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YouTube is using AI to tune videos without user permission [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2025-09-03

In a world that tries to tell you what to be with a promise that you can achieve it with the right amount of cash and attention to one fad after another, it can be difficult to love yourself. The way you look, the clothes you wear, the way you talk, and how you move are often judged as soon as you step foot out the door. Some folks work their whole lives to find acceptance of self; to disregard what the people around them think of their quirks and imperfections. It's a mindset that should be celebrated by society.

But hey, screw all of that: According to the BBC, YouTube's decided that they're just gonna use artificial intelligence to make folks pretty whether they asked for it or not:

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.

The Beeb says that complaints about YouTube tuning people's looks with AI go back as far as this past June. When asked about this digital dickery, Rene Richie—a former tech blogger who now serves as the video service's head of editorial—gave an outstanding canned response, saying "We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing."

Yes, our smartphones do some of this already when you record video or capture an image. The way that the world, selfies, and the moments in your life are captured depends heavily on which smartphone you choose to take your photos with and which app you use to shoot them. It's a rare piece of software, like Halide or Open Camera, that allows a photographer to capture images that haven't been messed with by a software algorithm. It's just a part of taking photos these days, for most people. But when we buy an iPhone or download a camera app to an Android device, we're making the choice about how the capture of our reality is shaped and curated. The saturated colours that come from shooting on a Samsung Galaxy device. The muted, natural-looking hues tuned by Hasselblad for OnePlus phones. This small bit of control we have, before we edit and process our images, all to hell is an expression of the way we want to see the world. No company should feel it has the right to mess with what we want folks to see—our truth—no matter how banal or vapid the content we upload to their servers may be.

You could argue that letting a company like YouTube dick with your content is the price paid for being able to share it with the world for free. Social media has already commoditized our lives, forcing ads on us if we want to stay in touch with friends or share our art with as wide an audience as possible. Now, they're changing that art to meet an ideal of beauty that the individuals filmed can't meet on their own, and without their permission. Is it still your photo or footage if it's changed by someone without your permission?

When the hell does it stop?

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/03/youtube-is-using-ai-to-tune-videos-without-user-permission.html

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