YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission. As AI quietly mediates our world, what happens to our shared connection with real life?

Rick Beato's face just didn't look right. "I was like 'man, my hair looks strange', he says. "And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup." Beato runs a YouTube channel with over five million subscribers, where he's made nearly 2,000 videos exploring the world of music. Something seemed off in one of his recent posts, but he could barely tell the difference. "I thought, 'am just I imagining things?'"

It turns out, he wasn't. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us.

"The more I looked at it, the more upset I got," says Rhett Shull, another popular music YouTuber. Shull, a friend of Beato's, started looking into his own posts and spotted the same strange artefacts. He posted a video on the subject that's racked up over 500,000 views. "If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening I would have done it myself. But the bigger thing is it looks AI-generated. I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet. It could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience in a small way. It just bothers me."

Shull and Beato weren't the first to notice the problem. Complaints on social media date back to June, at least, with users posting closeups of odd-looking body parts and questioning YouTube's intentions. Now, after months of rumors in comment sections, the company has finally confirmed it is altering a limited number of videos on YouTube Shorts, the app's short-form video feature.

"We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)," said Rene Ritchie, YouTube's head of editorial and creator liaison, in a post on X. "YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features."

YouTube did not respond to the BBC's questions about whether users will be given a choice about AI tweaking their videos.

It's certainly true that modern smartphones come with built-in AI features that can enhance image and video quality. But that's an entirely different affair, according to Samuel Wooley, the Dietrich chair of disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. "You can make decisions about what you want your phone to do, and whether to turn on certain features. What we have here is a company manipulating content from leading users that is then being distributed to a public audience without the consent of........

© BBC