Youtube's Sneaky AI 'experiment'
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
theatlantic.comTechstory
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YoutubeAIVideo Processing
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Video Processing
YouTube is allegedly using AI to upscale videos without user consent, sparking debate about the technology's impact on video quality and the platform's motives.
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Aug 23, 2025 at 2:50 AM EDT
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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.
Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.
For broader America, including Canda there is Quebec with French+English. etc
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
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.
Yes.
Number 5
Am I talking to AI chatbot, or a plain-old idiot?
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.
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.
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.
then launch that cesspool of feature in US only.
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?
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...
Google Translate and Gemini are essentially free to Youtube, so why not?
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)
It is "English to French" translation. Two close langs, with a humongous corpus to train on.
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?)
It has loudness normalization, which can be turned off in the settings.
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?
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.
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.