This is an absolutely huge deal. It doesn't matter how small the scope of the change is, they thought it was a good idea to apply mandatory AI post-processing to user content without consent or acknowledgement.

Secret experiments are never meant to be little one-offs, they're always carried out with the goal of executing a larger vision. If they cared about user input, they'd make this a configurable setting.

Again, this isn't GenAI.

The idea of it being "without consent" is absurd. Your phone doesn't ask you for consent to apply smoothing to the Bayer filter, or denoising to your zoom. Sites don't ask you for consent to recompress your video.

This is just computational image processing. Phones have been doing this stuff for many years now.

This isn't adding new elements to a video. It's not adding body parts or changing people's words or inventing backgrounds or anything.

And "experiments" are just A/B testing. If it increases engagement, they roll it out more broadly. If it doesn't, they get rid of it.