YouTube secretly used artificial intelligence to modify creators’ videos without notification or consent, making subtle changes to their appearance[1]. According to Rick Beato, who runs a YouTube channel with over 5 million subscribers, he noticed strange alterations in his videos - his hair looked different and it appeared he was wearing makeup[1:1].
The AI modifications included sharpening skin in some areas while smoothing it in others, defining wrinkles in clothing more clearly, and causing subtle warping of features like ears[1:2]. YouTuber Rhett Shull, who investigated the changes, said “If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening I would have done it myself… I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet”[1:3].
The unauthorized AI enhancements represent a concerning trend where artificial intelligence increasingly mediates reality before it reaches viewers, potentially eroding authentic connections between creators and their audiences[1:4].
The users/creators of AI are well known to be using real peoples’ content as training materials without consent. What watchdogs we have against any of it are completely toothless
Stop using Google.
How about that?
Several things:
- How did no one notice?
- Maybe stop using Google services
- Maybe use AI to explain the purposfully vague and ambigious TOS
I’m sure it’s in the terms and conditions, hence uploaders have no recourse. If not, it’s surely a violation of copyright, at least in the USA where copyright is automatically granted when a work is created.
One solution would be for people to stop uploading to Google platforms until this practice is halted and made opt-in, but that won’t happen. Too many people depend on YT to survive. And lots more desperately want to make it big there.
There are more and more creators which are uploading their content to Odysee (OpenSource), there they also can monetize their content but without ads and other Google crap. Maybe the best alternative to YT.
With AI seeping into everything I think offline backups should be made of everything that is important to you or your organization.
Imagine you are a government or corporation. Instead of recognising and dealing with any painful past events you just pull a 1984 and rewrite history, changing movies and editing old documents.
This is scary shit because we know people are already abusing it for their gain
What this news has to do with privacy?
Literally nothing.
OP just stole the actual BBC article and shoved 20 ads into it.
The real article, which still has fuck-all to do with privacy but at least isn’t a malware hazard: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission
I read only that. But it’s still an ai/tech news, not about privacy. It’s about wrongdoings of google, but now not against regular users but creators.
I should really gave up on the few .ml communities I still follow. Here just 2 users spams links, sometimes accidentally on topic, then there is some interesting conversations. There are better moderated privacy comms on lemmy: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Any community without a 24/7 mod team can get spammed.
This is just a spambot that takes high engagement posts from Reddit and reposts it everywhere it can find. Mod(s?) are probably asleep.
The community should be downvoting this crap (though, making vote manipulation bots is easy on Lemmy).
The community should be downvoting this crap
like that has ever worked for posts nor relevant to a community.
Yes I know, but there are other problems with .ml. But I’m not directly affected because I don’t comment about politics.
Most .ml communities have active alternatives on other instances, last time I checked this community was the only active on privacy topics, but it seems like others catching up
The fact that it’s creepy that AI decides for us how to make our videos. It’s spyware.
I’m not familiar with youtube TOS, but knowing google has a lot of lawyers I suspect there is a section where you allow them to do such experiments on your videos. The creators uploaded the videos there, they could choose not to upload. Who spied on who in this story?
Someone agreeing to a TOS doesn’t actually eliminate the privacy concerns.
But it’s a public video. They deliberately uploaded to make it public. Whose privacy was at stake in this story?
YouTube inserting itself into the creative process in an unwanted way is a violation of something that was previously personal and private. The artistic choices a video creator makes are their own, changing them changes the meaning of what they created and violates the authentic connection between the artist and the audience. Imagine if the comments you made on videos were edited to be something else -it’s a violation of our ability to even express ourselves in public. A private decision making process is being taken away from artists.
This isn’t unrelated to privacy.
Remuxing or resizing a video is also a violation? Because yt does that to all videos. A 4k nature movie looks different in 360p. From a technological point of view the 2 process (ai sharpening and changing to a resolution where new pixels have to be calculated via some filter) is not that different, an algorithm modifies the picture and calculates new pixels. Would you ban upscaling in televisions, because they violate the authentic connection between the the artist and the audiance? Hell, colorized photographs destroy the remaining privacy of photographers who died years ago.
