A makeup influencer I follow noticed youtube and instagram are automatically adding filters to his face without permission to his videos. If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.
The 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.
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.
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 seems like such an easy thing for someone to document with screenshots and tests against the content they uploaded.
So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening? If this is common, please share some examples (that aren't in Instagram reel format from non-technical influencers)
> So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening?
It's difficult for me to read this as anything other than dismissing this person's views as being unworthy of discussing because they are are "non-technical," a characterization you objected to, but if you feel this shouldn't be the top level comment I'd suggest you submit a better one.
To me it's fairly subtle but there's a waxy texture to the second screenshot. This video presents some more examples, some of them have are more textured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86nhP8tvbLY
It's a different diagnosis, but the problem is still, "you transformed my content in a way that changes my appearance and undermines my credibility." The distinction is worth discussing but the people levying the criticism aren't wrong.
Perhaps a useful analogy is "breaking userspace." It's important to correctly diagnose a bug breaking userspace to ship a fix. But it's a bug if its a change that breaks userspace workflows, full stop. Whether it met the letter of some specification and is "correct" in that sense doesn't matter.
If you change someone's appearance in your post processing to the point it looks like they've applied a filter, your post processing is functionally a filter. Whether you intended it that way doesn't change that.
Well, this was the original claim:
> If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.
I didn't downplay it, I just wasn't talking about that at all. The video I was talking about didn't make that claim, and I wasn't responding to the comment which did. I don't see any evidence for that claim though. I would agree the most likely hypothesis is some kind of compression pipeline with an upsampling stage or similar.
ETA: I rewatched the video to the end, and I do see that they pose the question about whether it is targeted at certain content at the very end of the video. I had missed that, and I don't think that's what's happening.
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.
> 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.
I'm not critiquing their opinion that the result is bad. I also said the result was bad! I was critiquing the fact that someone on HN was presenting their non-technical analysis as a conclusive technical fact.
Non-technical is describing their background. It's not an insult.
I will be the first to admit I have no experience or knowledge in their domain, and I'm not going to try to interpret anything I see in their world.
It's a simple fact. This person is not qualified to be explaining what's happening, yet their analysis was being repeated as conclusive fact here on a technical forum
"The influencer is non-technical" and "It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum," to me, reads as a dismissal. As in, "these claims are not true and this person doesn't have the background to comment." Non-technical doesn't need to be an insult to be dismissive. You are giving us a reason not to down weight their perspective, but since the outcome is the same regardless of their background, I don't think that's productive.
I don't really see where you said the output was "bad," you said it was a compression artifact which had a "swimming effect", but I don't really see any acknowledgement that the influencer had a point or that the transformation was functionally a filter because it changed their appearance above and beyond losing detail (made their eyes bigger in a way an "anime eyes" filter might).
If I've misread you I apologize but I don't really see where it is I misread you.
From a technical standpoint it's interesting whether it's deliberate and whether it's compression, but it's not a fair criticism of this video, no. Dismissing someone's concerns over hair splitting is text book "well actually"ing. I wouldn't have taken issue to a comment discussing the difference from a perspective of technical curiosity.
I agreed that the output was bad! I'm not dismissing their concerns, I was explaining that their analysis was not a good technical explanation for what was happening.
This is going to be a huge legal fight as the terms of service you agree to on their platform is “they get to do whatever they want” (IANAL). Watch them try to spin this as “user preference” that just opted everyone into.
That’s the rude awakening creators get on these platforms. If you’re a writer or an artist or a musician, you own your work by default. But if you upload it to these platforms, they own it more or less. It’s there in the terms of service.
One of the comments on IG explains this perfectly:
"Meta has been doing this; when they auto-translate the audio of a video they are also adding an Al filter to make the mouth of who is speaking match the audio more closely. But doing this can also add a weird filter over all the face."
I don't know why you have to get into conspiracy theories about them applying different filters based on the video content, that would be such a weird micro optimization why would they bother with that
I doubt that’s what’s happening too but it’s not beyond the pale. They could be feeding both the input video and audio/transcript into their transformer and it has learned “when the audio is talking about lips the person is usually puckering their lips for the camera” so it regurgitates that.
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.
Neural compression wouldn't be like HVEC, operating on frames and pixels. Rather, these techniques can encode entire features and optical flow, which can explain the larger discrepancies. Larger fingers, slightly misplaced items, etc.
Neural compression techniques reshape the image itself.
If you've ever input an image into `gpt-image-1` and asked it to output it again, you'll notice that it's 95% similar, but entire features might move around or average out with the concept of what those items are.
The resources required for putting AI <something> inline in the input (upload) or output (download) chain would likely dwarf the resources needed for the non-AI approaches.
