YouTube now requires to label their realistic-looking videos made using AI

https://blog.google/intl/en-in/products/platforms/how-were-helping-creators-disclose-altered-or-synthetic-content/

by thm • 2 years ago

882 474 2 years ago

sigmoid10• 2 years ago

Some examples of content that require disclosure include: [...] Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.

This sounds like every thumbnail on youtube these days. It's good that this is not limited to AI, but it also means this will be a nightmare to police.

nosvince• 2 years ago

Exactly, and many have done exactly the same kind of video using VFX. What's the difference? These kind of reactions remind me of the stories of the backlash following the introduction of calculators in schools...

dylan6042• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, but using a calculator to get around having to learn arithmetic is not even close being the same thing. Prove to me that you can do basic arithmetic, and then we can move on to using calculators for the more complex stuff where if you had to could at least come to the same value as the calculator.

People using VFX aren't trying to create images in likeness of another existing person to get people to buy crypto or other scams. Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.

GolDDranks• 2 years ago

What's the difference?

The ease and lack of skill required. That brings whole another set of implications.

DylanDmitri• 2 years ago

Using VFX for realistic scenes is more involved. VFX requires more expertise to do convincingly and realistically, in the thousands of hours of experience. More involved scenes require multiple professionals. The tooling and assets costs more. An inexperienced person, in a hundred hours of effort, can put out 10ish realistic scenes with leading edge AI tools, when previously they could do 0.

This is like regulating handguns differently from compound bows. Both are lethal weapons, but the bow requires hours of training to use effectively, and is more difficult to carry discreetly. The combination of ease, convenience, and accessibility necessitates new regulation.

This being said, AI for video is an incredibly promising technology, and I look forward to watching the TV shows and movies generated with AI-powered tooling.

Xeyz0r2• 2 years ago

This is very reminiscent of an act where someone calls the police about a 'looming' terrorist attack, for example

dev1ycan3• 2 years ago

You see thumbnails? I haven't seen a thumbnail in years, I use both DeArrow and Sponsorblock, youtube is very watchable.

_trampeltier• 2 years ago

So beauty filters are ok, but what's the true difference between a strong beauty filter and a face change.

vkou3• 2 years ago

Society is simply revisiting a conversation about doctored photographs, videos, and audio recordings.

The last word on this subject was not written in the 1920s, it's good to revisit old assumptions every century or so, when new forms of media and media manipulation become developed.

The first pass on it is unlikely to be the best, or even the last one.

diggan• 2 years ago

The first pass on it is unlikely to be the best, or even the last one.

And just like a prototype that would never end up in production, we'll remain with the first implementation we could think of cough copyright cough

ravenstine• 2 years ago

Society is simply revisiting a conversation about doctored photographs, videos, and audio recordings.

society in this case = media companies

dylan6042• 2 years ago

Doctoring an image of a willing model/actor is not the same thing as 100% made up attempting to look like a willing model/actor

floatrock• 2 years ago

"made using AI" is such a fuzzy all-encompassing term that this feels like it will turn into another California Prop 65 warning scenario. Pretty soon every video will have a disclaimer like:

WARNING: This video contains content known to the State of Google to be generated by AI algorithms and/or tools.

Ok, beauty face filters are not included. How about character motion animations? How detailed does the after effects plugin need to be before it's considered AI? Can we generate just a background? Just a minor subject in the foreground? Or is it like pornography, where we'll recognize it once we see it?

I fear AI tools will soon become so embedded in normal workflows that it's going to become a question of "how much" not "contains", and "how much" is such a blurry, subjective line that it's going to make any binary disclaimer meaningless.

wwalexander• 2 years ago

You might be interested in Adobe’s “Content Credentials” [1] which seemingly aim to clarify exactly what processing has applied to an image. I don’t like the idea of Adobe being the gatekeepers of image-fidelity-verification but the idea is intriguing and it seems like we’ll need something like this (that camera makers sign onto) to deal with AI.

EDIT: I think these should also include whatever built-in processing is applied to the raw sensor data within the camera itself.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/content-credenti...

fortran77• 2 years ago

We need to fix the title. It's not just AI -- it's any realistic scene generated by VFX, animation, or AI. The title of the blogpost is "How we're helping creators disclose altered or synthetic content" -- it shouldn't say AI on the Hacker News title.

Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.

Does the Wizard of Oz tornado scene need a warning now? [0] (Of course not, but it may be hard to draw the line in some places.)

[0] https://www.grunge.com/486387/heres-how-the-tornado-scene-in...

wnc3141• 2 years ago

yes but that's very hard and doesn't scale, (can't be cheaply shot from multiple angles etc.)

pixelcloud• 2 years ago

They don't make a distinction between AI generated and VFX. This is contained within the linked article.

jquery• 2 years ago

This is great. Really well-thought out policy, in my opinion. Sure, some people will try to get around the restrictions, especially nefarious actors, but the more popular the channel, the faster they'll get caught. It also doesn't try to distinguish between regular special effects and AI-generated special effects, which is wise.

m463• 2 years ago

I don't know, sometimes rules need ambiguity, like "high crimes and misdemeanors", but other times the little guys lose, like civil asset forfeiture.

dotnet003• 2 years ago

Without enforceability it'll go the same way as it has on Pixiv, the good actors will properly label their AI utilizing work, while the bad actors will continue to lie to try to maximize their audience until they get caught, then rinse and repeat. Kind of like crypto-scammers.

For context, Pixiv had to deal with a massive wave of AI content being dumped onto the site by wannabe artists basically right as the initial diffusion models became accessible. They responded by making 'AI-generated' a checkbox to go with the options to mark NSFW and adding an option for users to disable AI-generated content from being recommended to them. Then, after an incident of someone using their Patreon style service to pretend to be a popular artist, selling commissions generated by AI to copy the artist's style, they banned AI-generated content from being offered through that service.

jtriangle• 2 years ago

Also remains to be seen if labeling your content as containing AI-generated work will help or hurt you in your viewership.

My guess is that youtube is going to downrank this content, and may be trying to crowdsource training data in order to do this automatically.

dotnet003• 2 years ago

I think that for now they're just going to use it as a means of figuring out what kind of AI-involved content people are ok with and what kind they react negatively to.

Personally, I've developed a strong aversion to content that is primarily done by AI with very little human effort on top. After how things went with Pixiv I've come to hold the belief that our societies don't help people develop 'cultural maturity'. People want the clout/respect of being a popular artist/creator, without having to go through the journey they all go through which leads to them becoming popular. It's like wanting to use the title of Doctor without putting in the effort to earn a doctorate, the difference just being that we do have a culture of thinking that it's bad to do that.

dotancohen• 2 years ago

I think that the idea is mostly to dictate culture. And I like the idea, not only for preventing fraud. Ever since the first Starship launches, the reality looks more incredible than the fiction. Go look up the SN-8 landing video, tell me that does not look generated. I just want to know what is real and what is generated, by AI or not.

I think that this policy is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.

russdill• 2 years ago

I think one of the bigger issues will be false positives. You'll do an upload, and youtube will take it down claiming that some element was AI generated. You can appeal, but it'll get automatically rejected. So you have to rework your video and figure out what it thought might be AI generated and re-upload.

strangescript• 2 years ago

This a pointless nearly unenforceable rule to make people feel better. Sure, if you generate something that seems like a real event that is provably false you can be caught, but anything mundane is not enforceable. Once models reach something like Sora 1.5 level of ability, we are kind of doomed on knowing whats real in video.

gloosx• 2 years ago

naah, there still will be certain patterns and they will be recognisable.

once something sora 1.5 level of ability is there – definitely reverse-sora model which can recognise ai-made videos should be possible to train as well

supertrope• 2 years ago

This a pointless nearly unenforceable rule to make people feel better.

Pretty much. If Google says "Swiper no swiping" they can point at their policy when lobbying against regulations or pushing back against criticism.

Before surveillance capitalism became the norm, web services told users to not share personal information, and to not trust other users they had not met in real life.

nextworddev• 2 years ago

carlossouza• 2 years ago

Exactly what I thought.

Let’s see how long it will take them to collect enough data and train a model to distinguish AI-generated from user-generated videos.

the_duke• 2 years ago

They don't bother to mention it, but this is actually to comply with the the new EU AI act.

Providers will also have to ensure that AI-generated content is identifiable. Besides, AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labelled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content constituting deep fakes

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory....

Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39746669

machinekob• 2 years ago

Ofc. they don't mention it for big tech companies EU = Evil

duringmath• 2 years ago

You'd think they're evil too if they let a bunch of middlemen and parasitic companies dictate how the software you invested untold sums and hours developing and marketing should work.

ajross3• 2 years ago

Seems like this is sort of a manufactured argument. I mean, should every product everywhere have to cite every regulation it complies with? Your ibuprofen bottle doesn't bother to cite the FDA rules under which it was tested. Your car doesn't list the DOT as the reason it's got ABS brakes.

The EU made a rule. YouTube complied. That changes the user experience. They documented it.

contravariant• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem that out of place for a blog post on the exact change they made to comply though.

I mean you'd expect a pharmaceutical company to mention which rules they comply with at some point, even if not on the actual product (though in the case of medicine, probably also on the actual product).

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

If the contents of my ibuprofen bottle changed due to regulatory changes, then it wouldn’t be weird to have that cited at all.

LudwigNagasena• 2 years ago

Certain goods sold in the EU are required to have CE marking to affirm that they satisfy EU regulations.

supriyo-biswas• 2 years ago

India is considering very similar laws as well (though not implemented at this time)[1], so it’s not just the EU.

Also, if every applicable regulation had to be mentioned, it’d be a very long list.

[1] https://epaper.telegraphindia.com/imageview/464914/53928423/...

hoffs• 2 years ago

Considering is different from actually something that should be enforced

ysofunny• 2 years ago

I have a more entertaining: "typical google, getting somebody else to give them training data in exchnage for free hosting of some sort"

orbital-decay• 2 years ago

Labeling AI-generated content (assuming it works) is beneficial for Google, as they can avoid some dataset contamination.

airspresso4• 2 years ago

Excellent point. With more and more AI-generated content it will be key to be able to tell it apart from the human-generated content.

alphazard• 2 years ago

Is anyone else worried about how naive this policy is?

The solution here is for important institutions to get onboard with the public key infrastructure, and start signing anything they want to certify as authentic.

The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible. A signature means the signer wants you to know the content is theirs, nothing else.

It doesn't help to train people to live in a pretend world where fake content always has a warning sticker.

RandallBrown3• 2 years ago

One of Neal Stephenson's more recent novels deals with this concept. Fake news becomes so bad that everyone starts singing everything they create.

thwarted2• 2 years ago

I see a lot of confusing authenticity with accuracy. Someone can sign the statement "Obama is white" but that doesn't make it a true statement. The use of PKI as part of showing provenance/chain of trust doesn't make any claims about the accuracy of what is signed. All it does is assert that a given identity signed something.

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible.

That sounds like a dystopia, but I guess we're going into that direction. I expect that a lot of fringe groups like flat-earthers, lizard people conspiracy, war in Ukraine is fake, will become way more mainstream.

pjc50• 2 years ago

PKI has been around for, what, 30 years? Image authentication is just not going to happen at this point, because everyone's got too used to post-processing and it's a massive hassle for something that ultimately doesn't matter because real people use other processes to determine whether things are true or not.

gretch• 2 years ago

Example: a video shows a group of police beating up a man for a minor crime (say littering). The video is signed by Michael Smith (the random passerby who filmed it on his phone). The video is published to Instagram and shared widely.

How do you expect people to take the authenticity of this video?

Karellen2• 2 years ago

What if a real person reads a script that was created with an LLM? Does that count? Should it?

airspresso4• 2 years ago

Blog post specifically mentions that using AI to help writing the script does not require labeling the video.

pier25• 2 years ago

Thank you EU!

cmilton• 2 years ago

I would take this a step further and make it required that companies create an easy way for users to opt-out of this type of content.

hnbad2• 2 years ago

Usually when a big corporation gleefully announces a change like this it's worth checking whether there's any regulations on that topic taking effect in the near future.

On a local level, I recall how various brands started making a big deal of replacing disposable plastic bags with canvas or paper alternatives "for the environment" just coincidentally a few months before disposable plastic bags were banned in the entire country.

Xeyz0r2• 2 years ago

I think many countries have started considering the legal regulation of using AI in any content

summerlight• 2 years ago

Looks like there is a huge grea area that they need to figure out in practice. From https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491#:

Examples of content creators don’t have to disclose:

  * Someone riding a unicorn through a fantastical world
  * Green screen used to depict someone floating in space
  * Color adjustment or lighting filters
  * Special effects filters, like adding background blur or vintage effects
  * Production assistance, like using generative AI tools to create or improve a video outline, script, thumbnail, title, or infographic
  * Caption creation
  * Video sharpening, upscaling or repair and voice or audio repair
  * Idea generation

Examples of content creators need to disclose:

  * Synthetically generating music (including music generated using Creator Music)
  * Voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover
  * Synthetically generating extra footage of a real place, like a video of a surfer in Maui for a promotional travel video
  * Synthetically generating a realistic video of a match between two real professional tennis players
  * Making it appear as if someone gave advice that they did not actually give
  * Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance
  * Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen
  * Making it appear as if hospital workers turned away sick or wounded patients
  * Depicting a public figure stealing something they did not steal, or admitting to stealing something when they did not make that admission
  * Making it look like a real person has been arrested or imprisoned

Aardwolf2• 2 years ago

Synthetically generating music (including music generated using Creator Music)

What about music made with a synthesizer?

Jensson3• 2 years ago

If you manually did enough work have the copyright it is fine.

But since AI can't legally have copyright to their music Google probably wants to know for that reason.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Even if it is fully AI-generated, this requirement seems off compared to the other ones.

In all of the other cases, it can be deceiving, but what is deceiving in synthetic music? There may be some cases where it is relevant, like when imitating the voice of a famous singer, but other than that, music is not "real", it is work coming from the imagination of its creator. That kind of thing is already dealt with with copyright, and attribution is a common requirement, and one that YouTube already enforces (how it does that is different matter).

zuminator• 2 years ago

In one of the examples, they refer to something called "Dream Track"

Dream Track in Shorts is an experimental song creation tool that allows creators to create a unique 30-second soundtrack with the voices of opted-in artists. It brings together the expertise of Google DeepMind and YouTube’s most innovative researchers with the expertise of our music industry partners, to open up new ways for creators on Shorts to create and engage with artists.
Once a soundtrack is published, anyone can use the AI-generated soundtrack as-is to remix it into their own Shorts. These AI-generated soundtracks will have a text label indicating that they were created with Dream Track. We’re starting with a limited set of creators in the United States and opted-in artists. Based on the feedback from these experiments, we hope to expand this.

So my impression is they're talking about labeling music which is derived from a real source (like a singer or a band) and might conceivably be mistaken for coming from that source.

dheera• 2 years ago

* Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen
* Making it appear as if hospital workers turned away sick or wounded patients
* Depicting a public figure stealing something they did not steal, or admitting to stealing something when they did not make that admission

Considering they own the platform, why not just ban this type of content? It was possible to create this content before "AI".

dotnet003• 2 years ago

There are many cases where such content is perfectly fine. After all, YouTube doesn't claim to be a place devoted to non-fiction only. The first one is an especially common thing in fiction.

samatman5• 2 years ago

The third one could easily be satire. Imagine that a politician is accused of stealing from the public purse, and issues a meme-worthy press statement denying it, and someone generates AI content of that politician claiming not to have stolen a car or something using a similar script.

Valid satire, fair use of the original content: parody is considered transformative. But it should be labeled as AI generated, or it's going to escape onto social media and cause havoc.

It might anyway, obviously. But that isn't a good reason to ban free expression here imho.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Those voice overs on tiktok that are computer generated but sound quite real and often are reading some script. Do they have to disclose that those voices are artificially produced?

kazinator2• 2 years ago

Synthetically generating music

Yagoddabekidding. That could cover any piece of music created with MIDI sequencing and synthesizers and such.

kevindamm• 2 years ago

I think there's a clear difference between synthesizing music and synthetically generating music. One term has been around for decades and the other one is being confused with that.

Lerc• 2 years ago

* Voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover

This is interesting because I was considering cloning my own voice as a way to record things without the inevitable hesitations, ums, errs, and stumbling over my words. By this standard I am allowed to do so.

But then I thought what does it even mean "someone else's" when multiple people can make a video, if my wife and I make a video together can we not then use my recorded voice because to her my voice is someone else.

I suspect all of these rules will have similar edge cases and a wide penumbra where arbitrary rulings will be autocratically applied.

exodust5• 2 years ago

...to her my voice is someone else.

To her, your voice is your voice not someone else's voice.

If you share a Youtube account with your wife, "someone else" means someone other than you or your wife.

The more interesting and troubling point is your use of "synthetic you" to make the real you sound better!

xarope2• 2 years ago

  * Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance

Does all the autotuning that singers use in live performance counts?

nuz• 2 years ago

Interestingly they only say you have to disclose it if it's a singer missing a note. Seems like it's fair game to fix a note that was off key in real life and not disclose that.

dormento• 2 years ago

IMHO, not even a /j.

