Creators on YouTube are noticing strange changes in their own videos, subtle but unmistakable to a careful eye. Rick Beato, a music educator with over five million subscribers, says he stared at his face in a recent video and thought, “my hair looks weird… almost like makeup.” At first, he wondered if it was just him imagining things.

Soon, it became clear: YouTube has been using AI to adjust videos without informing creators. Wrinkles on shirts sharpened, skin textures smoothed inconsistently, and ears appeared slightly warped. The changes are tiny, barely noticeable without a side-by-side comparison, but they leave a subtle “AI feel” that some creators find unsettling.

Rhett Shull, a fellow music YouTuber, spotted similar distortions on his videos. “If I wanted this strange over-sharpening, I would’ve done it myself,” he says. “The bigger problem is it misrepresents me online, it might even erode trust with my audience.” Social media complaints about odd artifacts date back months, mostly on close-up shots, and only recently did YouTube confirm it’s experimenting on Shorts with traditional machine-learning techniques to “improve clarity.”

Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s head of editorial, emphasized this isn’t generative AI: “We use machine learning to unblur, denoise, and enhance videos, similar to smartphone processing.” Yet experts argue the distinction is misleading, as AI intervenes between creators and viewers without consent.

Samuel Woolley, a disinformation researcher, warns that these changes reflect a broader trend. “Algorithms increasingly mediate reality, shaping how we see the world,” he says. Jill Walker Rettberg adds, “With AI, the analogue sense of reality fades—footprints in the sand aren’t digitalized, but video can be.”

Instances beyond YouTube illustrate the point. Netflix remastered ‘80s sitcoms with AI, creating warped faces; Samsung and Google enhanced images artificially, sometimes creating moments that never existed. Thirty years ago, Photoshop raised similar concerns, but AI scales the impact exponentially.

Despite unease, some creators are not alarmed. Beato says, “YouTube keeps experimenting; they changed my life. It’s a tool, and a powerful one at that.” Yet the ethical question lingers: should creators’ content be altered without their knowledge? The subtle interventions might erode the line between authentic reality and AI-processed media.

—https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission