Well, who would have doubted it? Fuck, 1984 is already here.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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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.
Yep.
It's all about control and manipulation.
They love reminding us who is really in charge.
“AI”
Sharpening, Denoising and upscaling barely count as machine learning. They don’t require AI neural networks.
Barely count or not they absolutely ruin every piece of media I've seen them used in. They make people look like wax figures and turn text into gibberish.
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.
My simple rule is that if it uses a neural network model of some kind, then it can be accurately called AI.
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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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.
at least since digital video
Right. Even back in the eighties UK broadcasters were "upscaling" American NTSC 480i60 shows to 576i50. The results were varied. High-ticket shows like Friends and Fraiser looked great, albeit a bit soft and oversaturated, while live news feeds looked terrible. If you've never seen it, The Day Today has a perfect example of what a lot of US programmes lookd like converted to PAL.
Ya, I knew there were analogue "upscalers", but I'm not familiar enough with them to confidently call them an upscaler vs a signal converter.
Depends on what you're trying to upscale.
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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.
It's very likely to do with compression codecs to save money.
Ostensibly, yes. Just like the Patriot Act was to fight terrorism.
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?
It’s not that computationally intensive to upscale frames. TVs have been doing it algorithmically for ages and looking good doing it. Hell, nVidia graphics cards can do it for every single frame of high end games with DLSS. Calling it “AI” because the type of algorithm it’s using is just cashing in on the buzzword.
(Unless I’m misunderstanding what’s going on.)
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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.
We wouldn't need so many damn laws to prevent shitty companies from doing shitty things if we could just become the kind of society that doesn't support shitty companies. The cookie thing is a great example of how a well–intentioned regulation made the internet an even more irritating place to be.
I suppose. But have you tried to get people to care about things? It's stupid hard. I can't get most of my friends to stop using Twitter, which is a pretty low stakes change. Nevermind something like "eat less meat" or "walk instead of drive sometimes"
If you can make people care, you can solve a lot of problems
I have tried, and writing my last comment actually brought a lot of repressed rage out. I've been too lenient on my friends and family who continue to use things like Facebook and X, because I didn't want to be that opinionated, ideological snore who won't shut up about how Facebook is the world's most prolific purveyor of hate speech, propping up the Trump administration, Israel, LGBT hate groups, the Rohingya genocide, housing discrimination, abortion witch hunts, blah blah blah. But the thing is that these are true things, and people should be appalled enough to never touch a Meta product again, even if it means teaching an elderly family member to learn a new group messaging app.
So I'm back to being a loudmouth bitch who scolds people for using Facebook. And X. But I probably don't stand a chance with Google.
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I KNEW THOSE SHORTS I'VE BEEN WATCHING HAD THE "AI LOOK" GOD-DAMNIT! With the smooth faces and the weird plastic looking contrast.
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