Under the current guidelines, doesn't all music performances that make use of some sort of pitch correction assist are technically "digitally altered"?

BlueGh0st• 2 years ago

Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen

A bit funny considering a realistic warning and "live" radar map of an impending, major, natural disaster occurring in your city apparently doesn't violate their ad policy on YouTube. Probably the only time an ad gave me a genuine fright.

chasd00• 2 years ago

There’s a whole genre of videos on YouTube simulating the PSAs of large scale disasters. Nuclear war, meteors, etc. My 12 year old is really into them.

greggsy• 2 years ago

To me, the guidelines are fairly clear: if it’s assisting production of a work of fiction, it’s ok.

Bombthecat• 2 years ago

So all those trash generated AI voice product videos and or just reading reddit text can stay?

jjcm2• 2 years ago

I think it's smart to start trying things here. This has infinite flaws with it, but from a business and learnings standpoint it's a step toward the right direction. Over time we're going to both learn and decide what is and isn't important to designate as "AI" - Google's approach here at least breaks this into rules of what "AI" things are important to label:

• Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do

• Alters footage of a real event or place

• Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur

At the very least this will test each of these hypotheses, which we'll learn from and iterate on. I am curious to see the legal arguments that will inevitably kick up from each of these - is color correction altering footage of a real event or place? They explicitly say it isn't in the wider description, but what about beauty filters? If I have 16 video angles, and use photogrammetry / gaussian splatting / AI to generate a 17th, is that a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur? Do I need to have actually captured the photons themselves if I can be 99% sure my predictions of them are accurate?

So many flaws, but all early steps have flaws. At least it is a step.

jjcm2• 2 years ago

One black hat thing I'm curious about though is whether or not this tag can be weaponized. If I upload a real event and tag it as AI, will it reduce user trust that the real event ever happened?

AnthonyMouse15• 2 years ago

The AI tags are fundamentally useless. The premise is that it would prevent someone from misleading you by thinking that something happened when it didn't, but someone who wants to do that would just not tag it then.

Which is where the real abuse comes in: You post footage of a real event and they say it was AI, and ban you for it etc., because what actually happened is politically inconvenient.

And the only way to prevent that would be a reliable way to detect AI-generated content which, if it existed, would obviate any need to tag anything because then it could be automated.

sangnoir2• 2 years ago

I suspect we're headed into a world of attestation via cryptographically signed videos. If you're the sole witness, then you can reduce the trust in the event, however, if it's a major event, then we can fall back on existing news-gathering machinery to validate and counter your false tagging (e.g. if a BBC camera captured the event, or there is some other corroboration & fact checking).

JohnFen8• 2 years ago

I fear that we're barrelling fast toward a future when nobody can trust anything at all anymore, label or not.

Aeolun• 2 years ago

Having the tag weaponizes it by itself, because people will now consider any content without the tag real, whether it actually is or not.

drexlspivey• 2 years ago

The labels collected by google will certainly be used to train classifiers to detect AI created content so I think that’s a legit concern.

Cthulhu_3• 2 years ago

If you upload a real event but you're the only source, it'll be doubted anyway; see also, most UFO sightings.

jonathankoren• 2 years ago

Absolutely. Mass reporting for content violations to attack someone has been a tactic decades.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

This isn’t strictly some blackhat thing, people will attempt to hand wave inconvenient evidence against them as AI generated and build reasonable doubt.

4ndrewl• 2 years ago

It's to comply with the EU AI regulatory framework. This step is just additional cost they wouldn't have voluntarily burdened themselves with.

okdood64• 2 years ago

I know people on HN love to hate on Google, but at least they're a major platform that's TRYING. Mistakes will be made, but let's at least attempt at moving forward.

tkiolp4• 2 years ago

Basically, Google decides what’s real and what’s not. Cool.

pizzafeelsright• 2 years ago

For at least a dozen years it would seem.

smt882• 2 years ago

On their own platforms, yes. We need to break up their monopolies so that their choices don't matter as much.

barfbagginus4• 2 years ago

Don't worry Google has become incompetent - it is in the "Fading AOL" portion of its life cycle. Do you remember how incontinent AOL became in the final minutes before it became completely irrelevant? Sure it's taking longer with Google. But it's not a process that they can reverse.

That means the system will be really really awful. So challengers can arise - maybe a challenger that YOU build, and open source!

electrondood4• 2 years ago

At least on Youtube, Google's AI does, yes.

And? Do they have a track record of crafting a false reality for people?

randmeerkat• 2 years ago

Alters footage of a real event or place

I wonder if this will make all forms of surveillance, video or otherwise, inadmissible in court in the near future. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt, with any electronic media now.

Eiim• 2 years ago

Bad evidence is not the same thing as inadmissible evidence. Evidence is admitted, and then the fact finder determines whether to consider it, and how much weight to give it. It is likely that surveillance video will be slightly less credible now, but can still be part of a large, convincing body of evidence.

leoqa2• 2 years ago

There will be a new side gig for ‘experts’ to explain deepfakes to a jury.

tsimionescu3• 2 years ago

Video evidence already requires attestation to be admissible evidence. You need a witness to claim that the footage comes from a camera that was placed there, that it was collected from the night of, etc. It's not like the prosecutor gets a tape in the mail and they can present it as evidence.

Intralexical3• 2 years ago

By that rationale, all witness testimony and written evidence should already be inadmissible.

This website focuses too much on the technical with little regard for the social a bit too often. Though in general, videos being easily fakable is still scary.

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

I wonder if this will make all forms of surveillance, video or otherwise, inadmissible in court in the near future.

No, it won't. Just as it does now, video evidence (like any other evidence that isn't testimony) will need to be supported by associated evidence (including, ultimately, testimony) as to its provenance.

It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for a lawyer to make an argument for reasonable doubt,

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is only the standard for criminal convictions, and even then is based on the totality of evidence tending support or refute guilt, its not a standard each individual piece of evidence must clear for admissibility.

yosito• 2 years ago

As someone who studied video production two decades ago, regarding the criteria you mentioned for AI:

- Makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do

- Alters footage of a real event or place

- Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur

These are things that have been true of edited video since even before AI was a thing. People can lie about reality with videos, and AI is just one of many tools to do so. So, as you said, there are many flaws with this approach, but I agree that requiring labels is at least a step in the right direction.

okanat2• 2 years ago

For videos that requires pretty significant effort even today to be done by hand. Humans don't scale. AI does.

I think anonymity is completely dead now. Not due to social networks but AI will definitely kill it. With enough resources it is possible to engage an AI arms race against whatever detector they put.

It is also possible to remove any watermarking. So the only way to prove if the content is made by humans will be requiring extensive proofs to their complete identity.

If you're from a minority or a fringe group, all of your hopes about spreading awareness anonymously on popular social media will be gone.

lysp• 2 years ago

I think it also gives them a legal / business remedy if people fail to label their content.

If someone for example makes a political video and fails to label it, they can delete the video/terminate the account for a breach of service.

sverhagen2• 2 years ago

Given the regular stories posted on HN about folks who've had some aspect of their social or other media canceled by any some SaaS company, are these companies having many (legal) qualms as it is about canceling people without providing a good reason for it? Would be nice if they did, though...

chii2• 2 years ago

but this gives room to also abuse the uncertainty to censor anyone without recourse - by arguing such and such video is "AI" (true or not), they have a plausiblely deniable reason to remove a video.

Power is power - can be used for good or bad. This labelling is a form of power.

albert_e• 2 years ago

And some of these questions apply to more traditional video editing techniques also.

If someone says "I am not a crook" and you edit out the "not", do you need to label it.

What if it is done for parody.

What if the edit is more subtle - where a 1 hour interview is edited into 10 minute excerpts.

Mislabeled videos for propaganda.

Or simply date or place incorrectly stated.

Dramatic recreations as often done in documentaries.

Etc

mjevans• 2 years ago

Truth in 'advertising' is important.

> 17th angle - AI Generated vantage point based on existing 16 videos (reference links). <<

Would be • Alters footage of a real event or place

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

keep holding ourselves back with poorly written legislation designed to garner votes while rival companies take strides in the technology at rapid rates

Intralexical3• 2 years ago

keep holding ourselves back

Not everyone works in ML.

with poorly written legislation

This is a company policy, not legislation.

designed to garner votes

Represent the will of the people?

while rival companies take strides

Towards?

in the technology at rapid rates

YouTube's "Trending" page isn't a research lab.

Even if it was, why would honesty slow it down?

Intralexical3• 2 years ago

I think the real benefit for this is that probably that it establishes trust as the default, and acts as a discriminator for good-faith uses of "AI". If most non-malicious uses of ML are transparently disclosed, and that's normalized, then it should be easier to identify and focus on bad-faith uses.

