Joe Maring / Android Authority TL;DR YouTube has been secretly upscaling Shorts by certain creators without their consent. Creators have not been offered any notification or given any option to disable upscaling. The team has clarified that it is using “traditional machine learning” to denoise and unblur videos. YouTube was founded 20 years ago and has gone through significant changes over this period, especially in video quality. More recently, however, it is experimenting with forced upscaling of certain videos, even without consent from creators. If you’ve recently encountered videos from your favorite YouTube creators looking like they were generated with AI, you may not be alone. Google has confirmed that this is part of an experiment where it is upscaling low-resolution videos with the help of machine learning. And the results haven’t landed well with users, just like its another recent attempt to determine users’ actual age using AI. Over the last few months, there have been reports about YouTube making alterations to the videos that make them look fake. One of the reports on Reddit calls out these modifications that resemble beauty filters on smartphones. The original poster says some of the Shorts they have seen look “smeary” and appear as if there was an oil paint effect applied on top of them. The upscaling effect was recently also called out by YouTuber Rhett Shull, who said a recent Short they uploaded looked “weird” and resembled a deepfake. The issue is clearly widespread, and another YouTuber, TheMrBravoShow, also posted about it on Reddit about a month ago. The YouTuber showed examples of their Shorts being upscaled with “a ton of post processing and weird effects,” which rob the original video of its essence. TheMrBravoShow complained that they shoot their videos using an 80s camcorder on purpose, and nostalgia is a significant aspect of their channel. However, the recent experimentation from YouTube makes their videos look entirely different from what they are intended to be. Don’t want to miss the best from Android Authority? Set us as a preferred source in Google Search to support us and make sure you never miss our latest exclusive reports, expert analysis, and much more. The more discouraging part of this is that YouTube hasn’t taken consent from any of the original creators uploading their videos. Uploaded Shorts are reportedly altered automatically, and there is no option to deactivate it. While there was uncertainty about the upscaling, YouTube has confirmed this experiment after TechLinked (an affiliate of Linus Tech Tips) made a video highlighting Rhett Shull’s video above. YouTube support replied that this is an “experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning.” Further nested in the X post was another post by video creator and YouTube’s official liaison, Rene Ritchie, who clarified that YouTube is using “machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing.” Ritche also emphasized that this isn’t AI, specifically allaying concerns that YouTube is using generative AI to upscale videos. Instead, they say that it is similar to what smartphones do with photos and videos. Despite the claims, however, the use of AI is still contentious, since the experiment matches the colloquial definition of AI-based upscaling, even if YouTube prefers to tone it down by calling it machine learning. The absolute outrage stems from the fact that YouTube hasn’t given creators the option to disable these alterations or even informed creators of these changes. We hope YouTube listens to the feedback and offers creators the options to disable upscaling, denoising, or whatever it classifies these changes as. More importantly, without those options, this appears hypocritical, especially since YouTube itself has been planning to limit monetization options for channels that use AI to improve or enrich their videos. Follow