Maybe such a thing could exist in the future, but I don't think the idea that YouTube is already serving a secret neural video codec to clients is very plausible. There would be much clearer signs - dramatically higher CPU usage, and tools like yt-dlp running into bizarre undocumented streams that nothing is able to play.
If they were using this compression for storage on the cache layer, it could allow more videos closer to where they serve them, but they decide the. Back to webm or whatever before sending them to the client.
I don't think that's actually what's up, but I don't think it's completely ruled out either.
That doesn't sound worth it, storage is cheap, encoding videos is expensive, caching videos in a more compact form but having to rapidly re-encode them into a different codec every single time they're requested would be ungodly expensive.
A new client-facing encoding scheme would break utilization of hardware encoders, which in turn slows down everyone's experience, chews through battery life, etc. They won't serve it that way - there's no support in the field for it.
It looks like they're compressing the data before it gets further processed with the traditional suite of video codecs. They're relying on the traditional codecs to serve, but running some internal first pass to further compress the data they have to store.
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.
> If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired.
Seriously?
Then why is nobody in this thread suggesting what they're actually doing?
Everyone is accusing YouTube of "AI"ing the content with "AI".
What does that even mean?
Look at these people making these (at face value - hilarious, almost "cool aid" levels of conspiratorial) accusations. All because "AI" is "evil" and "big corp" is "evil".
Use occam's razor. Videos are expensive to store. Google gets 20 million videos a day.
I'm frankly shocked Google hasn't started deleting old garbage. They probably should start culling YouTube of cruft nobody watches.
Videos are expensive to store, but generative AI is expensive to run. That will cost them more than storage allegedly saved.
To solve this problem of adding compute heavy processing to serving videos, they will need to cache the output of the AI, which uses up the storage you say they are saving.
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.
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.
As soon as people start paying Google for the 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour (2022 figure), then they can dictate what forms of compression and lossiness Google uses to save money.
That doesn't include all of the transcoding and alternate formats stored, either.
People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS.
Google doesn't even say they'll keep your videos. They reserve the right to delete them, transcode them, degrade them, use them in AI training, etc.
The 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.
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.
There's already a huge number of AI generated channels in youtube. The only difference is that they're uploaded by channel owners. What's is gonna happen very quickly (if not already) is that Youtube itself will start "testing" AI content that it creates on what will look like new channels. In a matter of a few years they'll promote this "content" to occupy most of the time and views in the platform.
And then they'll start feeding in data like gaze tracking, and adjust the generated content in real time to personalize it to be maximally addictive for each viewer.
I buy into this conspiracy theory, it's genius. It's literally a boiling the frog kind of strategy against users. Eventually, everyone will get too lazy to go through the mental reasoning of judging every increasingly piece of content as "is this AI" as you mentally spend energy trying to find clues.
And over time the AI content will improve enough where it becomes impossible and then the Great AI Swappening will occur.
Perhaps the shorter/dumber the medium and format, the less discerning an audience it attracts. We're seeing a split between people who reject the idea of content without the subtext of the human creation behind it, and people who just take content for what it is on the surface without knowing why it should matter how it was created.
I think this will backfire and kill any service that mass implements it. The human to human nature of video is important to the engagement. Even if it becomes such that you can't tell on individual videos, eventually they'll become known for just being AI slop farms as a whole (something that I'm seeing have a lot of backlash)
And what for? Tiktok creators already generate content for them
Yes, but what happens when the AIs themselves begin to brainrot (as happens when they are not fed their usual sustenance of information from humans and the real world)?
It's very hard to tell in that instagram video, it would be a lot clearer if someone overlaid the original unaltered video and the one viewers on YouTube are seeing.
That would presumably be an easy smoking gun for some content creator to produce.
There are heavy alterations in that link, but having not seen the original, and in this format it's not clear to me how they compare.
Wouldn't this just be unnecessary compute using AI? Compression or just normal filtering seems far more likely. It just seems like increasing the power bill for no reason.
The examples shown in the links are not filters for aesthetics. These are clearly experiments in data compression
These people are having a moral crusade against an unannounced Google data compression test thinking Google is using AI to "enhance their videos". (Did they ever stop to ask themselves why or to what end?)
This level of AI paranoia is getting annoying. This is clearly just Google trying to save money. Not undermine reality or whatever vague Orwellian thing they're being accused of.
Agreed. It looks like over-aggressive adaptive noise filtering, a smoothing filter and some flavor of unsharp masking. You're correct that this is targeted at making video content compress better which can cut streaming bandwidth costs for YT. Noise reduction targets high-frequency details, which can look similar to skin smoothing filters.
The people fixated on "...but it made eyes bigger" are missing the point. YouTube has zero motivation to automatically apply "photo flattery filters" to all videos. Even if a "flattery filter" looked better on one type of face, it would look worse on another type of face. Plus applying ANY kind of filter to a million videos an hour costs serious money.