HlessClaudesman• 2 years ago

Porn classification / regulation boils down to: "I'll know it when I see it." Implying the existence of some hyper vigilant seer who can heroically determine what we should keep behind the video storre curtain of dencey, as if no grey areas exist. This also has the problem of requiring actual unbiased humans to view and accurately assess everything, which of course does not scale.

Perhaps AI classification is the mirror opposite to porn, using the test: "I'll know it when I don't see it", ie, if an average user would mistake AI generated content for reality, it should be clearly labeled as AI. But how do we enforce this? Does such enforcement scale? What about malicious actors?

We could conceivably use good AI to spot the bad AI, an endless AI cat and AI mouse game. Without strong AI regulation and norms a large portion of the internet will devolve into AI responding to AI generated content, seems like a gigantic waste of resources and the internet's potential.

electrondood4• 2 years ago

The great thing about AI, is that it's exactly optimized for discriminating in gray areas with difficult-to-articulate rules like "I'll know it when I see it."

hobo_in_library• 2 years ago

We could conceivably use good AI to spot the bad AI

I suspect this is Google's actual goal with the tagging system. It's not so much about helping users, rather it's a way to collect labeled data which they can later use to train their own "AI detection" algorithms

jliptzin• 2 years ago

At some point fairly soon we will probably have to label everything as AI generated until proven otherwise

rileymat2• 2 years ago

But why does it matter if it was generated by AI instead of generated like Forest Gump?

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

Because right now AI is an issue the public and policymakers are concerned about, and this is to show that private industry can take adequate steps to control it to stave up government regulation while the attention is high.

dragonwriter4• 2 years ago

I am curious to see the legal arguments that will inevitably kick up from each of these

Google policy isn't law; there's no court judging legal arguments, it is enforced at Google’s whim and with effectively no recourse, at least not one which is focused on parsing arguments about the details of the policy.

So there won’t be “legal arguments” over what exactly it applies to.

peddling-brink• 2 years ago

Can’t they be sued for breach of contract if they aren’t following their own tos? Having a rule like this gives them leeway to remove what they consider harmful.

skybrian• 2 years ago

I’m reminded of how banks require people to fill out forms explaining what they’re doing, where it’s expected that criminals will lie, but this is an easy thing to prosecute later after they’re caught.

Could a similar argument be applied here? It doesn’t seem like there is much in the way of consequences for lying to Google. But I suppose they have other ways of checking for it, and catching someone lying is a signal that makes the account more suspicious.

antoniojtorres• 2 years ago

It’s a compliance checkbox for the most part I think. They can stay on top of new legislation by claiming they are providing tools to deal with misinformation, whereas it’d be easier to say that they are encouraging the proliferation of misinformation by not doing anything about it. It certainly shifts the legal question in the way you described it would seem.

danpalmer• 2 years ago

Yeah I think it’s a very similar approach to what you’ve described. The scale of YouTube, I don’t think you can just start banning content you don’t like. Instead you have to have a policy, clearly documented, and then you can start enforcing based on that policy.

The other thing is that they don’t necessarily want to ban all of this content. For example a video demonstrating how AI can be used to create misinformation and showing examples, would be fairly clearly “morally” ok. The policy being that you have to declare it allows for this sort of content to live on the platform, but allows you to filter it out in certain contexts where it may be inappropriate (searches for election coverage?) and allows you to badge it for users (like Covid information tags).

wslh• 2 years ago

ELI5: what would be the difference if you use AI or it is a new release of Star Wars? I understand that AI does not need proof-of-work and that is the difference?

xyst• 2 years ago

Self reporting. How useless. Wonder what legislation they are minimally complying with

AnthonyMouse15• 2 years ago

These rules have really nothing to do with AI. They're trying to impose a ban on deceit.

ajross3• 2 years ago

That's like saying speed limit signs have really nothing to do with cars, they're trying to impose a ban on collision velocity. Which is true, but only speciously, as the rule exists only because motor vehicles made it so easy to go fast.

AnthonyMouse15• 2 years ago

They don't have anything specifically to do with cars. They apply equally to motorcycles, trucks and anything else that could go that fast. Get pulled over in a tank or a hovercraft and try to tell the officer that you can't have been speeding because it isn't a car.

Should we like deepfakes any better if they're created by a nation state using pre-AI Hollywood production technology, or "by hand" with Photoshop etc.? If 3D printers get better so that anybody can 3D print masks you can wear to convincingly look like someone else and then record yourself on camera, would you expect a different set of rules for that or are we talking about the same kind of problem?

speff5• 2 years ago

From your comment's tone, it seems like this is supposed to be a bad thing. The only people who would be upset about this are folks who are trying to pass generated content off as real. I'm sorry if I don't have much sympathy for them.

AnthonyMouse15• 2 years ago

"You have to tell people if you're lying" isn't a stupid rule because lying is good, it's a stupid rule because liars can lie about lying and proving it was the original problem.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

Won't it be equally problematic for creators, particularly reporters/journalists, whose real content is misidentified as fake?

This divide is obviously going to play out on two sides.

Proving authenticity may turn out to be as difficult as proving fakeness. People will use this maliciously to flag and censor content they dislike.

Gormo2• 2 years ago

Deceit usually implies some sort of intent to defraud. I'm not sure using software to generate background music for a video fits that description.

jachee• 2 years ago

    RIAA has entered the chat.

"It defrauds us of our hard-earned middle-man cut."

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Requiring labeling / disclosure is not the same as banning.

jahewson• 2 years ago

In this case it is, because labelled deceit is not deceptive.

ehsankia2• 2 years ago

It's a label, not a ban. Just like sponsored content is not banned, but must be disclosed.

dang2• 2 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39747921.

arduanika• 2 years ago

Is there a word missing from the title here? Requires whom?

jbiason• 2 years ago

Same. For a second, I thought YouTube made a rule that YouTube is now required to flag the AI videos created by YouTube.

samatman5• 2 years ago

The title was editorialized, which people do far more often than they should. The original title, with the domain name next to it, would have been fine.

cpncrunch• 2 years ago

Editorializing is fine, as long as it's done properly and the headline makes sense.

yoavz3• 2 years ago

Most interesting example to me: "Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance".

This seems oddly specific to the inverse of what happened recently with Alicia Keys from the recent Superbowl. As Robert Komaniecki pointed out on X [1], Alicia Keys hit a "sour note" which was silently edited by the NFL to fix it.

[1] https://twitter.com/Komaniecki_R/status/1757074365102084464

frays• 2 years ago

This is a great example as a discussion point, thank you for sharing.

I will be coming back to this video in several months time to check whether the "Altered or synthetic content" tag has actually been applied to it or not. If not, I will report it to YouTube.

ryandrake4• 2 years ago

Yea, it’s a really super example!

However autotune has existed for decades. Would it have been better if artists were required to label when they used autotune to correct their singing? I say yes but reasonable people can disagree!

I wonder if we are going to settle on an AI regime where it’s OK to use AI to deceptively make someone seem “better” but not to deceptively make someone seem “worse.” We are entering a wild decade.

elpocko• 2 years ago

Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer hit a lot of notes is still fine though.

yoavz3• 2 years ago

Correct, it's the inverse that requires disclosure by Youtube.

Still, I find it interesting. If you can't synthetically alter someone's performance to be "worse", is it OK that the NFL synthetically altered Alicia Key's performance to be "better"?

For a more consequential example, imagine Biden's marketing team "cleaning up" his speech after he has mumbled or trailed off a word, misleading the US public during an election year. Should that be disclosed?

post_break• 2 years ago

Oh no, is that going to mess up my favorite genre called shreds? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nAhQOoJTIA

wccrawford• 2 years ago

Only if people start rejecting it because they learn it was modified by AI.

If they don't reject it for that, nothing changes.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

If it's realistic who will know?

simion314• 2 years ago

If it's realistic who will know?

Look at "realistic" photos , it is easy for someone with experience to spot issues, the hangs/fingers are wrong, shadows and light are wrong, hair is weird, eyes have issues. In a video there are much more information so much more places to get things wrong, making it pass this kind of test will be a huge job so many will not put the effort.

lampiaio4• 2 years ago

AI that is indistinguishable from reality is a certainty for the not-so-distant future.

That future will come, and it will come sooner than anyone's expecting.

Yet all I see is society trying to prevent the inevitable from installing itself (because it's "scary", "dangerous", "undermines the very pillars of society" etc.), instead of preparing itself for when the inevitable occurs.

People seem to have finally accepted we can't put the genie back in the bottle, so now we're at the stage where governments and institutions are all trying to look busy and pass the image of "hey, we're doing something about it, ok? You can feel safe".

