old news. the transcript commonly mistakes words in videos for swears or racial slurs and gets people demonetized
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I think this is more of an official acknowledgment and them exploring how it works, not so much “breaking news” for those of us in the know. I’d imagine most people are probably unaware of this.
I don't think this is referring to the audio transcript, this looks like youtube's running the videos through an OCR to read text in the actual video
It's not a secret; they've been doing this for a long time. It's why you see a lot of YouTubers who cover news stories black out certain words if they share snippets of a news article.
What's weird about it is that the policy doesn't seem to be the same for text as it is for audio. For instance, Philip DeFranco has to censor out words like "rape" from articles he puts up graphics of, but doesn't have to censor it out as he narrates the article verbally.
Semi-related but it drives me crazy that there can be non-censored swearing in a video but the subtitles have it censored. Imagine being punished for being deaf
I wonder if the scenario with spoken vs printed words getting treated differently is due to the differences in accuracy of google’s audio and ocr technology. Hi-res text images makes ocr very good at deciphering between grape and rape but with audio it may not be as good.
Similarly, I wonder if the fact that google is autogenerating subtitles for videos makes a difference. When it’s spoken in a video it’s not something they’ve produced but when it’s in subtitles they have generated it is something they produced and could somehow open themselves up to legal issues? Regardless it’s still unfortunate that YouTube is forcibly censoring subtitles.
Is anyone surprised?
We knew they could do automatic captions (Don't know why don't offer that standard any more). We know they monitor what's in the video, meaning the words. We know this was an automated system.
I don't even think there's an ounce of anything new here to anyone who has been paying attention.
And I think google offers to translate text from picture for a while? So why wouldn't they implement this to YouTube? And of course they have to moderate the content if possible.
What has gone so wrong with all these gigantic social media companies that they had to start all collectively digging their graves in the 2020s?
I'm not any kind of economist or anything, but one theory I read is that the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank scared investors and venture capitalists into wanting a ROI ASAP.
That makes sense for some, but Facebook started it's wrist cutting before that, and YouTube has been testing out how far they can push the line for a long time, but the last few years it seems like all of them are working double time to drive all their users away.
Money costs money for the first time since 2008.
We all died from covid three years ago.
This is actually hell.