“AI”
Sharpening, Denoising and upscaling barely count as machine learning. They don’t require AI neural networks.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Sharpening is a simple convolution, doesn't even count as ML.
I really hate that everything gets the AI label nowadays
The “ai bad” brainrot has everyone thinking that any algorithm is AI and all AI is ChatGPT.
My simple rule is that if it uses a neural network model of some kind, then it can be accurately called AI.
just today someone told me that Vocaloid was also AI music, they are either too dumb to make some basic fact-checking or true believers trying to hype up AI by any means necessary
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They don’t require AI neural networks.
Sharpening and denoising don't. But upscalers worth anything do require neural nets.
Anything that uses a neural network is the definition of AI.
Not true
Company I used to work for had excellent upscalers running on FPGAs that they developed 20+ years ago.
The algorithms have been there for years, just AI gives it bit of marketing sprinkle to something that has been a solved problem for years.
Depends on what you're trying to upscale.
Well, the algorithms that make up many neural networks have existed for over 60 years. It's only recently that hardware has been able to make it happen.
AI gives it bit of marketing sprinkle to something that has been a solved problem for years.
Not true and I did say "any upscaler that's worth anything". Upscaling tech has existed at least since digital video was a thing. Pixel interpolation is the simplest and computationally easiest method. But it tends to give a slight hazy appearance.
It's actually far from a solved problem. There's a constant trade-off beyond processing power and quality. And quality can still be improved by a lot.
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Barely count or not they absolutely ruin every piece of media I've seen them used in. They make people look like wax figures and turn text into gibberish.
But you can use AI for that
From what I've seen so far, the case here seems to be that it's only being done to shorts, and what's happening is that they're being permanently stored at a lower quality and size and are then upscaled on the fly. I mean... it feels kinda fair to me. Theres a good reason YouTube has so little competition, and it's because how hard and expensive maintaining a service like this is. They're always trying to cut costs, and storage is gonna be a big cost. Personally, I'm glad it's just shorts for now. It absolutely shouldn't be happening to people who are paying for the service or making money for it, though.
I mean yeah, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. But if it actually was reasonable, wouldn't they just inform the uploader?
Or give an option to toggle. Surely letting people turn it off would save them even more resources, if they don't have to bother with upscaling the video in the first place.
It likely costs them less to upscale than it does to store and serve a full sized video, so they're not giving the uploader the choice.
Storage is very cheap. This only makes sense if they actually do the upscaling client side
It would not make any sense for them to be upscaled on the fly. It's a computationally intensive operation, and storage space is cheap. Is there any evidence of it being done on the fly?
It’s not that computationally intensive to upscale frames. TVs have been doing it algorithmically for ages and looking good doing it. Hell, nVidia graphics cards can do it for every single frame of high end games with DLSS. Calling it “AI” because the type of algorithm it’s using is just cashing in on the buzzword.
(Unless I’m misunderstanding what’s going on.)
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It's not so much that they down- and upscale the video of shorts, their algorithm changes the look of people. It warps skin and does a strange sort of sharpening that makes things look quite unreal and almost plastic.
It is a filter that evens the look with images generated by, say, grok or one of the other AI filters.
In a year people will think that "AI-look" is a normal video look, and stuff generated with it is what humans can look like. We will see crazed AI-fashion looks popping up.
Yeah, upscaling can generate artefacts and such.
I'm huge into makeup, and I watch a lot of beauty content on YouTube because I want to see how certain makeup looks and performs before I buy it. This AI bullshit defeats the purpose of demonstrating makeup.
Nice
(linked from the article about a Netflix series upscale)
Seems like this should be illegal, Google should be broken up, and its leadership imprisoned
I’m down for a breakup but I don’t see how we could twist this into illegality.
You could probably make it illegal to alter people's videos without their explicit consent. But also the Republicans have shown us that laws mean what the people in charge want
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Knowing Google, they care more about blurring the lines between AI and reality to confuse and force it onto people than they do about saving a few dollars on storage costs.
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It's very likely to do with compression codecs to save money.
Ostensibly, yes. Just like the Patriot Act was to fight terrorism.
I KNEW THOSE SHORTS I'VE BEEN WATCHING HAD THE "AI LOOK" GOD-DAMNIT! With the smooth faces and the weird plastic looking contrast.
Well, who would have doubted it? Fuck, 1984 is already here.
yucky, shorts lol
Well, youtube is not even intended to host quality content anymore, but besides that, this appears to just be visual tweaks. This title is trying to be vague enough that one could assume it's tweaking the content itself which would be of real concern. It's not doing that (for now). Video graphics seems like an awefully minor thing to be screaming about AI over. Especially when AI has actual reprocussions in the knowledge accuracy sector.
From what I've heard this mostly happens on YT Shorts, and the AI upscaling they're doing is making people look like plastic and uncanny as hell.
I haven't noticed on normal videos, since that's pretty much all I watch.
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