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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The video shown as evidence is full of compression artifacts. The influencer is non-technical and assumes it's an AI filter, but the output is obviously not good quality anywhere.

To me, this clearly looks like a case of a very high compression ratio with the motion blocks swimming around on screen. They might have some detail enhancement in the loop to try to overcome the blockiness which, in this case, results in the swimming effect.

It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum. It should be a dead giveaway that this is a compression issue because the entire video is obviously highly compressed and lacking detail.

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You obviously didn't watch the video, the claims are beyond the scope of compression and include things like eye and mouth enlargement, and you can clearly see the filter glitching off on some frames.

Someone in the comments explained that this effect was in auto translated videos. Meta and YT apparently use AI to modify the videos to have people match the language when speaking. Which is a nightmare on its own, but not exactly the same.

I've come across these auto translated videos while traveling, and actually found them quite helpful. Lot of local "authentic" content that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Its all kinds of annoying if you’re bilingual. Youtube now autotranslates ads served in my mother tongue to English and I have not found a way to turn it off.

This is an incredibly annoying feature

I have uBlock Origin.

Set your mother tongue to some esoteric language Google has not enough training data on. Then it defaults to the original language.

Unfortunately it also changes the interface. And I would like my interface be in English.

This is how I got rid of ads on facebook!

I really hate them. Once again, Google have completely failed to consider multi-lingual people. Like Google search, even if you explicitly tell it what languages it should show results in, it's often wrong and only gives results in Russian when searching in Cyrillic, even for words that do not exist in Russian but do in the language defined in the settings.

Also the voice is pretty unemotional and nothing to do with the original voice. And it being a default that you can't even seem to disable...

Last night, I came across a video with a title in English and an "Autodubbed" tag. I assumed it would be dubbed into English (my language) from some other language. But it wasn't. It was in French, and clearly the creator's original voice. The automatic subtitles were also in French. I don't know what the "Autodubbed" tag meant, but clearly something wasn't working.

I am by no means fluent in French, but I speak it well enough to get by with the aid of the subtitles, so that was fine. In an ideal world, I'd have the original French audio with English subtitles, but that did not appear to be an option.

Recently they added a setting for default language

I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.

Provide option to turn on that bad quality dubbing for those few people that want it.

And for crist sake, be transparent instead of auto translating titles so I dont even know the video was not made that badly by its original author.

> I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.

For Silicone Valey, it is difficult to comprehend, that people may be speaking more than 1 language. That's why you get programs in other languages than intended (phone set to English - get the English version of app) or they "offer" ( ok/not now) to translate.

But I'm fluent in multiple, and wouldn't want a video in a language I'm fluent in to be shittily AI dubbed to another language.

As if that's a solution. I feel we need a "Falsehoods programmers believe about language" campaign.

Falsehoods Americans think about language.

That list would be incomplete. Americans at least don't tend to "helpfully" automatically proxy their whole site through Google Translate when they detect foreign IPs.

The most baffling thing is that we aren't talking about Hurrah-Americans here. We are talking about Google, which is full of Indians on all levels of the company. They, if anyone, should have understanding of multilingual people, and yet... such an incredible mess, which is still not fixed after many months.

I bet you never used Microsoft or Mozilla products. /s

> about: Just trolling.

Hmmmmm.

There are some very clear examples elsewhere. It looks as if youtube applied AI filters to make compression better by removing artifacts and smoothing colors.

> There are some very clear examples elsewhere.

Such as?

This seems like such an easy thing for someone to document with screenshots and tests against the content they uploaded.

So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening? If this is common, please share some examples (that aren't in Instagram reel format from non-technical influencers)

> So why is the top voted comment an Instagram reel of a non-technical person trying to interpret what's happening?

It's difficult for me to read this as anything other than dismissing this person's views as being unworthy of discussing because they are are "non-technical," a characterization you objected to, but if you feel this shouldn't be the top level comment I'd suggest you submit a better one.

Here's a more detailed breakdown I found after about 15m of searching, I imagine there are better sources out there if you or anyone else cares to look harder: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1lllnse/youtube_sh...

To me it's fairly subtle but there's a waxy texture to the second screenshot. This video presents some more examples, some of them have are more textured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86nhP8tvbLY

Upscaling and even de-noising is something very different to applying filters to increase size of lips/eyes...

It's a different diagnosis, but the problem is still, "you transformed my content in a way that changes my appearance and undermines my credibility." The distinction is worth discussing but the people levying the criticism aren't wrong.

Perhaps a useful analogy is "breaking userspace." It's important to correctly diagnose a bug breaking userspace to ship a fix. But it's a bug if its a change that breaks userspace workflows, full stop. Whether it met the letter of some specification and is "correct" in that sense doesn't matter.

