34 pointsby slowdog10 hours ago6 comments
  • wpm5 hours ago
    Subtitles are parsed by their LLMs for the pointless summaries placed right below the video and for all the other boring, dumb stuff YT does with AI.

    See: https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8 (Poisoning AI with ".ass" Subtitles)

    • kingstnap44 minutes ago
      They aren't useless, it's nice for finding timestamps of things, especially in long content like talks.
    • aurareturnan hour ago
      Is it pointless? I find myself asking for summaries of videos more and more often.
  • ggm9 hours ago
    I could believe this is a filter designed to simplify conformance to some YT standard.

    I could believe this is a side effect of something else.

    I could believe its a problem with some output devices (sw) of the nature of "oh I'm ASCII I can't handle UTF-8 encoded data" which doesn't have a good default.

    Is there some more direct profit/IPR motivated approach which directs this format of all others should be removed?

    • altairprime8 hours ago
      It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all. So, just as with Crunchyroll, better to kill the complex human artistic subtitles so that people don’t get used to their boring “could be machine, could be human, who cares” slop (and, as a bonus, so that human moderators aren’t required to evaluate whether the subtitles are offensively shaped).
      • CamperBob26 hours ago
        It differentiates human-created content from AI-created content in a space where AI can’t perform competitively at all.

        Well, that certainly remains to be seen.

        • altairprime6 hours ago
          Indeed. Fortunately, “cannot” is present tense, not future tense.
  • ompogUe7 hours ago
    • quietsegfault6 hours ago
      I mean, it’s sort of a vector. The malware itself can only be executed if you click a suspicious .lnk file. The moral here isn’t that subtitles are a “vector”, but to not indiscriminately run scripts.
  • 8 hours ago
    undefined
  • efilife9 hours ago
    this just keeps happening over and over. And I can't find any logical reason why they are doing this. Surely you can't lose money due to supporting a colorful subtitles format? Ditch youtube. You most likely do NOT need it
    • its-summertime8 hours ago
      They still support multiple formats with color information
      • slowdog6 hours ago
        Even still, it's not as much information and doesn't excuse deleting creators work without any warning.
  • pfannkuchen4 hours ago
    > Sure, it's not officially supported or even documented

    Conspiracy, or P3 bug?