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.
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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.
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