I'm not saying YouTube is an angel. They absolutely deploy dark patterns and user manipulation at massive scale - but they always do it to make money. Automatically applying "flattery filters" to videos wouldn't significantly improve views, advertising revenue or cut costs. Improving compression would do all three. Less bandwidth reduces costs, smaller files means faster start times as viewers jump quickly from short to short and that increases revenue because more different shorts per viewer/minute = more ad avails to sell.
Lets be straight here, AI paranoia is near the top of the most propagated subjects across all media right now, probably for worse. If it's not "Will you ever have a job again!?" it's "Will your grandparents be robbed of their net worth!?" or even just "When will the bubble pop!? Should you be afraid!? YES!!!" and also in places like Canada where the economy is predictably crashing because of decades of failures, it's both the cause and answer to macro economic decline. Ironically/suspiciously it's all the same re-hashed redundant takes by everyone from Hank Green to CNBC to every podcast ever, late night shows, radio, everything.
So to me the target of one's annoyance should be the propaganda machine, not the targets of the machine. What are people supposed to feel, totally chill because they have tons of control?
I learned to ignore the AI summaries after the first time I saw one that described the exact OPPOSITE conclusion/stance of the video it purported to summarize.
Also I just absolutely hate the tone of them. So obviously AI, and they all have the same structure, ending in "Prepare for a journey through blah blah blah".
Talking about AI, Google, and shady tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if soon we discover they are purposefully adding video glitches (deformed characters and so on) in the first handful of iterations when using Veo video generation just so people gets used to trying 3 or 4 times before they receive a good one.
Well the current models that cost per output sure love wasting those tokens on telling me how I am the greatest human being ever that only asks questions which get to the very heart of $SUBJECT.
You are right! Would you like me to pretend I'm able to generate better responses if you just give me more input but will end up just wasting your time and your money? And with some luck when you inevitably end up frustrated you will conclude that it was your fault for not giving me good enough input and not mine for being unable to generate good output, in other words that to you just need to get better at GPTing.
I'm seeing Youtube summary pictures which seem to be AI-generated. I was looking at [1], which is someone in China rebuilding old machines, and some of the newer summary pictures are not frames from the video. They show machines which are the sort of thing you might get by asking a Stable Diffusion type generator to generate a picture from the description.
YouTube should keep their grubby hands off. And give that capability to us instead. I want the power to do personal AI edits built in. Give me a prompt line under each video. Like "replace English with Gaelic", "replace dad jokes with lorem ipsum", "make the narrator's face 25% more symmetrical", "replace the puppy with a xenomorph", "change the setting to Monument Valley", etc.
i wonder how many years (decades?) out this is still. it would be wild to be able to run something like that locally in a browser. although, it will probably be punishable by death by then.
Yes! Thank you! He is talking about AI generated summaries being inaccurate, which is plenty to get up in arms about.
A lot of folks here hate AI and YouTube and Google and stuff, but it would be more productive to hate them for what they are actually doing.
But most people here are just taking this headline at face value and getting pitchforks out. If you try to watch the makeup guy’s proof, it’s talking about Instagram (not YouTube), doesn’t have clean comparisons, is showing a video someone sent back to him, which probably means it’s a compression artifact, not a face filter that the corporate overlords are hiding from the creator. It is not exactly a smoking gun, especially for a technical crowd.
I, for one, find it extremely odd that any of these video posters believe they get to control whether or not I use, directly or indirectly, an AI to summarize the video for me.
They're under the encouraged belief that they are in control over what is shown on their youtube channel. They think they should control what text is shown under their videos on "their" channel. This illusion of control of presentation has been unconvincing for quite a while but now Alphabet is just throwing around it's weight because there are no other options except youtube for what youtube does: allowing money to flow to people who make videos without the video file host getting sued out of existence. Alphabet does this by mantaining a large standing army of lawyers and a huge money supply. Trivial technical issues like file hosting and network bandwidth have been repeatedly solved by others but when they become popular they're legally attacked and killed.
FYI, I used to pay for YouTube Premium and have since stopped doing that. Deleting the app and letting ad blockers filter out this nonsense is a superior experience.
Strongly recommend. We’ll get local AIs that can skip the cruft soon enough anyway.
AI is the field. Machine learning is one of many specializations within the field. “Generative AI” is the colloquial term for using various machine learning models to generate text, images, video, code, etc.; that is, it’s a subfield of machine learning.
Other subfields of AI include things like search, speech and language understanding, knowledge representation, and so on. There’s a lot more to AI than machine learning and a lot more to machine learning than LLMs (“gen AI”).
