WTF? YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators' knowledge. [View all]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtube-shorts-ai-upscaling/683946/

YouTube’s Sneaky AI ‘Experiment’
The video platform is quietly using AI to “improve clarity” in uploaded content. Why?

By Alex Reisner
August 22, 2025, 2:37 PM ET


Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything. Viewers have noticed “extra punchy shadows,” “weirdly sharp edges,” and a smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic.” Many people have come to the same conclusion: YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators’ knowledge.

A multimedia artist going by the name Mr. Bravo, whose YouTube videos feature “an authentic 80s aesthetic” achieved by running his videos through a VCR, wrote on Reddit that his videos look “completely different to what was originally uploaded.” “A big part of the videos charm is the VHS look and the grainy, washed out video quality,” he wrote. YouTube’s filter obscured this labor-intensive quality: “It is ridiculous that YouTube can add features like this that completely change the content,” he wrote. Another YouTuber, Rhett Shull, posted a video last week about what was happening to his video shorts, and those of his friend Rick Beato. Both run wildly popular music channels, with more than 700,000 and 5 million subscribers, respectively. In his video, Shull says he believes that “AI upscaling” is being used—a process that increases an image’s resolution and detail—and is concerned about what it could signal to his audience. “I think it’s gonna lead people to think that I am using AI to create my videos. Or that it’s been deepfaked. Or that I’m cutting corners somehow,” he said. “It will inevitably erode viewers’ trust in my content.”

The Atlantic asked Google, which owns YouTube, what was going on, and they were told it's "an experiment that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content...using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos."

Toh’s description sounds remarkably similar to the process undertaken when generative-AI programs create entirely new videos. These programs typically use a diffusion model: a machine-learning program that is trained to refine an extremely noisy image into one that’s clear, with sharp edges and smooth textures. An AI upscaler can use the same diffusion process to “improve” an existing image, rather than to create a new one. The similarity of the underlying process might explain why the visual signature of diffusion-based AI is recognizable in these YouTubers’ videos.

While running this experiment, YouTube has also been encouraging people to create and post AI-generated short videos using a recently launched suite of tools that allow users to animate still photos and add effects “like swimming underwater, twinning with a lookalike sibling, and more.” YouTube didn’t tell me what motivated its experiment, but some people suspect that it has to do with creating a more uniform aesthetic across the platform. As one YouTube commenter wrote: “They’re training us, the audience, to get used to the AI look and eventually view it as normal.”