubious. Rule that fine print with a bunch of other stuff doesn't count as explicit. Like there are rules now about cookie acceptance that has changed how the web works, and most sites don't try to hide the cookie thing because that's against the rules.
I kinda doubt you’d be able to write a law that would actually have the effect you’re looking for. In the case of what you just wrote, all YouTube would need to do is write into their ToS that by uploading to their platform you’ve given them explicit permission to alter the video for purposes of storage space or increasing/decreasing quality.
I think you're under estimating what the law can do, probably because most of the time it's used to bolster rich assholes.
It might not be currently illegal but I think there should be a law defining "crimes against society" that only applies to corporations and politicians. It could be vague like "disorderly conduct" but just for corpos and politicians and would include things like lying to the public and could have punishments like corpos losing their business license (death) and banishment to the moon/sun for politicians.
Overly vague laws are never a good thing.
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From what I've seen so far, the case here seems to be that it's only being done to shorts, and what's happening is that they're being permanently stored at a lower quality and size and are then upscaled on the fly. I mean... it feels kinda fair to me. Theres a good reason YouTube has so little competition, and it's because how hard and expensive maintaining a service like this is. They're always trying to cut costs, and storage is gonna be a big cost. Personally, I'm glad it's just shorts for now. It absolutely shouldn't be happening to people who are paying for the service or making money for it, though.
I mean yeah, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. But if it actually was reasonable, wouldn't they just inform the uploader?
Or give an option to toggle. Surely letting people turn it off would save them even more resources, if they don't have to bother with upscaling the video in the first place.
It likely costs them less to upscale than it does to store and serve a full sized video, so they're not giving the uploader the choice.
Storage is very cheap. This only makes sense if they actually do the upscaling client side
It's not so much that they down- and upscale the video of shorts, their algorithm changes the look of people. It warps skin and does a strange sort of sharpening that makes things look quite unreal and almost plastic.
It is a filter that evens the look with images generated by, say, grok or one of the other AI filters.
In a year people will think that "AI-look" is a normal video look, and stuff generated with it is what humans can look like. We will see crazed AI-fashion looks popping up.
Yeah, upscaling can generate artefacts and such.
It would not make any sense for them to be upscaled on the fly. It's a computationally intensive operation, and storage space is cheap. Is there any evidence of it being done on the fly?
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Counterpoint: no they couldn’t.
Well, youtube is not even intended to host quality content anymore, but besides that, this appears to just be visual tweaks. This title is trying to be vague enough that one could assume it's tweaking the content itself which would be of real concern. It's not doing that (for now). Video graphics seems like an awefully minor thing to be screaming about AI over. Especially when AI has actual reprocussions in the knowledge accuracy sector.
From what I've heard this mostly happens on YT Shorts, and the AI upscaling they're doing is making people look like plastic and uncanny as hell.
I haven't noticed on normal videos, since that's pretty much all I watch.
yucky, shorts lol
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