This link is to a Mastodon thread which links to another blog post which links to an actual source on ynetnews.com which quotes another article that has a quote from a YouTube rep. Save yourself the trouble and go straight to that article (although it's not great either): https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bj1qbwcklg
The key section:
> Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, acknowledged in a post on X that the company was running “a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
So the "AI edits" are just a compression algorithm that is not that great.
THAT Rene Ritchie? Cool, I wondered what happened to him. I listened to his podcast all the time in the 2000s, when podcasts were synced to an iPod over USB before your commute.
Noise is, because of its random nature, inherently less compressible than a predictable signal.
So counterintuitively, noise reduction improves compression ratios. In fact many video codecs are about determining which portion of the video IS noise that can be discarded, and which bits are visually important...
That doesn't make it just a compression algorithm, to me at least.
Or to put it another way, to me it would be similarly disingenuous to describe e.g. dead code elimination or vector path simplification as "just a compression algorithm" because the resultant output is smaller than it would be without. I think part of what has my hackles raised is that it claims to improve video clarity, not to optimise for size. IMO compression algorithms do not and should not make such claims; if an algorithm has the aim (even if secondary) to affect subjective quality, then it has a transformative aspect that requires both disclosure and consent IMO.
Perhaps it would raise your hackles less if you read the Youtube comment as "improve video clarity at a particular file size", rather than how you presumably read it as "improve video clarity [with no regard for how big the resulting file is]".
I think the first comment is why they would position noise reduction as being both part of their compression and a way to improve video clarity.
> That doesn't make it just a compression algorithm, to me at least
It's in the loop of the compression and decompression algorithm.
Video compression has used tricks like this for years. For example, reducing noise before decode and then adding it back in after the decode cycle. Visual noise doesn't need to be precise, so it removing it before compression and then approximating it on the other end saves a lot of bits.
“a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
It looks like quality cleanup, but I can’t imagine many creators aren’t using decent camera tech and editing software for shorts.
Well yes, that's what I mean, quality cleanup is not what I'd call a compression algorithm.
And as you say, arbitrarily applying quality cleanup is making assumptions of the quality and creative intent of the submitted videos. It would be one thing if creators were uploading raw camera frames to YouTube (which is what smartphone camera apps are receiving as input when shooting video), but applying that to videos that have already been edited/processed and vetted for release is stepping over a line to me. At the very least it should be opt-in (ideally with creators having the ability to preview the output before accepting to publish it).
YouTube is not hosting and serving uncompressed video so the apt comparison is not "compression" to "no compression" rather than "fancy experimental compression" to "tried and true compression."
The key section:
> Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, acknowledged in a post on X that the company was running “a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”
So the "AI edits" are just a compression algorithm that is not that great.