The only facts we know are: Mormon Christian, terminally online, left some memes in casings.
Considering the facts we can't know anything, the messaging is coming from both sides based on their own agendas. The remaining fact is: Trump's government is attempting a power grab based on this murder.
Edit: The shooter is a deranged leftist. Absolutely none of the evidence contradicts this. Much of the evidence disproves the claim that he was a conservative.
I'm an adblock user and I do pay for Premium, so there's at least one of us.
I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
Yes, but that's the "dumb as dirt" part. You never, ever "drive users away". Ever. A person with no money now (a college student on a tight budget?) may in a few years have a healthy income. A single person may be struggling, then find a partner and collectively they have more income.
People's income levels change.
Training them that your product is utter and complete garbage, means those people won't ever become customers. Ever.
The truth of the matter is, that just like their search, every other aspect of Google's infra is in a state of decay. Youtube is slow and takes forever to start now. Google search is pathetic, takes forever to give results in some circumstances, and randomly locks people out with captchas.
The Google of today must be complete chaos internally, it's the only explanation I can see. If the problem is AI, you never give up a cash cow whilst you pivot. You don't let what you have fall to tatters, whilst you pursue some other goal.
Especially when Google has the scope and capability to maintain and yet also pursue other avenues.
I suspect, but could be entirely wrong here, that Google has pulled key people, drivers, movers, which are a rare breed -- out of key positions in all of their structure and focused them on something else.
IME this is a long-standing thing - failing to include visuals for inherently visual news stories. They're geared towards text news stories for whatever reason.
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.
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.
Looks similar to the cursive z I learned - I guess in the late 70's/early 80's - in Scotland. It's still in my signature, although that's a right scrawl.
