What type of compression would change the relative scale of elements within an image? None that I'm aware of, and these platforms can't really make up new video codecs on the spot since hardware accelerated decoding is so essential for performance.

Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.

If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired. More likely it's product managers who barely know what's going on in their departments except that there's a word "AI" pinging around that's good for their KPIs and keeps them from getting fired.

Totally. Unfortunately it's not lossless and instead of just getting pixelated it's changing the size of body parts lol

Probably compression followed by regeneration during decompression. There's a brilliant technique called "Seam Carving" [1] invented two decades ago that enables content aware resizing of photos and can be sequentially applied to frames in a video stream. It's used everywhere nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me that arbitrary enlargements are artifacts produced by such techniques.

[1] https://github.com/vivianhylee/seam-carving

I largely agree, I think that probably is all that it is. And it looks like shit.

Though there is a LOT of room to subtly train many kinds of lossy compression systems, which COULD still imply they're doing this intentionally. And it looks like shit.

It could be, but if compression is codecs, usually new codecs get talked about on a blog.

> This is an experiment

A legal experiment for sure. Hope everyone involved can clear their schedules for hearings in multiple jurisdictions for a few years.