Soon we will be forced to accept that all that wasted effort was but a futile attempt at catching a falling knife.

Maybe the next idiom in line will be "crying over spilled milk", because could someone point me to what is being done in terms of "hey, let's start by directly assuming a world in which anyone can produce unrestricted, genuine-looking content will soon come and there's no way around it -- what then?"

All I see is a meteor approaching and everyone trying to divert it, but no one actually preparing for when it does hit. Each day that passes I'm more certain that we will we look at each other like fools, asking ourselves "why didn't we focus on preparing for change, instead of trying to prevent change"?

skobes• 2 years ago

What sort of preparations do you recommend?

lampiaio4• 2 years ago

There's a saying in my local language that people usually say to someone who's going through a breakup or going through an unfair situation:

"Accept it, it hurts less".

I'm not saying it makes the actual situation any better; it obviously doesn't. But anyone can feel the rarefied AI panic in the air growing thicker by the minute, and panic will only make the situation worse both before and after absolute change takes place.

When we don't accept incoming change before it arrives, we surely are forced to accept it after it arrives, at a much higher price.

You asked about preparations: prepare yourself to see governments try (and fail) to regulate what processing power can be acquired by consumers. Prepare yourself for the serious proposal of "truth-checking agencies" with certified signatures that ensure "this content had its chain of custody verified as authentic from its CMOS capture up to its encoded video stream", in which a lot of time and effort will be wasted (there's already people replying about this, saying metadata and/or encryption will come to the rescue via private/public keys. Supposedly no will would ever film a screen!).

The above might seem an exaggeration, but ask yourself: the YouTube guidelines this post is about, the recent EU regulation... do you think those are enough? Of course they're not. They will keep trying to solve the problem from the wrong end until they are (we are) forced to accept there's nothing that can be done about it, and that it is us who need to adapt to live in such a world.

Enjoy the ride, I suppose.

alex_duf• 2 years ago

What would you do then if you could prepare for a world where it's already here? Where the asteroid already hit, to use your own metaphor.

cush3• 2 years ago

There are some interesting hardware solutions from camera makers that provide provably authentic metadata and watermarks to videos and images - mostly useful for journalists, but soon consumers will expecting this to be exposed on social media platforms and those they follow on social media. There really are genuinely valuable things happening in this space.

samatman5• 2 years ago

This will always be spoofable by projecting the AI content onto the sensor and playing it to the microphone. Which will give the spurious content a veneer of authenticity, this is within reach of a talented malicious amateur, and would be trivial for nationa-state actors to do at scale.

survirtual• 2 years ago

We've been preparing for a while? It's all that work people have been doing for years with asynchronous cryptography, ecc, and tech like what happens during heavy rain downpours and that coin with a bit in front of it.

These are all the proper preparation for AI. AI can't generate a private key given a public key. AI can't generate the appropriate text given a hash.

So we build a society upon these things AI can't do.

It has been a good run. We have done things like the tried and true ink stamping to verify documents. We have a labyrinth of bureaucracy for every little activity, mostly because it is the way that has always worked. It has surely been nice for the "administration" to sit around and sip lemonade in their archaic jobs. It has been nice to have incompetent people with no vision being appointed to high places for being born into the right families connected with the right people. That gravy train was surely a joy for those who were a part of it.

Sadly, it won't work anymore. We will need competent people now that actually care.

We need everything to be authenticated now with digital signatures.

It is not even that difficult a problem to solve. The existing systems are far more complex, far more prone to error, far more expensive, and far more difficult to navigate.

AI is giving us an opportunity to evolve. It is a time for celebration. Society will be faster, more efficient, more secure, and much more fun with generative content. AIs will produce official AI-signed content, and unsigned content. Humans will produce official human signed content, and unsigned content. Some AIs will use humans to sign content to subvert systems. But all of this pales in comparison to the fraud, waste, and total abuse of the current system.

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

Most nefarious AI content is going to be posted by humans misusing the AI tools, as opposed to some kind of AI gone rogue.

These humans would simply generate a public key from the private key, then post it under their human identity. The main threat from AI in the future IMO is not rouge AI, but bad human actors using it for their own nefarious agendas. This is how the first "evil" AI will probably come about.

refulgentis• 2 years ago

Forgive me on an initial reading, it is hard to have a nuanced discussion on this stuff without coming off like an uncaring caricature of one of two stereotypes, or look like you're attacking your interlocutor. When I'm writing these out, it's free association like I'm writing a diary entry, not as a critique of your well-reasoned and 100% accurate take.

Personal thoughts:

- we're already a year past the point where it was widely known you can generate whatever you want, and get it to a reasonable "real" threshold with less than a day worth of work.

- the impact is likely to be significantly muted, rather than an exponential increase upon, a 2020 baseline. professionals were capable of accomplishing this with a couple orders of magnitude more manual work for at least a decade.

- in general, we've suffered more societally from histrionics/over-reactions to being bombarded with the same messaging

- it thus should end up being _net good_, in that a skeptic has a 100% accurate argument for requiring more explanation than "wow look at this!"

- I expect that being able to justify / source / explain things will gain significant value relative to scaled up distributors giving out media someone else gave them without any review.

- something I've noticed the last couple years is people __hate__ looking stupid. __Hate__. They learn extremely quickly to refactor knowledge they think they have once confronted in public, even by the outgroup, as long as theyre a non-extremist.

After writing that out, I guess my tl;Dr as of this moment and mood, is there will be negligible negative effects, we already reached a nadir of unquestioned BS sometime between 2010 and 2024, and a baseline be _anyone_ can easily BS will lead to wide acceptance of skeptical reactions, even within ingroups.

God I hope I'm right.

lampiaio4• 2 years ago

I like the outlook you build through your observations, and I acknowledge the possible conclusion you arrive at as plausible. I do, however, put a heavier weight on your first point because I see what we have today in terms of image/video generation as very rudimentary compared to what we'll have in a couple years. A day's worth of work for a 100% convincing, AI-generated video immune to the most advanced forensics? We'll soon have it instantaneously.

Thank you for the preface you wrote, I completely understand your point of how easy it is to sound like a contrarian online, I'm sure my writing style doesn't help much on that front I'm afraid to admit.

dorkwood3• 2 years ago

All I see is a meteor approaching and everyone trying to divert it, but no one actually preparing for when it does hit. Each day that passes I'm more certain that we will we look at each other like fools, asking ourselves "why didn't we focus on preparing for change, instead of trying to prevent change"?

I don't know, we've done a pretty good job at preventing nuclear war so far. We didn't just say "oh well, the genie is out of the bottle now. Everyone will have nuclear weapons soon and there's nothing we can do about it. All wars from now on are going to be nuclear. Might as well start preparing for nuclear winter." We signed treaties and made laws and used force to prevent us all from killing each other.

cush3• 2 years ago

Ah it’s better than nothing!

paulpauper2• 2 years ago

Scammers have been making fake content on youtube since its founding. And youtube has never even pretended so much as to care about doing anything about it.

qwertox• 2 years ago

How about first removing those crypto-scam channels which pop up whenever something big happens at SpaceX.

yoavz3• 2 years ago

I am not envious of the policy folks at Youtube who will have to parse out all the edge cases over the next few years. They are up against a nearly impossible task.

https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

rchaud2• 2 years ago

It's not like there are any real consequences if they don't get it right. Deepfake ads already exist on YT.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

Certainly there are if YouTube wants to continue to do business in the EU.

111111101101• 2 years ago

We can't have the proles misrepresenting reality the same way that the rich have been doing for the last century. Rules for thee but not for me.

paulpauper2• 2 years ago

We cannot have fake content on youtube now! No way.

rchaud2• 2 years ago

Google of yore would have offered a 'not AI' type of filter in their advanced search.

Present day Google is too busy selling AI shovels to quell Wall St's grumbling, to even consider what AI video will to do to the already bad 'needle in a haystack' nature of search.

exodust5• 2 years ago

A "not AI" filter is an excellent idea.

dorkwood3• 2 years ago

Adding before:2020 to the end a query is a fairly good approximation.

Note that this will become less useful over time, however, as Google prunes old results from its index.

bgirard2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up like prop 65 cancer warnings, or cookie banners. The intention might be to separate believable but low quality hallucinated AI content spam from high quality manual content. But it will backfire like prop 65. You'll see notices everywhere because increasingly AI will be used in all parts of the content creation pipeline.

I see YouTube's own guidelines in the article and they seem reasonable. But I think over time the line will move, be unclear and we'll end up like prop 65 anyways.

bombcar• 2 years ago

This is exactly what will happen, just like with cookie warnings, etc.

To be effective, warnings like this have to be MANDATED on the item in question, and FORBIDDEN when not present.