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Have you seen all the "240fps TVs" being sold for the past 15 years? They all apply some weird fake smoothing and people prefer them.
> Samuel Woolley, a disinformation expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said the company’s wording was misleading. “Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence,” he said. “This is AI.”
It's the other way around isn't it? "AI" is a subset of ML.
I’ve also noticed YouTube has unbanned many channels that were previously banned for overt supremacist and racist content. They get amplified a lot more now. Between that and AI slop, I feel like Google is speed running the changes X made over the last few years.
Being driven mad by conspiracy paranoia about 'face filters' (possible compression artifacts) is a great example of being AI-pilled.
And then the discourse is so riddled with misnomers and baited outrage that it goes nowhere.
The other example in submitted post isn't 'edits to videos' but rather the text descriptions of automated captions. The Gemini/AI engine not being very good at summarizing is a different issue.
This link is to a Mastodon thread which links to another blog post which links to an actual source on ynetnews.com which quotes another article that has a quote from a YouTube rep. Save yourself the trouble and go straight to that article (although it's not great either): https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bj1qbwcklg
The key section:
> Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, acknowledged in a post on X that the company was running “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.”
So the "AI edits" are just a compression algorithm that is not that great.
THAT Rene Ritchie? Cool, I wondered what happened to him. I listened to his podcast all the time in the 2000s, when podcasts were synced to an iPod over USB before your commute.
YouTube is not hosting and serving uncompressed video so the apt comparison is not "compression" to "no compression" rather than "fancy experimental compression" to "tried and true compression."
“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).
Noise is, because of its random nature, inherently less compressible than a predictable signal.
So counterintuitively, noise reduction improves compression ratios. In fact many video codecs are about determining which portion of the video IS noise that can be discarded, and which bits are visually important...
That doesn't make it just a compression algorithm, to me at least.
Or to put it another way, to me it would be similarly disingenuous to describe e.g. dead code elimination or vector path simplification as "just a compression algorithm" because the resultant output is smaller than it would be without. I think part of what has my hackles raised is that it claims to improve video clarity, not to optimise for size. IMO compression algorithms do not and should not make such claims; if an algorithm has the aim (even if secondary) to affect subjective quality, then it has a transformative aspect that requires both disclosure and consent IMO.
Perhaps it would raise your hackles less if you read the Youtube comment as "improve video clarity at a particular file size", rather than how you presumably read it as "improve video clarity [with no regard for how big the resulting file is]".
I think the first comment is why they would position noise reduction as being both part of their compression and a way to improve video clarity.
> That doesn't make it just a compression algorithm, to me at least
It's in the loop of the compression and decompression algorithm.
Video compression has used tricks like this for years. For example, reducing noise before decode and then adding it back in after the decode cycle. Visual noise doesn't need to be precise, so it removing it before compression and then approximating it on the other end saves a lot of bits.
"Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as as bit of an exaggeration; it might lead you to think they're actually editing videos rather than simply... post-processing them[1].
That being said, I don't believe they should be doing anything like this without the creator's explicit consent. I do personally think there's probably a good use case for machine learning / neural network tech applied to the clean up of low-quality sources (for better transcoding that doesn't accumulate errors & therefore wastes bitrate), in the same way that RTX Video Super Resolution can do some impressive deblocking & upscaling magic[2] on Windows. But clearly they are completely missing the mark with whatever experiment they were running there.
Please allow me "post-process" your comment a bit. Let me know if I'm doing this right.
> "Making AI edits to videos" strikes me as something particularly egregious; it leads a viewer to see a reality that never existed, and that the creator never intended.
Sure, but that's not YouTube. That's Instagram. He says so at 1:30.
YouTube is not applying any "face filters" or anything of the sort. They did however experiment with AI upscaling the entire image which is giving the classic "bad upscale" smeary look.
Like I said, I think that's still bad and they should have never done it without the clear explicit consent of the creator. But that is, IMO, very different and considerably less bad than changing someone's face specifically.
His followers also added screenshots of youtube shorts doing it. He says he reached out to both platforms and says he will be reporting back with an update from their customer service and is doing some compare an contrast testing for his audience.
> Here's some other creators also talking about it happening in youtube shorts (...)
If you open the context of the comment, they are specifically talking about the bad, entire-image upscaling that gives the entire picture the oily smeary look. NOT face filters.
EDIT : same thing with the two other links you edited into your comment while I was typing my reply.
Again, I'm not defending YouTube for this. But I also don't think they should be accused of doing something they're not doing. Face filters without consent are a far, far worse offense than bad upscaling.
I would like to urge you to be more cautious, and to actually read what you brandish as proof.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_/?igsh=MTZybml2NDB...
The screenshots/videos of them doing it are pretty wild, and insane they are editing creators' uploads without consent!
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