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.
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.
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)?
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.
