The use of AI on creative content is often contentious enough, but when one of the world's biggest platforms starts doing it without user consent? That takes things to a whole new level.
Rhett Shull is a popular music YouTuber and currently a rather annoyed one. He thinks YouTube has been secretly touching up his videos with AI, with the result that stuff he's filmed looks more like a deepfake than anything he's produced. His video on the subject is now approaching 1 million views.
Y'know, a lot of people have work done, but Pearl Jam's Mike McCready just looks fundamentally odd in the video that Shull shares from fellow YouTuber Rick Beato that kicked off the whole thing.
"Is YouTube secretly applying an AI filter to Shorts without telling creators? I recently noticed my videos looked strange and smeary on YouTube compared to Instagram, almost like a cheap deep fake," writes Shull.
"After talking with Rick Beato and seeing discussions on Reddit about the same "oil painting" effect on videos from creators like Hank Green, it's clear there is some kind of non-consensual AI upscaling being applied to our content. For me, this is a huge issue that threatens to erode the most important thing a creator has: the trust of their audience."
It's an interesting and heated debate, as you can quickly glean from a look at this Reddit thread or this excellent BBC article.
For its part, YouTube has come out and said that it's not using genAI to do this, but machine learning.
As more than a few people have pointed out, though, the type of AI being used is less an issue than that it's being done without our knowledge. Sure, the pictures we take on smartphones are processed, but then it is our choice to share them with the world. It's all about consent and it's all about transparency, something that it seems YouTube forgot over the summer.
But then, maybe AI has become such a hot button topic that the pushback as well is too extreme.
"You know, YouTube is constantly working on new tools and experimenting with stuff," Beato tells the BBC. "They're a best-in-class company, I've got nothing but good things to say. YouTube changed my life."