From a PR perspective, I wonder why YouTube is at the same time forcing unwanted AI features down people's throats[1], a move that many companies now do to drum up their perceived AI competence, but THEN at the same time, when asked, also downplaying this use of AI by splitting words.

The combination of the two confuses me. If this was about shareholders, they'd hype up the use of AI, not downplay it. And if this was about users, they'd simply disable this shit.

[1] I mean, they're sacrificing Google Search of all things to push their AI crap. Also, as a bilingual YouTube user, AI-translated titles and descriptions make the site almost unusable now. In addition to some moronic PM forcing this feature onto users, they somehow also seem to have implemented the worst translation model in the industry. The results are often utterly incomprehensible, and there's no way to turn this off.

The customers are advertisers and marketers. The product is access to the userbase. This is how we arrive where we are at today, where major clients have made significant investments into AI and expect further return on that investment through proliferation of the technology, while the users could not care less or even balk at it. But we are also at a time where there is no viable alternative to the monopolied corners of the internet such as youtube any longer, so the userbase has nowhere to flee if they even wanted to.