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].
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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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.
The creation process is private and personal, interfering with it is a violation of that privacy. This is at least privacy adjacent, and I don’t know why you won’t admit that.
You’re tilting at windmills anyway. Judging by the way the community is engaging with the OP, they agree with me.