Otherwise you stick a prop 65 "may contain" warning on everything, and it's pointless.

(This post may have been generated by AI; this notice in compliance with AI notification complications.)

Jensson3• 2 years ago

The "sponsored content" tag on youtube seems to work very well though. Most content creators don't want to label their videos sponsored unless they are, I assume the same goes for AI generated content flags. Why would a manual content creator want to add that?

This post may have been generated by AI

I doubt "may" is enough.

bgirard2• 2 years ago

To be effective, warnings like this have to be MANDATED on the item in question, and FORBIDDEN when not present.

I think for it to be effective you'd have to require them to provide an itemized list of WHAT is AI generated. Otherwise what if a content creator has a GenAI logo or feature that's in every video and put a lazy disclaimer.

(This post may have been generated by AI; this notice in compliance with AI notification complications.)

schoen2• 2 years ago

The Prop 65 warnings are probably unhelpful even when accurate because they don't show anything about the level of risk or how typical or atypical it is for a given context. (I'm thinking especially about warnings on buildings more than on food products, although the same problem exists to some degree for food.)

It's very possible that Prop 65 has motivated some businesses to avoid using toxic chemicals, but it doesn't often help individuals make effective health decisions.

aeternum• 2 years ago

How much AI is enough to warrant it though. Like is human motion-capture based content AI or human? How about automatic touchup makeup? At what point does touch-up become face swap?

jcalx• 2 years ago

This will make AI the new sesame allergen [1] — if you aren't 100% certain every asset you use isn't AI-generated, then it makes sense to stick some AI-generated content in and label the video accordingly, out of compliance.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/30/1196640...

aspyct• 2 years ago

Disagree. I will proudly write that my work is AI free.

winter_blue• 2 years ago

I’ve found Prop 65 warnings to be useful. They’re not pervasively everywhere; but when I see a Prop 65 warning, I consciously try to pick a product without it.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

To be effective, warnings like this have to be MANDATED on the item in question, and FORBIDDEN when not present.

That already happens for foods.

The solution for suppliers is to intentionally add small quantities of allergens (sesame). [1] By having that as an actual ingredient, manufacturers don't have to worry about whether or not there is cross contamination while processing.

[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/allergyimmunology/allergy/10652...

tehwebguy2• 2 years ago

I think the opposite will happen, non-AI content will be "certified organic"

aodonnell2536• 2 years ago

This may be a good thing, as it could teach the public some skills for identifying whether or not content has been AI generated.

Eventually, it may be completely indiscernible, but we aren’t there yet

yaomingite• 2 years ago

AI can already create photo-realistic images, and the old "look at the hands" rule doesn't really work on images generated with modern models.

There may be a few tells still, but those won't last long, and the moment someone can find a new pattern you can make that a negative prompt for new images to avoid repeating the same mistake.

I think we are already there, and it seems like we aren't because many people are using free low-quality models with a low number of steps because its more accessible.

samstave• 2 years ago

Or such construction/arch things such as "TITLE N" compliance...

For any physical build there are typ "TITLE 25" such disclosurs that are required for any new-build plans...

Maybe we have TITLE N as designed by AI discolsures that will be needed...

lp0_on_fire• 2 years ago

Am I the only one who is bothered by calling this phenomenon "hallucinating"?

It's marketing-speak and corporate buzzwords to cover for the fact that their LLMs often produced wrong information because they aren't capable of understanding your request, nuance, or the training data it used is wrong, or the model just plain sucks.

Would we tolerate such doublespeak it were anything else? "Well, you ordered a side of fries with your burger but because our wait staff made a mistake...sorry, hallucinated, they brought you a peanut butter sandwich that's growing mold instead."

It gets more concerning when the stakes are raised. When LLMs (inevitably) start getting used in more important contexts, like healthcare. "I know your file says you're allergic to penicillin and you repeated when talking to our ai-doctor but it hallucinated that you weren't."

samatman5• 2 years ago

You're not the only one. I will continue to fight the losing battle for "confabulation" for as long as the problem remains current.

altairprime• 2 years ago

Human beings regularly hallucinate details that aren’t real when asked to provide their memories of an event, and often don’t realize they’re doing it at all. So whole AI definitely is lacking in the “can assess fact versus fiction” department, that’s an overlapping problem with “invents things that aren’t actually real”. It can, today, hallucinate accurate and inaccurate information, but it can’t determine validity at all, so it’s sometimes wrong even when not hallucinating.

IshKebab3• 2 years ago

Nonsense. It isn't marketing speak to cover for anything. It's a pretty good description of what is happening.

The reason models hallucinate is because we train them to produce linguistically plausible output, which usually overlaps well with factually correct output (because it wouldn't be plausible to say e.g. "Barack Obama is white"). But when there isn't much data to show that something that is totally made up is implausible then there's no penalty to the model for it.

It's nothing to do with not being able to understand your request, and it's rarely because the training data is wrong.

lucianbr4• 2 years ago

To me it sounds pretty damning. "The tool hallucinates" makes me think it's completely out of touch with reality, spouting nonsense. While "It has made a mistake, it is factually incorrect" would apply to many of my comments if taken very literally.

Webster definition: "a sensory perception (such as a visual image or a sound) that occurs in the absence of an actual external stimulus and usually arises from neurological disturbance (such as that associated with delirium tremens, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, or narcolepsy) or in response to drugs (such as LSD or phencyclidine)".

I would fire with prejudice any marketing department that associated our product with "delirium tremens, schizophrenia, [...] LSD or phencyclidine".

ToValueFunfetti• 2 years ago

I don't get this at all. "Hallucinate" to me only can mean "produce false information". I've only ever seen it used perjoratively re: AI, and I don't understand what it covers up- how else are people interpreting it? I could see the point if you were saying that it implies sentience that isn't there, but your analogy to a restaurant implies that's not what you're getting at.

bcrosby95• 2 years ago

Would we tolerate such doublespeak it were anything else?

Yes: identity theft. My identity wasn't "stolen", what really happened was a company gave a bad loan.

But calling it identity theft shifts the blame. Now it's my job to keep my data "safe", not their job to make sure they're giving the right person the loan.

oaktowner• 2 years ago

I can't stand it being called "hallucinating" because it anthropomorphizes the technology. This isn't a conciousness that is "seeing" things that don't exist: it's a word generator that is generating words that don't make sense (not in a syntactic sense, but in a semantic sense).

Calling it "hallucination" implies that there are (other) moments when it is understanding the world correctly -- and that itself is not true. At those moments, it is a word generator that is generating words that DO make sense.

At no point is this a conciousness, and anthropomorphizing it gives the impression that it is one.

programjames• 2 years ago

I think people are much more conservative with their health than text generation. If the text looks funky, you can just try regenerating it, or write it yourself and have only lost a few minutes. If your health starts looking funky, you're kind of screwed.

makeitdouble3• 2 years ago

You put prop 65 as backfiring, but it looks to me like the original intent was reducing toxic products in tap water for instance and it largely achieved that goal.

From there warnings proliferated on so many more products, but getting told that chocolate bars can cause cancer is still a reasonable tradeoff. Especially as nothing is stopping the law from getting tweaked from there.

Comparing it to prop 65 or GDPR makes it look like a probably deeply effective, yes slightly annoying rule...I sure hope that's what we end up with.

Aerroon• 2 years ago

I think the main way where the line will move is what is considered "realistic" and what is "animation".

A lot of early stable diffusion seemed "realistic" but comparing them to newer stuff makes them stand out at obviously AI generated and unrealistic.

aiauthoritydev2• 2 years ago

Yes. Nearly all EU regulations are going to end up like that. Over-regulate and people develop blindness to regulations. Our best hope right now is that EU becomes more and more irrelevant as the gap between US and EU grows to the point American companies can simply bankroll the EU leaders.

damiankennedy2• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, United orders more from Airbus.

JohnFen8• 2 years ago

You'll see notices everywhere because increasingly AI will be used in all parts of the content creation pipeline.

Which would be OK with me, personally. Right now, those cookie banners do serve a valuable function for me -- when I see them, I know to treat the site with caution and skepticism. If AI warnings end up similar, they too will serve a similar purpose. It's all better than nothing.

TurningCanadian• 2 years ago

I like sites whose cookie banner gives options instead of only having "Accept All". It makes you feel more respected as a user.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

Cookie banners are not required even by EU laws. It's a stupid trend everyone is copying.

hnbad2• 2 years ago

That's technically correct but not entirely true.

The ePrivacy directive and GDPR don't literally require cookie banners but the former requires disclosure of specific information and the latter requires consent for most forms of data collection and processing. Even the 2002 directive actually require an option to refuse cookies which many cookie banners still fail to implement properly post-GDPR.

