YouTube's sneaky AI 'experiment'
63 pointsby JumpCrisscross26 days ago64 comments(www.theatlantic.com)
Comments (18)
neonate•23 days ago
rhdunn•26 days ago
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.
kace91•22 days ago
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.
tavavex•22 days ago
It's mind-boggling and insane how hostile YT became to multilingualism. You'd think that out of the hundreds of people involved in this project, at least one would've been bilingual and experienced this hostility firsthand. I can't even come up with any explanations for how this happened, except for no one important being bilingual (or even having thought of bilingual people), and/or some kind of systemic flaw that lets these breaking changes slip into the final product.
YouTube doesn't care about the languages listed in your Google account, as everything else does. It doesn't care what content you watch. The algorithm seemingly takes your display language and forces poorly AI-translated content down your throat, more often than not completely obliterating any coherence the original video had. And this change is forced upon you, you must watch it in the language YouTube decides you have to watch it in.
There is a browser extension that reverts this behavior to how it used to be and makes YouTube load the proper audio track. What happens when that stops working?
Tostino•22 days ago
These companies are not actually diverse, even if they attempt(ed in the past) to hire diverse ethnicities.
tavavex•22 days ago
But the strangest thing is that you don't need to be of a certain ethnicity to speak multiple languages. Sure, I think it's less likely for some average US-born employee, but I would still guess that probably >10% have got to speak a foreign language, especially since they're all highly educated people who had more exposure to other languages and cultures than the average American.
happysadpanda2•22 days ago
Aha! I too have seen thumbnails of videos with context clues (product brands in the thumbnail which doesn't exist under that brand in my country) yet with a video title in my native tongue, which a clear "machine translation"-feel to it.
Until I read this thread I assumed that it was the content creator doing shenanigans (low quality AI slop video mass-produced in many languages and targeting my locale with videos for my locale), but it does make so much more "sense" that it would be YT doing this.
And my reaction to those thumbnails, thinking it was the creator doing low quality AI slop, was to "reward" them with "Don't recommend this channel".
So I have been punishing innocent channels for crap that YT is doing...
aredox•22 days ago
Those AI translations fail all the time - I am looking at woodworking, and a "plane" gets translated variously as an "avion", a "surface", etc... and never as a "rabot".
It is "English to French" translation. Two close langs, with a humongous corpus to train on.
glitchc•22 days ago
I'm certain it boils down to money. Someone like you (fluently bilingual) would provide the best translation but also the costliest. Every other option is cheaper, and Youtube will strive for the cheapest available.
Google Translate and Gemini are essentially free to Youtube, so why not?
tavavex•22 days ago
The crazy part isn't that the feature exists - I'm sure YouTube wants to make foreign content available to people who don't speak that language, and of course they can't manually translate every video in the world - it's that it's mandatory.
kace91•22 days ago
I would buy this argument, except the cheapest thing for them would be to offer me the regular original experience in English, which is always my preferred option (maybe with some optional subs once in a blue moon, for thick accents and the like).
It’s pretty much impossible to set this preference the moment you have _something_ (a location, a keyboard, whatever) not set to the American default. And even if you do, it would then mangle Spanish content (or whatever your other language is)
mountainb•22 days ago
Try to drop a foreign phrase into MS Word to add a little color and watch it go completely berserk.
anal_reactor•22 days ago
I've been downvoted for this and I'll be downvoted again, but average user is monolingual and for them, shitty automatic translation is better than no translation. Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language. It's mind-boggling that HN users don't understand that they're not the target audience of most major platforms.
Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.
Wowfunhappy•22 days ago
> but [the] average user is monolingual
That's certainly true in America, but my understanding (as an American myself) is that it's not true in much of the world! In Romania for example people speak Romanian and English; in Ukraine they speak Ukrainian and Russian. I'm not sure how this nets out in terms of the overall population of technology users, but it's a large chunk of people!
P.S. For what it's worth, I downvoted you because you said "I'll be downvoted for this", not because I thought the rest of your comment was bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
anal_reactor•22 days ago
It's just frustrating to see how clueless people here are on the topic of multilingualism, despite being otherwise well-rounded. They genuinely think that the reason why platforms support multilingualism so poorly is different from "market forces proved that multilingual support is not an important feature".
Wowfunhappy•22 days ago
It could also be a market failure borne of how America-focused the big tech companies are!
anal_reactor•22 days ago
Not really because in many cases American big tech replaced local solutions, so from purely economic perspective, they must've been better.
Xelbair•22 days ago
even if average american is...
then launch that cesspool of feature in US only.
viraptor•22 days ago
Everyone who finished highschool with me knows at least 2 languages. Anyone who wants uni knows 3 at least vaguely. And that's in a country with a single official language. There are places with 2+ of them.
amanaplanacanal•22 days ago
Average American is monolingual, anyway.
jcranmer•22 days ago
Apparently about 20% of the US is multilingual (per census data). So while the median might be monolingual, it is still so large of the US as to be a market segment worth catering to.
johannes1234321•22 days ago
While even in America (as in USA) there is a large community of people speaking English and Spanish. And tech companies (including Google) have a lot of immigrants, who should be aware of the existance of bilinguals.
For broader America, including Canda there is Quebec with French+English. etc
thrance•22 days ago
> small percentage of users speak more than one language.
Are you paid by Google to astroturf us into being accepting of their laziness? We're only asking them to allow us to specify two languages in the YouTube app, nothing more.
> Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.
Really? I happened to check this today and found no such features.
adastra22•22 days ago
Or to respect user language settings at all, rather than geolocate and assume.
anal_reactor•22 days ago
> Really?
