Rick Beato has over five million subscribers and two decades making videos about music. He noticed something was off in a recent Short: "I was like 'man, my hair looks strange,'" he told the BBC. "The closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup." Fellow creator Rhett Shull checked his own Shorts against the same footage posted elsewhere and found the same thing - a smoothing, an "oil painting effect," changes neither of them made and neither of them were told about. Shull's video showing the side-by-side has passed 500,000 views.
YouTube didn't deny it. Rene Ritchie, YouTube's head of editorial and creator liaison, confirmed the company has been "running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing."
Worth sitting with that sentence for a second, because it's doing a lot of quiet work.
"Traditional machine learning," not "generative AI"
That's the framing YouTube chose, and it's not an accident. Generative AI editing your face without asking sounds like a scandal. "Traditional machine learning" that "improves clarity" sounds like a codec upgrade - something that happens to video anyway, nothing to see here. But Beato and Shull aren't describing better compression. They're describing a face that looks like someone else's idea of their face, applied without consent, at a scale nobody outside YouTube can currently measure.
It's been running since at least June 2025
Creator complaints about this trace back over a year before it became a story anyone covered. YouTube still hasn't said how many creators or videos were affected. Ritchie acknowledged the backlash and said the company is "working on an opt-out." When the BBC asked directly whether a choice will actually be offered, YouTube didn't answer.
How they get to do this at all
Buried in YouTube's Terms of Service is language requiring uploaders to accept the YouTube Data Processing Terms - a broad grant to "process" any audio or audiovisual content uploaded to the service. Creators keep copyright. But "process" is vague enough to cover pretty much anything YouTube decides to run on your video after you hit upload, without a separate, specific ask each time. That's the actual answer to "how do they think they can get away with this" - not a defence of the decision, just the mechanism that makes a decision like this possible to make quietly, for over a year, without anyone's sign-off.
We don't have that clause, because we don't need it
Long Play doesn't run enhancement passes, beautification filters, or anything else on your video that you didn't ask for. What you upload is what plays. If we ever wanted to change that, it wouldn't be something we could quietly fold into a processing clause nobody reads - because there isn't one to fold it into. Your footage staying exactly as you made it isn't a feature we're proud of building. It's just what happens when a platform doesn't reserve the right to decide otherwise.