The problem is that most websites want to start collecting, tracking and processing data that requires consent before any interaction takes place that would allow for a contextual opt-in. This means they have to get that consent somehow and the "cookie banner" or consent dialog serves that purpose.

Of course many (especially American) implementations get this hilariously wrong by a) collecting and processing data even before consent is established, b) not making opt-out as trivial as opt-in despite the ePrivacy directive explicitly requiring this (e.g. hiding "refuse" behind a "more info" button or not giving it the same weight as "accept all"), c) not actually specifying the details on what data is collected etc to the level required by the directive, d) not providing any way to revise/change the selections (especially withdrawing consent previously given) and e) trying to trick users with a manual opt-out checkbox per advertiser/service labeled "legitimate interest" which is an alternative to consent and thus is not something you can opt out of because it does not require consent (but of course in these cases the use never actually qualifies as "legitimate interest" to begin with and the opt-out is a poorly constructed CYA).

In a different world, consent dialogs could work entirely like mobile app permissions: if you haven't given consent for something you'll be prompted when it becomes relevant. But apparently most sites bank on users pressing "accept all" to get rid of the annoying banner - although of course legally they probably don't even have data to determine if this gamble works for them because most analytics requires consent (i.e. your analytics will show a near 100% acceptance rate because you only see the data of users who opted into analytics and they likely just pressed "accept all").

dang2• 2 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39747906.

duxup• 2 years ago

Going to be a long road with this kinda thing but forums and places I visit often already have "no AI submissions" type rules and they have been received pretty well that I've seen.

Are they capable of enforcing it? I don't know, but it's clear users understand / don't like the idea of being awash in a sea of AI content at this point.

If they can actually avoid it remains to be seen.

asciimov• 2 years ago

Will this cover all those product "review" videos that are clearly reading some copy or amazon reviews?

dmje• 2 years ago

I suspect it’ll get me downvoted but this newish trend of using this grammar syntax drives me nuts. It’s “YouTube now requires YOU to” not “YouTube now requires to”. It’s lazy, it’s grammatically incorrect and it doesn’t scan.

dwighttk• 2 years ago

Title seems to be missing “creators”

elif• 2 years ago

based on how it takes them 48+ hours to take down fake elon musk crypto doubling scams that get reported, i doubt this will help anyone.

idatum• 2 years ago

Altering footage of real events or places: Such as making it appear as if a real building caught fire, or altering a real cityscape to make it appear different than in reality.

What about the picture you see before clicking on the actual video? This article of course is addressing the content of the videos, but I can't help but look at the comically cartoonish, overly dramatic -- clickbait -- picture preview of the video.

For example, there is a video about a tornado that passed close to a content author and the author posts video captured by their phone. In the preview image, you see the author "literally getting sucked into a tornado". Is that "altered and synthetic content"?

NoPicklez2• 2 years ago

I don't think they need to be treated the same.

The thumbnail isn't the content itself necessarily.

cdrini2• 2 years ago

Yeah I agree; and it's generally a bit harder to communicate _too_ much misinformation in a thumbnail.

Devasta2• 2 years ago

I hope this allows me to filter them entirely. If it wasn't worth your time creating it, its not worth my time looking at it.

I am generally very skeptical of these tags though, I suspect a lot of them are in place to stop an AI consuming its own output rather than any concern for the end user.

munificent• 2 years ago

If it wasn't worth your time creating it, its not worth my time looking at it.

God, I wish I could beam this sentence directly into the brain of every single person breathlessly excited about using gen AI to be "a creative".

danlugo922• 2 years ago

The fact that it cannot self-feed will take care of this anyways.

sumedh2• 2 years ago

If it wasn't worth your time creating it

Once something like Sora is available to the public, its going to be game over. A new bunch of creators will use it to "create" videos and I am sure you will change your mind then.

Devasta2• 2 years ago

"Game over".

Typical, people who don't want their feeds filled with AI generated pigswill are to be defeated, not persuaded.

paul7986• 2 years ago

All websites and all for profit AI companies must add and then display AI watermarks otherwise nothing can truly believed online and offline too

thomastjeffery• 2 years ago

It's as if everyone in the world just forgot that fraud has been illegal the whole time.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

Fraud is a very specific thing.

Namely it requires payment under false pretense

lawlessone• 2 years ago

So how do I report the ones that don't?

I have a whole lot of shorts content to report..

RyEgswuCsn• 2 years ago

This is somewhat expected to be honest. I am rather pessimistic on the future solutions to such issues though. I can see only one possibility going forward: camera sensor manufactures will either voluntarily or forcibly implement hardware that inject cryptographic "watermarks" to the videos produced by their cameras. Any videos that do no bear valid watermarks are considered potentially "compromised" by GenAI.

dbg31415• 2 years ago

This will just result in a pop-up before every video, like the cookie warnings, “Viewers should be aware that this video may contain AI-generated or AI-enhanced images.” And it’ll be so annoying…

omoikane• 2 years ago

Creators must disclose content that [...] Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur

This may spoil the fun in some 3D rendered scenes. For example, I remember there was much discussion on whether a robot throwing a bowling ball was real or not[1].

Part of the problem has to do with all the original tags (e.g. "#rendering3d") being lost when the video spread through various platforms. The same problem will happen with Youtube -- creators may disclose everything, but after a few rounds through reddit and back, whatever disclosure and credit that was in the original video will be lost.

[1] https://twitter.com/TomCoben/status/1146431221876105216

https://twitter.com/TomCoben/status/1147870621713543168

brikym• 2 years ago

YouTube now requires to label their realistic-looking videos made using AI *

* Unless you're a powerful state actor then your videos are always 'real'.

whoopdedo• 2 years ago

I'd like a content ID system for AI generated media. If someone tries to pass an image to me as authentic I can check its hash against a database that will say "this was generated by such-and-such LLM on 18 Mar 2024." Maybe even add a country of origin.

zhoujianfu• 2 years ago

These guys are doing something sort of in that vein.. https://wolfsbane.ai/

okanat2• 2 years ago

Well, it is software. So one can remove such patterns and generate a completely different hash or even train a model to specifically do that. It doesn't scale.

meindnoch• 2 years ago

Or else?

twodave• 2 years ago

I've said before that we're entering an age where no online material is truly verifiable without some kind of hardware signing (and even that has its flaws). Public figures will have to sort out this quagmire before things get even uglier than they are. And I really hope that's the biggest problem of the next decade or so, rather than that we achieved AGI and it decided we were inferior.

danlugo922• 2 years ago

I guess the first AGI will not be connected to anything thus it will be shut down right away if it wants to kill us?

I think...

airspresso4• 2 years ago

No mention of clearly labeling ads made using AI. The deepfake Youtube ads are so annoying. Elon wants to recruit me to his new investment plot? Yeah right.

stevage• 2 years ago

I predict that this kind of labelling will disappear before long and in a couple of years will look ridiculous.

micheljansen• 2 years ago

The cynic in me thinks this is just Google protecting their precious training data from getting tainted but I’m glad their goals align with what’s better for consumers for once.

sheepscreek• 2 years ago

While their intentions are good, the solution isn’t. There’s a lot that they have left to the subjectivity of the creators. Especially for what is “clearly unrealistic”.

scotty79• 2 years ago

This label will be mostly misleading. Absence of the tag will give false sense of veracity and presence of it on non-ai generated materials will discredit them.

Fact checking box like on twitter would be better and if you can't provide it, don't pretend you know anything about the content.

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

"Requires". It will rely on the honor system, which sleazy assholes won't honor; or the report system, which people will abuse. AI detectors aren't reliable; GenAI is basically tautologically defined as hard/impossible to detect and we keep getting reminded that "it will only get better".

Everyone calls this a problem, but it's a predicament because it has NO solution, and I have nothing but contempt for everyone who made it reality.

primeradical• 2 years ago

Does YouTube know that the Google Photos team actively encourages altering your videos and photographs to represent scenes that never happened?

https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-features-p... https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-magic-edit...

codedokode• 2 years ago

And what if someone doesn't label the video? What if someone has drawn a fake video in Photoshop? The whole requirement to label AI-generated videos is dumb. Typical decision from some old politician who doesn't understand anything in AI or video editing and who should have retired 20 years ago instead of making such dumb rules.

Why movies are not labeled but AI video must be labeled? What about comedians impersonating politicians?

If Google or govt is afraid that someone will use AI-generated videos for bad purposes (e.g. to display a candidate saying things that he never said) then they should display a warning above every video to educate people. And popular messengers like Telegram or video players must do the same.

At least add a warning above every political and news videos.

blobbers• 2 years ago

Well, that's reassuring that youtube can't tell on its own /s.

barfbagginus4• 2 years ago

Actually love AI content! Been a member of the Cursed AI group on Facebook, and now non-AI images just look boring to me!