Yes.
thrance•22 days ago
It was a rhetorical question, I checked the GitHub and all. There is no such features. I don't know why you keep lying through your teeth, that's frankly disturbing and rather lame.
anal_reactor•22 days ago
https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-documentation/blob/main...
Number 5
Am I talking to AI chatbot, or a plain-old idiot?
kjkjadksj•22 days ago
60 million people in the US are spanish speakers.
tavavex•22 days ago
> Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language
Everything I can find online claims that ~40% of the world, if not more, is at least bilingual. It's not some crazy rare single-digit percentage trait. In some nations, multilingualism is near-universal. Do you think it's reasonable for a company like YouTube to deliver a frankly hot garbage experience with no opt-out to about half of its userbase, if not more? That's billions of people we're talking about here.
thrance•22 days ago
My advice would be to stop feeding this troll. Just look at their comment history.
anal_reactor•22 days ago
This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting. When you ask average person "do you speak English?" they understand "can you ask in English where toilet is?", not "can you consume content in English comfortably?". Ignoring this, sure, there are some countries where true bilingualism is common, but even there, most people are effectively monolingual consumers because what happens is that they just pick one favorite language and consume most content in that language.
tavavex•22 days ago
> This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting.
Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find the primary source for those numbers (everyone says 43%, quoting each other), but my assumption for anything that quantifies people across the entire planet is that it's probably not based on polling, but making statistical inferences and relying on other data from individual countries, so a mix of different things.
Regardless, even if you disagree with that number, true fluency in multiple languages is still extremely common. And it's not just countries that have multiple official languages. People from one country who live close to another country with a similar language will commonly be fluent in both. Depending on your culture, you may be exposed to English to an extent where you'll have a good understanding of it. Try talking to a Dutch person in their language without being fluent in it.
And sure, if what you're watching is news or knitting videos, you'll watch them in your first language. The reason why I watch content in another language is because there's often stuff that doesn't even exist in my own. Lots of people with bad formal English education became proficient in English because of the internet, they want to consume English-speaking content because the English internet is far larger and more international than, say, the Norwegian, Polish or Korean internet.
It's very, very common.
MandieD•22 days ago
After watching several well-produced videos from my fellow Americans to try to learn how to hand spin, the one that made it click was a barely-edited one done by an older Chilean/Peruvian woman in Spanish.
I have an American high school language course (granted, I did all four years) level of Spanish understanding - maybe because of the language gap, I paid more attention to her motions. Either way, I think having the video in the original language made it work better for me.
Google Maps has been doing the most counterproductive thing for quite awhile now: it translates German business names. Instead of seeing "Stoff Bauer," which is the sign I need to look for while driving, I saw "Fabric Farmer," and ironically, only because I actually speak German, I was able to figure out that they had translated that rather common German family name, and what it really should be.
Excessive, compulsory auto-translation is awful.
lm28469•26 days ago
The best part is that the TTS is somehow worse than what elevenlab had 3 years ago
thrance•22 days ago
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.
fho•22 days ago
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?)
stephen_g•22 days ago
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.
anticensor•15 days ago
It's opt-out.
JohnTHaller•22 days ago
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.
atleastoptimal•22 days ago
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).
add-sub-mul-div•22 days ago
The tyranny of the majority and the plight of the discerning.
Workaccount2•22 days ago
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?
atrettel•22 days ago
I think the compression idea is the most plausible, but it still doesn't make complete sense. Unless the compression scheme significantly reduced the size, I don't see why YouTube would implement something so lossy, especially without warning people beforehand.
Gigachad•22 days ago
Removing noise and smoothing the video would reduce the size. While also giving it that AI dream look.
zb3•22 days ago
Or to get promoted :)
anal_reactor•22 days ago
They just throw shit at everything and see what sticks. Truth is, AI does and will revolutionalize some aspects of our lives, it's just not clear what specifically. It's like we're in this weird phase when during dotcom bubble everyone tried to make everything online. Most ideas are pure unadulterated poop, but someone will indeed hit the jackpot.
OptionKitchen•22 days ago
I suspect they want to make natural videos look slightly more artificial so that AI generated content will look less unnatural. "close the uncanny valley" so to speak
mitchbob•25 days ago
NoPicklez•22 days ago
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.
explodes•26 days ago
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.
tomhow•22 days ago
YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003073 - Aug 2025 (267 comments)
jgalt212•22 days ago
This must be great for Google's Cloud business.
htrp•22 days ago
Google is behind on getting human feedback data and is incorporating this anywhere they can (SGE, Gemini in Gmail, Video in Youtube).
vivzkestrel•22 days ago
maybe they should also give some thought on how to fix their broken search since they are in the mood to fix things
kurito•22 days ago
"Experiment" is such an understatement to the treachery happening here
userbinator•22 days ago
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.
burnt-resistor•25 days ago
If YT ads were honest: Corporate technofeudalism: now with 30% less consent and only 10% more suck.
karmakaze•26 days ago
I hate it. Similar to "Remastered" on Spotify that makes everything sound the same, which I hate far more.
a57721•22 days ago
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.
SoftTalker•22 days ago
"Remastered" = "Set loudness to 11."
gdbsjjdn•22 days ago
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.
olyjohn•22 days ago
Who knows. I just know that I have uploaded high quality video to YouTube, and they compress the living shit out of it so badly that it looked blurry and faded. Now they gotta use AI to upscale shitty looking videos? Dumb as fuck.
anal_reactor•22 days ago
As much as HN hates AI, most users are happy with this change because for most videos, it works correctly.
schiffern•26 days ago
"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."
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.