by data-ottawa 3 hours ago
Are these AI filters, or just applying high compression/recompressing with new algorithms (which look like smoothing out details)?
edit: here's the effect I'm talking about with lossy compression and adaptive quantization: https://cloudinary.com/blog/what_to_focus_on_in_image_compre...
The result is smoothing of skin, and applied heavily on video (as Youtube does, just look for any old video that was HD years ago) would look this way
It's filters, I posted an example of it below. Here is a link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9MwTHCoR_/?igsh=MTZybml2NDB...
It's very hard to tell in that instagram video, it would be a lot clearer if someone overlaid the original unaltered video and the one viewers on YouTube are seeing.
That would presumably be an easy smoking gun for some content creator to produce.
There are heavy alterations in that link, but having not seen the original, and in this format it's not clear to me how they compare.
you can literally see the filters turn on and off making his eyes and lips bigger as he moves his face. It's clearly a face filter.
To be extra clear for others, keep watching until about the middle of the video where he shows clips from the YouTube videos
What would "unaltered video" even mean.
The time of giving these corps the benefit of the doubt is over.
The examples shown in the links are not filters for aesthetics. These are clearly experiments in data compression
These people are having a moral crusade against an unannounced Google data compression test thinking Google is using AI to "enhance their videos". (Did they ever stop to ask themselves why or to what end?)
This level of AI paranoia is getting annoying. This is clearly just Google trying to save money. Not undermine reality or whatever vague Orwellian thing they're being accused of.
Why would data compression make his eyes bigger?
Because it's a neural technique, not one based on pixels or frames.
https://blog.metaphysic.ai/what-is-neural-compression/
Instead of artifacts in pixels, you'll see artifacts in larger features.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11379
Look at figure 5 and beyond.
"My, what big eyes you have, Grandmother." "All the better to compress you with, my dear."
Whatever the purpose, it's clearly surreptitious.
> This level of AI paranoia is getting annoying.
Lets be straight here, AI paranoia is near the top of the most propagated subjects across all media right now, probably for worse. If it's not "Will you ever have a job again!?" it's "Will your grandparents be robbed of their net worth!?" or even just "When will the bubble pop!? Should you be afraid!? YES!!!" and also in places like Canada where the economy is predictably crashing because of decades of failures, it's both the cause and answer to macro economic decline. Ironically/suspiciously it's all the same re-hashed redundant takes by everyone from Hank Green to CNBC to every podcast ever, late night shows, radio, everything.
So to me the target of one's annoyance should be the propaganda machine, not the targets of the machine. What are people supposed to feel, totally chill because they have tons of control?
It's compression artifacts. They might be heavily compressing video and trying to recover detail on the client side.