alt Hacker News“a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
It looks like quality cleanup, but I can’t imagine many creators aren’t using decent camera tech and editing software for shorts.
Well yes, that's what I mean, quality cleanup is not what I'd call a compression algorithm.
And as you say, arbitrarily applying quality cleanup is making assumptions of the quality and creative intent of the submitted videos. It would be one thing if creators were uploading raw camera frames to YouTube (which is what smartphone camera apps are receiving as input when shooting video), but applying that to videos that have already been edited/processed and vetted for release is stepping over a line to me. At the very least it should be opt-in (ideally with creators having the ability to preview the output before accepting to publish it).