alt Hacker NewsThe AI filter applied server-side to YouTube Shorts (and only shorts, not regular videos) is horrible, and it feels like it must be a case of deliberate boiling the frog. If everyone gets used to overly smooth skin, weirdly pronounced wrinkles, waxy hair, and strange ringing around moving objects, then AI-generated content will stand out less when they start injecting it into the feed. At first I thought this must be some client-side upscaling filter, but tragically it is not. There's no data savings at all, and there's no way for uploaders or viewers to turn it off. I guess I wasn't cynical enough.
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Wow - I had not considered this as the intention.
I think they are doing it so they can mask the extreme compression they are doing to YouTube shorts.
I’ve been saying for a while that the end game for addictive short form chum feeds like TikTok and YouTube Shorts is to drop human creators entirely. They’ll be AI generated slop feeds that people will scroll, and scroll, and scroll. Basically just a never ending feed of brain rot and ads.
Smoothing skin does give important data savings. Smooth blocks take up much less space than detailed blocks. Which makes me believe these are nothing but compression artefacts.
The conspiracy theory that this is done to make people get used to AI content is the kind of bs that would be derided and flagged otherwise… but since it is anti-tech, it’s fine. Shows how the site is going.
Have you tried viewing the short in the normal YouTube UI? Just copy the short's unique identifier from the URL and replace the unique identifier in any normal UI YouTube video.