If you click through to Rhett Schul's (sp?) video you can see examples comparing the original video (from non-Shorts videos) with the sharpened video (from Shorts).

Basically YouTube is applying a sharpening filter to "Shorts" videos.

This makes sense. Saying YT is applying AI to every single video uploaded would be a huge WTF kind of situation. Saying that YT has created a workflow utilizing AI to create a new video from the creator's original video to fit a specific type of video format that they want to promote even when most creators are NOT creating that format makes much more sense. Pretty much every short I've seen was a portrait crop from something that was obviously originally landscape orientation.

Do these videos that YT creates to backfill their lack of Shorts get credited back to the original creator as far as monetization from ads?

This really has a feel of the delivery apps making websites for the restaurants that did not previously have one without the restaurant knowing anything about it while setting higher prices on the menu items while keeping that extra money instead of paying the restaurants the extra.

I saw the sharpening, and listened to the claims of shirt wrinkles being weird and so on, but I didn't deem these to be on the level of the original claim, which is that "AI enhancements" are made to the video, as in, new details and features are invented on the video. In the ear example, the shape of the ear changed, which is significant because I'd never want that in any of my photos or videos. The rest of the effects were more "overdone" than "inventive".

Although, I probably wouldn't want any automatic filtering applied to my video either, AI modifications or not.

Flickr used to apply an auto-enhancement (sharpening, saturation, etc) effect to photos[0]. It would be really weird seeing a photo locally and then see the copy on Flickr that looked better somehow.

Aside: The mention of Technorati tags (and even Flickr) in the linked blog post hit me right in the Web 2.0 nostalgia feels.

[0] https://colorspretty.blogspot.com/2007/01/flickrs-dirty-litt...

Is what I've been noticing this past week! There have been a handful of videos that looked quite uncanny but were from creators I knew, and a few from unknown sources I completely skipped over because they looked suspect.

Have to say, I am not a fan of the AI sharpening filter at all. Would much prefer the low res videos.