“It turns out, he wasn’t. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people’s videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.
There’s a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won’t be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it’s eroding our ties to the world around us.”
1. What happened YouTube admitted it’s been running AI processing on some Shorts — sharpening, denoising, smoothing — without asking permission. Creators noticed their own faces looked subtly “off,” like they were wearing AI makeup. And the altered version is what the audience sees.
2. Why this crosses a line
Ownership: Your video is your work. Your face is your image. When YouTube silently rewrites it, they are asserting that they—not you—own how you appear on their platform.
Trust: Creators like Rick Beato and Rhett Shull rely on authenticity. If the platform itself tampers with that, it erodes the bond between creator and audience.
Consent: On your phone, you can toggle filters. On YouTube, you aren’t asked. That’s the difference between a tool you control and a platform that controls you.
Reality creep: These changes seem tiny, but they normalize the idea that media is always pre-processed. Once you accept that, the very expectation of “realness” starts to vanish.
3. Why YouTube thinks they can do this
Most people won’t notice.
Those who do notice won’t leave; there’s no real competition at YouTube’s scale.
With bigger global crises, this feels too trivial to fight. They know apathy and exhaustion keep most people quiet.
4. The deeper problem This isn’t about whether a shirt wrinkle looks sharper. It’s about power. YouTube doesn’t see itself as a neutral distributor of your work. It sees itself as the author of the experience, with full rights to “optimize” your content however it likes. Creators are just raw material. That’s why they didn’t ask: asking implies you could say no.
5. What can be done
Raise awareness. The only reason this surfaced was because creators with big audiences noticed. Keep amplifying it.
Demand control. A mandatory opt-out is the minimum. YouTube must not alter identity without consent.
Diversify. Explore Nebula, PeerTube, even Patreon-hosted video. Every bit of independence reduces monopoly leverage.
Frame the stakes. This isn’t “just a filter.” It’s a question of who owns your image, your work, your voice. If we concede that to the platform, we’ll lose the last trace of authenticity online.
6. The bottom line Google once said “Don’t be evil.” Now the motto is closer to “Don’t get caught.” They’re not testing video quality — they’re testing how much tampering people will tolerate before they resist. And if there’s no resistance, the platform’s ownership over your reality becomes the default.
BUFFY: What happened to Xander?
GILES: He kept poking me with his hook. (Buffy picks up an item from the counter) I sent him over to charmed objects. With any luck he'll poke the wrong one and end up in an alternative dimension inhabited by a 50-foot Giles that squishes annoying teeny pirates.
I’m posting a lot this morning because I did some high-octane cleaning (with frequent breaks. I know how it works) on Saturday and APPARENTLY I have still not recovered from it. Awake (and dressed, and fed, and watered) but exhausted about it. Why on earth would I, a person with long covid/chronic fatigue, ever be tired after doing something?
When it took forever to fall asleep last night, my brain's hamster wheel of choice was all household things--puttering and cleaning products and other such exciting stuff. I'm feeling fidgety and restless about home-related things, and I choose to blame the arrival of meteorological autumn (which TBH I usually forget is a thing, even though those seasonal dates are easier to pin down than the solstices and equinoxes). We often sort of melt into autumn here, but this year everything's taken a beating from lack of rain, so I've read several people talking about some leaves already coming down. :/
This morning I did manage to do some small puttery things that needed doing, but most things require input from both of us and scruloose's mind and energy are currently elsewhere (long-overdue reno project). Also, y'know, I have a rewrite due in less than two weeks that I'm having real trouble focusing on; both that and the general restlessness are presumably not being helped by inevitable mild worry about Jinksy having dental extractions (also long-overdue) tomorrow.
(I'm reminding myself that any surfaces we can declutter before the fall crunch starts at Dayjob will be a significant help for my brain while that's going on. Here's hoping we can manage some of that.)
I won't think it's properly autumn until equinox anyway, but I do think maybe I'm ready for it.
