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They've also introduced automatic dubbing for foreign language videos. While this can be useful, I'd prefer it to be opt-in like how you can select the language for subtitles.
Language is one of the silliest things in modern tech.

I speak fluent English, but my native language is Spanish. I should be the most basic case of bilingualism for an app to handle - my native language is popular, English is the poster child of second language you learn for global communication, the combination itself is common as well...

The amount of stupid assumptions apps and sites make about me is mindboggling.

"Your app and OS is set to English, you watch mostly English content, you use no subtitles and your subscriptions are mostly US-based. let's give you an extremely fake dub over the content you usually watch."

Reddit also auto translate the links I enter and makes them gibberish if I'm not logged in, chagpt switches languages halfway through a message regardless of what I use...It's becoming borderline hostile.

Or at the very least, allow us to opt-out. This automatic enabling of AI dubbing for videos in a language I can understand is maddening.
Absolutely, I really wish you could opt-out of the auto-dubbing instead of having to select the audio manually. I'd take poorly translated auto-transcribed subtitles with the original audio basically every time over the badly auto-dubbed audio.
I started watching a video that was using this on desktop. I down-voted it immediately because I figured it was AI slop, as so much of YouTube is today.
YouTube's automatic title translation (English to German in my case) is surprisingly bad.

I often stumble over translations that are technically correct, but plain wrong in the context of the video.

(Just tried to find some examples, but could not find any. Maybe Google does not force autotranslated titles on me anymore?)

Hmm. I've been watching some old shows taken from VHS and some of them look like cursed AI upscale. One series was titled as AI upscale, and another wasn't. Both looked a bit rough. Wonder if this is why.
I hate it. Similar to "Remastered" on Spotify that makes everything sound the same, which I hate far more.
"Remastered" = "Set loudness to 11."
I think remasters are uploaded by the record labels, it's not some kind of algorithm run by Spotify.

It has loudness normalization, which can be turned off in the settings.

  "The same pixel-filled rectangle could contain the work of someone who spent time and energy and had the courage to perform publicly, or of someone who sits in bed typing prompts and splicing clips in order to make a few bucks."
One can imagine much the same sentence being written 100+ years ago, about the honest hard-working landscape painters we all know and love, vs the newfangled corner-cutting opportunists with their (questionably moral) "photography."

Fraud is bad, and people should know what they're consuming. Artists should control what they're producing, as in this case with Youtube. That said, the underlying moral panic betrayed by the quoted sentence is completely over-the-top.

Full disclosure: I don't create AI art, and I don't know anyone who does.

If YT ads were honest: Corporate technofeudalism: now with 30% less consent and only 10% more suck.
What would be the goal here?

Technical? Some kind of super compression-decompression scheme? Model tuning to see how people react? Is there a stupid "Upscale with AI" slider that is new and default turned on?

As much as HN hates AI, most users are happy with this change because for most videos, it works correctly.
Google is behind on getting human feedback data and is incorporating this anywhere they can (SGE, Gemini in Gmail, Video in Youtube).
There's a paywall, but does TFA actually confirm if this is done for "image quality" or if it's used to improve compression ratios? I've seen both theories - that YouTube is deliberately applying an AI aesthetic to non-AI videos, or that this is a side-effect of aggressive attempts to reduce bandwidth.
That description sounds like what happens when the compression level of H.265 is turned up all the way. It's great for certain types of content (anime...) but not others.
For every erudite AI-skeptic who decries the overuse of AI and the muddy, oversaturated style AI image and upscaling models propagate, there are 10 reliable ad-watching product-purchasing users who love that aesthetic and their consumer behavior will drive towards that aesthetic being used more (for good reason, that look was fine tuned to match their preferences).
This has happened with articles circulating about Will Smith and his recent concert video looking AI generated.

Supposedly his video uploaded to Youtube shorts looked heavily AI generated compared to the same video uploaded to Instagram, despite the crowds and couples in the shorts being real people that were also photographed.

This must be great for Google's Cloud business.
maybe they should also give some thought on how to fix their broken search since they are in the mood to fix things
"Experiment" is such an understatement to the treachery happening here