So this announcement begs the question: is there any way to search for just AI content?

Joel_Mckay• 2 years ago

Or more likely, google wants a labeled dataset to improve their own training projects.

ziofill• 2 years ago

Rather than tagging what’s made up, why not tag what’s genuine? There’s gonna be less of it than the endless mountain of generated stuff.

I’m thinking something as simple as a digital signature that certifies e.g. a photo was made with my phone if I want to prove it, or if someone edits my file there should be a way of keeping track of the chain of trust.

asadalt• 2 years ago

yeah expect this to flip. i am guessing this will go like “https” path. first we will saw green lock for https enabled sites, later we saw insecure for http sites.

cdrini2• 2 years ago

This would I think be the ideal if it's possible. I'd love videos to have signatures that prove when it was recorded, that it was recorded from so and so a phone, that it hasn't had any modification, and maybe even optionally the GPS location (for like news organisations, to even more reliabily prove the validity of their media). And then have a way to have a video format that can allow certain modifications (eg colour grading), but encode that some aesthetic changes were made. And, more importantly, a way to denote that a region of video is a clip of a another video, and provide a backing signature for the validity of the clip.

That would allow a much strong verifiability of media. But I'm not sure if that would be possible...

creatonez• 2 years ago

Any links to videos that currently have this status?

bandrami2• 2 years ago

This has definite RFC 3514 energy

cottsak2• 2 years ago

Risks of not disclosing
It can be misleading if viewers think a video is real, when it's actually been meaningfully altered or synthetically generated to seem realistic.
When content is undisclosed, in some cases YouTube may take action to reduce the risk of harm to viewers by proactively applying a label that creators will not have the option to remove. Additionally, creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information may be subject to penalties from YouTube, including removal of content or suspension from the YouTube Partner Program.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491

This is censorship. That's all.

dorkwood3• 2 years ago

This isn't fair. If I make a video using AI, who is to say whether it's anymore real than a video taken with a camera? You think what a camera captures is reality?

NoPicklez2• 2 years ago

After reading it I think it's a good approach, whilst not perfect it's a good step.

Interestingly it isn't just referring to AI but also "other tools", used to make content that is "altered, synthetic and seems real".

Fair amount of ambiguity in there but I see what they're getting at when it comes to the bigger fish like the president being altered to say something they didn't.

acituan• 2 years ago

It might take 50 years to awaken to the abuse of power going on here.

Forget individual videos for a second and look at youtube-the-experience as a whole. The recommendation stream is the single most important "generative AI" going on ever, using the sense of authenticity, curiosity and salience that comes from the individual videos themselves, but stitching them together in a very particular way. All the while the experience of being recommended videos being almost completely invisible. Of course this is psychologically "satisfying" to the users - in the shortest term - because they keep coming back, to the point of addiction. (Especially as features like shorts creep in).

Allowing the well of "interesting, warm, authentic audio & videos having the secondary gains of working on your psychological needs" being tainted with the question of generated content is a game changer because it breaks the wall of authenticity for the entire app. It brings the whole youtube-the-experience into question, it reduces its psychological stand-in function for human voice & likeness, band-aiding the hyper-individualized lonely person's suffering based content consumption habits. I know this is a bit dramatic, and for sure videos can be genuinely informative, but let's be honest, neither that is the entirety of your stream, nor that is the experience for the vast majority of the users. It will get worse as long as there is a mathematical headroom of making more money out of making it worse, that's what the shareholder duty is about.

When gen-AI came about I was naively happy about the fake "authenticity" wall of the recommended streams breaking down thanks to the garbage of generated sophistry overtaking and grossing out the users. Kind of like super delicious looking cakes turning out to be made of kitchen sponges turning people off of cakes all together. I was wrong to think AI oligopoly would let the opportunity of having a chokehold on the entire "content" business, and here we are. (Also this voluntary tagging will give them the perfect live training set, on top of what they have.)

Once the tech is good enough to generate video streams on the fly, so that all you need is a single livestream, that you won't even have a recommendation engine of videos and instead a team of virtual personas doing everything you could ever desire on screen, it is game over. It might already be game over.

To get out of this the single most important legislative maneuver is being able to accept and enforce the facts that a) recommendation is speech b) recommendation is also gen-AI, and should be subject to same level of regulatory scrutiny. I don't care if it generates pixels or characters at a time, or slaps together the most "interesting" subset of videos/posts/users/reels/shorts out of the vast sea of the collective content-consciousness, they are just one level of abstraction apart but functionally one and the same: look at me; look at my ads; come back to me; keep looking at me.

armatav• 2 years ago

collecting training data

Tioka001• 2 years ago

Not bad? it helps users distinguish between reality and virtuality, the world is becoming more virtual though...

bhasi• 2 years ago

How do they plan to enforce this?

TobTobXX• 2 years ago

TikTok added the same switch a few days ago.

IlPeach• 2 years ago

Oh that's great so we can finally train AI on what human generated content is Vs content to discard.

romanovcode• 2 years ago

It would be amazing if users could opt-out of any videos that use AI content. The whole short-form farm is incredibly annoying to sift through.

pompino• 2 years ago

in the future we’ll look at enforcement measures for creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information.

Nothing of use here. As per the usual MO of tech companies they throw the responsibility back on the user. Sounds like yet another bullshit clause that they can invoke when they want to cancel you.

zuppy• 2 years ago

call me cynic but i share the same thought. plus... unless we figure out a way to detect it, which we can't reliably do now at scale, this will be pretty useless. the ones who want to use it for profit will do whatever it takes, just the honest people will label it. i believe that this is even worse than to assume that everything is ai generated, as people without technical knowledge will trust that the labeling works.

unwind• 2 years ago

Meta: the word "creators" is sorely missing from the title, it should read something like "[...] now requires creators to label [...]"

astro-• 2 years ago

I’m wondering whether another motivation for this could be trying to keep the data set as clean as possible for future model training.

Creating videos takes quite a bit of time. If AI video generation becomes widely available, pretty soon, there could be more AI content being uploaded to YouTube than human-made stuff.

Presumably, training on AI generated stuff magnifies any artefacts/hallucinations present in the training set, reducing the quality of the model.

sylware• 2 years ago

A quiet feature of sora: It can base itself on an existing footage for modifications of this very footage....

cseleborg• 2 years ago

This is interesting because it highlights the trust we've always placed in real-looking images. It brings real-looking images down to the same level as text.

It's always been possible to write fake news. We've never had to add disclaimers at the top of textual content, e.g. "This text is made to sound like it describes real events, but contains invented and/or inaccurate facts." We feel the need to add this to video because until now, if it looked real, it probably was (of course, "creative" editing has existed for a long time, but that's still comparatively easy to spot).

It's the end of a media era, really.

Loughla• 2 years ago

We've never had to add disclaimers at the top of textual content, e.g. "This text is made to sound like it describes real events, but contains invented and/or inaccurate facts."

I mean, yes we have? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclai...

opentokix• 2 years ago

How else is google able to train their competitor if they don't know if the video they are training on is real or not.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

Will be meaningless within 3 years. The tide is clear and 50% of all pixels created will be traveling through these models by then.

It’s obvious this tech will replace all vfx, lots of elements of a camera pipeline and eventually even video game rendering.

The labelling will become to common it will mean nothing.

electrondood4• 2 years ago

In an US election year when stakes are high, it's concerning that not every platform has a similar policy in place, now.

slowhadoken• 2 years ago

“requires”

montag• 2 years ago

s/requires to/requires creators to/

dev1ycan3• 2 years ago

They're all garbage I'm tired of falling asleep and waking up to some ripped off youtube video that was altered with AI, often of large science channels, or the Elon Musk videos

washadjeffmad• 2 years ago

While in the waiting room of my doctor's office, I noticed a few elderly patients playing videos of an obviously AI Joe Biden promising them free money and promoting a familiarly Trump platform, and they were /discussing/ it, as if it was real.

Who manufactured the problem here? It isn't just that these systems exist solely for individuals to be selected for by vulnerability, but that the people best poised to protect them are so effectively excluded from any sign of it.

What would it look like if we could see every ad meant for every audience from the same companies? What if we could just look up who was trying to target us? Is responsible, auditable advertisement impossible, or just not able to print money?

KETpXDDzR• 2 years ago

Great, now bad actors can label child pornography as AI-generated to avoid legal consequences.

This label is worthless IMO. We're close or already at a point where it's impossible to distinguish between real and AI generated content. Any company offering "AI detection" are scammers. It's just plain not possible.

YouTube now requires to label their realistic-looking videos made using AI

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