Side note, doing my best to redirect a young relative to Airbender and Percy Jackson (just got a set of the books). Something with a big enough media footprint that it’ll undercut HP re: the urge for collectibles or “what special power/in-group do you have” quizzes. I don’t want to give HP any kind of “forbidden fruit” allure, so I’m not saying anything to them against it; I’m just saying, “Look how cool these things are,” not even pointedly. Just, hey, there’s a lot of things out there, let’s see what sticks.
Also to be clear if you put the new Harry Potter show on my dashboard I will be unfollowing and probably blocking you. JK Rowling is responsible for the death and pain of too many trans people to count in my country and I cannot tolerate her new way of trying to gain cultural and financial power in any way shape or form.
I don’t even want to see critiques of it. I don’t want to see hatewatch reviews about how bad or dumb or racist or transphobic parts of it are like people did for the fantastic beasts movies of the hogwarts video game. You are part of the problem. Do not feed the machine. Let it die. You do not need to consume media you don’t like just to show off to everyone else how much you don’t like it. It’s especially heinous if you say something like “I’m donating the cost of a movie ticket or a month’s streaming subscription to a trans charity,” because that doesn’t balance the scales, it doesn’t negate the evil, it just shows you are willing to support both sides, making you a spineless coward.
Just fucking ignore it and understand that it’s going to be recationary on purpose. It’s going to be full of bait. Warner Bros is counting on there being a ton of controversy to boost the numbers because there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
DO NOT ENGAGE. Let it come and go, and maybe the numbers will be bad enough that it gets canceled before it gets to book 7. Probably not, though. This is a tentpole for WB, they’re putting all their eggs in this basket, it’s not gonna bomb like Morbius. They’re gonna push it through to the end no matter what, so just do your part by not playing along.
don’t even pirate it. let it die in obscurity.
Here is a fun challenge. If you ACTUALLY want to do something material against this stupid fucking show, that’s a two-step process.
Step One: As described above, JUST IGNORE IT. Do not comment on it, do not mention it, do not even say the name of it or the series that it is based on, do not put anything in the tags. As of right now, It Does Not Exist, PERIOD.
Step Two: Go find some trans/nb authors to fall in love with. Read their books. Flood the internet with recommendations, discussion, fanart, fanfic, anything. The show is a hateful thing, so fight back with Love. Drown it out by openly, loudly, vocally loving Anything Else But That. Especially around the time the show gets released, coordinate together to drown it out with all the noise you can make about authors who deserve it way more than whatshername.
Will this make much of a difference to whatshername or Warner Bros? Nope! But I guarantee you this will make an immense difference to the trans/nb authors you’re loving out loud. Do you know how often authors who don’t have mega-fandoms get fanart of their work? EXTREMELY rarely. Do you know what sales numbers are like for smaller authors without big-budget marketing support? It can be just one or two books a week, if that. One single reader getting vocally enthusiastic on the internet can boost that by a factor of ten. If they’ve got a big following, it’s a factor of a hundred. I’m not joking.
You can’t take money out of whosits and WB’s pockets in any way that matters, but you can throw your VOCAL, NOISY, LOUD support behind trans/nb authors in a way that very, very, very much would matter.
I hate that the “x reader” or “x Y/N” style of fanfic has become sooooo popular, partially because it’s just not for me and partially because they clog general non-fic related tags and those authors seem allergic to the “read more” function on this website, but ALSO because I believe that you should have to go through the trouble of creating an absolutely batshit self-insert character, with a backstory that makes no sense and a name that doesn’t really gel with the aesthetics of the universe. Legolas and Aragorn should be in a love triangle with Kylie, the angsty sixteen year old half-human half-elf and inexplicable tenth member of the Fellowship. Do the WORK. If everyone was doing “Y/N” nonsense back in the day, there would be no Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, or probably Bella Swan. These are important women. They deserve to be named, confusingly and with no regard for the fictional world they inhabit.
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