YouTube is silently deleting uploaded SRV3 (styled) subtitles | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is silently deleting uploaded SRV3 (styled) subtitles

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40 pointsslowdog17 comments

Subtitles are parsed by their LLMs for the pointless summaries placed right below the video and for all the other boring, dumb stuff YT does with AI.

See: https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8 (Poisoning AI with ".ass" Subtitles)

Is it pointless? I find myself asking for summaries of videos more and more often.

Ha hilarious all these content creators started making long rambling videos to make more advertising money.

I have always maintained that I can read text faster but literacy is going down the drain.

You should find yourself asking if those summaries are actually accurate, faithful summaries of the video content at all.

Like, is reading a digest version of War and Peace the same thing as War and Peace?

For videos with low enough importance, I do not care if the LLM makes a mistake here and there.

For videos where with high importance to me, I can watch it myself.

They aren't useless, it's nice for finding timestamps of things, especially in long content like talks.

So...something you could do with the browser's built-in ability to parse text files, which YouTube could simply serve the subtitles to you as?

I could believe this is a filter designed to simplify conformance to some YT standard.

I could believe this is a side effect of something else.

I could believe its a problem with some output devices (sw) of the nature of "oh I'm ASCII I can't handle UTF-8 encoded data" which doesn't have a good default.

Is there some more direct profit/IPR motivated approach which directs this format of all others should be removed?

It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all. So, just as with Crunchyroll, better to kill the complex human artistic subtitles so that people don’t get used to their boring “could be machine, could be human, who cares” slop (and, as a bonus, so that human moderators aren’t required to evaluate whether the subtitles are offensively shaped).

It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all.

Well, that certainly remains to be seen.

Indeed. Fortunately, “cannot” is present tense, not future tense.

this just keeps happening over and over. And I can't find any logical reason why they are doing this. Surely you can't lose money due to supporting a colorful subtitles format? Ditch youtube. You most likely do NOT need it

They still support multiple formats with color information

Even still, it's not as much information and doesn't excuse deleting creators work without any warning.

Not sure on their reasoning, but subtitle files _are_ an attack vector:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-one-batt...

https://mashable.com/article/subtitles-hackers

I mean, it’s sort of a vector. The malware itself can only be executed if you click a suspicious .lnk file. The moral here isn’t that subtitles are a “vector”, but to not indiscriminately run scripts.

> Sure, it's not officially supported or even documented

Conspiracy, or P3 bug?

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