The point is you rarely see a video as it was created by someone, so your generalization is not applicable to this case. And it’s still not about privacy, you just redifined the meaning of copyright and some kind of indentity theft. Which shouldn’t happen, but still a different topic.
Yes, any editing done without the author’s consent is a violation of the personal and private creative process. There are obviously degrees of violation, so on the low end there’s other examples you gave like resizing a video or colorizing a photo without permission. Then on the other end we have the fucking nightmare of YouTube changing my face because I’m too ugly.
The point is, you’re defending YouTube for doing something heinous. Do you think this is okay?
It is an unsavory corporate behaviour similar to invasion privacy and disrespect to personal security.
If you think this is off topic, report to the mods with your reasoning.
But spare us this pathetic bootlicking, it is pathetic.
I would certainly not want to defend AI and AI-usage but I don’t understand this remark. I mean I understand what it says, but I don’t understand why it’s mentioned at all:
The unauthorized AI enhancements represent a concerning trend where artificial intelligence increasingly mediates reality before it reaches viewers, potentially eroding authentic connections between creators and their audiences[^1].
There is no such thing as an ‘authentic connection’ or a non-mediated ‘reality before it reaches viewers’ if by ‘authentic’ the author means ‘direct’, unfiltered or unedited.
In a least two ways, a video is always edited, aka mediated:
- A video being scripted and or scenarized, even say just by the choice of lens and lighting used, or by the props visible in the frame. Not forgetting the sound (the way the voice is recorded/enhanced) and the music used to suggest/enhance some mood. And/or when the video is edited (selection of sequences to keep and other to discard). Which makes even the most basic videos, even a live stream, not an authentic (unmediated) connection.
- It’s also not unmediated by the very way video works, like photo: the ‘reality’ mentioned and that is being recorded is just that: a record of it. And not even of it, a record of the image of it which is a recording of the photons that were hitting said reality and that were bounced back (first mediation) onto the camera’s sensor (second mediation) that were then transformed by the camera into an electrical signal (third) that was stored as binary data (fourth) to be later on converted again into something the viewer (add as many as the ones already listed) at every single conversion there was an interpretation and a decisions were made (one of the reasons there can be so large image differences between various brands is that they don’t use the same sensors and don’t use the same algorithms to convert signal into data and vice versa). It’s not just with digital, any recording, even a film one, or an old handmade painting or a sketch, is a a lot of mediation between a reality (that can sometimes be long gone and forgotten) and its viewer (us).
So, to me the issue should not be that this mediation was made using an AI-powered tool by Youtube to change the video. It should focus on the fact that YouTube violated the creator’s copyright by deciding on their own to ‘improve’ said videos without the creator’s consent.
A bit like we should not accept when anyone, no matter their reasoning and intentions, wants to edit an existing creation because they think it should be changed (say they don’t like the dude’s face, or their nose or even they disagree with what they say and want to change it). Unless they get explicit authorization to edit it, they should not have any right to do so.
Sorry for the lengthy comment, I find it odd when I read that a video is about ‘authentic connection’ between a supposed reality and us. It’s not, with or without AI involved.
I fully comprehended what the statement said. You are over analyzing it.
There’s a term in art called “authorial control.” Roger Ebert used the term to attack video games as art, saying they lacked “authorial control” and hence invalid for art.
The claim I hear in this is the AI taking away the control of the author. Yes, videos are edited, but there’s a bunch of choices made in that process. If some robot came in & started mucking around with my edits or lighting, especially without my knowledge, that’s a major red flag. YT, as a platform, already has enough problems. Invisible robots “enhancing” videos is perhaps one of the worst features they can add. Unwanted help is not help.
You sure used a lot of words to say something completely meaningless
You might have missed the problem.
We have an authentic connection to the author when we engage with their content, the editing and lighting and scripting is a reality they create and share with us.
What YouTube did was mediate the connection between the creator and the viewers. YouTube destroyed the reality that the author was trying to create for their viewers and substituted its own reality instead.
Just because someone made art, doesn’t mean it’s not reality. Their art is real, and IS that reality. Until YouTube altered it.
