alt Hacker NewsThe video shown as evidence is full of compression artifacts. The influencer is non-technical and assumes it's an AI filter, but the output is obviously not good quality anywhere.
To me, this clearly looks like a case of a very high compression ratio with the motion blocks swimming around on screen. They might have some detail enhancement in the loop to try to overcome the blockiness which, in this case, results in the swimming effect.
It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum. It should be a dead giveaway that this is a compression issue because the entire video is obviously highly compressed and lacking detail.
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Someone in the comments explained that this effect was in auto translated videos. Meta and YT apparently use AI to modify the videos to have people match the language when speaking. Which is a nightmare on its own, but not exactly the same.
There are some very clear examples elsewhere. It looks as if youtube applied AI filters to make compression better by removing artifacts and smoothing colors.
This is an unfair analysis. They discuss compression artifacts. They highlight things like their eyes getting bigger which are not what you usually expect from a compression artifact.
If your compression pipeline gives people anime eyes because it's doing "detail enhancement", your compression pipeline is also a filter. If you apply some transformation to a creator's content, and then their viewers perceive that as them disingenuously using a filter, and your response to their complaints is to "well actually" them about whether it is a filter or a compression artifact, you've lost the plot.
To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way. Regardless of whether they are technical, they are living in a world increasingly intermediated by technology, and we should be listening to their feedback on it. They have to live with the consequences of our design decisions. If we believe them to be non-technical, we should extend a lot of generosity to them in their use of terminology, and address what they mean instead of nitpicking.
You obviously didn't watch the video, the claims are beyond the scope of compression and include things like eye and mouth enlargement, and you can clearly see the filter glitching off on some frames.