If you change someone's appearance in your post processing to the point it looks like they've applied a filter, your post processing is functionally a filter. Whether you intended it that way doesn't change that.

Well, this was the original claim: > If his content was about lip makeup they make his lips enormous and if it was about eye makeup the filters make his eyes gigantic. They're having AI detecting the type of content and automatically applying filters.

No need to downplay it.

I didn't downplay it, I just wasn't talking about that at all. The video I was talking about didn't make that claim, and I wasn't responding to the comment which did. I don't see any evidence for that claim though. I would agree the most likely hypothesis is some kind of compression pipeline with an upsampling stage or similar.

ETA: I rewatched the video to the end, and I do see that they pose the question about whether it is targeted at certain content at the very end of the video. I had missed that, and I don't think that's what's happening.

As a makeup technician who looks in the mirror a lot, he's technically skilled at recognizing his own face.

The TFA.

Rheet Shull's video is quite high quality and shows it.

When it was published I went to Youtube's website and saw Rick Beato's short video mentioned by him and it was clearly AI enhanced.

I used to work with codec people and have them as friends for years so what TFA is talking about is definitely not something a codec would do.

In the best of gaslighting and redirection, Youtube invents a new codec with integrated AI, thus vastly complicating your ability to make this point.

After posting a cogent explanation as to why integrated AI filtering is just that, and not actually part of the codec, Youtube creates dozens of channels with AI-generated personalities, all explaining how you're nuts.

These channels and videos appear on every webpage supporting your assertions, including being top of results on search. Oh, and AI summaries on Google searxh, whenever the top is searched too.

This is an unfair analysis. They discuss compression artifacts. They highlight things like their eyes getting bigger which are not what you usually expect from a compression artifact.

If your compression pipeline gives people anime eyes because it's doing "detail enhancement", your compression pipeline is also a filter. If you apply some transformation to a creator's content, and then their viewers perceive that as them disingenuously using a filter, and your response to their complaints is to "well actually" them about whether it is a filter or a compression artifact, you've lost the plot.

To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way. Regardless of whether they are technical, they are living in a world increasingly intermediated by technology, and we should be listening to their feedback on it. They have to live with the consequences of our design decisions. If we believe them to be non-technical, we should extend a lot of generosity to them in their use of terminology, and address what they mean instead of nitpicking.

> To be honest, calling someone "non-technical" and then "well actually"ing them about hair splitting details when the outcome is the same is patronizing, and I really wish we wouldn't treat "normies" that way.

I'm not critiquing their opinion that the result is bad. I also said the result was bad! I was critiquing the fact that someone on HN was presenting their non-technical analysis as a conclusive technical fact.

Non-technical is describing their background. It's not an insult.

I will be the first to admit I have no experience or knowledge in their domain, and I'm not going to try to interpret anything I see in their world.

It's a simple fact. This person is not qualified to be explaining what's happening, yet their analysis was being repeated as conclusive fact here on a technical forum

"The influencer is non-technical" and "It's strange to see these claims being taken at face value on a technical forum," to me, reads as a dismissal. As in, "these claims are not true and this person doesn't have the background to comment." Non-technical doesn't need to be an insult to be dismissive. You are giving us a reason not to down weight their perspective, but since the outcome is the same regardless of their background, I don't think that's productive.

I don't really see where you said the output was "bad," you said it was a compression artifact which had a "swimming effect", but I don't really see any acknowledgement that the influencer had a point or that the transformation was functionally a filter because it changed their appearance above and beyond losing detail (made their eyes bigger in a way an "anime eyes" filter might).

If I've misread you I apologize but I don't really see where it is I misread you.

The outcome is visible and not up for discussion, so is the fact that this is a problem for the influencer.

He's getting his compassionate nodding and emotional support in the comments over there.

I agree that him being non-technical shouldn't be discussion-ending in this case, but it is a valid observation, wether necessary or not.

I'm not commenting on Instagram, I'm not asking anyone to provide this random stranger with emotional support, and I'm not disputing that the analysis was non technical.

The difference is wether the effect is intentional or not.

"Non-technical" isn't an insult.

What you call "well actually"ing is well within limits on a technical forum.

From a technical standpoint it's interesting whether it's deliberate and whether it's compression, but it's not a fair criticism of this video, no. Dismissing someone's concerns over hair splitting is text book "well actually"ing. I wouldn't have taken issue to a comment discussing the difference from a perspective of technical curiosity.

> Dismissing someone's concerns

I agreed that the output was bad! I'm not dismissing their concerns, I was explaining that their analysis was not a good technical explanation for what was happening.

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