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].
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).
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?
No, I’m not defending google. I’m saying this news does not fit this community, as it’s not about privacy. You can do bad, evil, illegal things a lot other ways, not just against privacy, I think this is mostly against consent and copyright.
I love lemmy because you have different communities for different topics. I hate users who post randomly to unrelated communities. It messes up my ocd.
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.