YouTube Forces Dubs Now
Saw this video on another platform and I thought let me go to YouTube so I can share it, only to hear AI voices. I'm like WTF? I investigate and find out that it's auto dubbed and that there's no option to disable it. Huh?
I'm not sure why but I'm able to disable them on mobile. The tricky part is guessing what the original track is. I'm on YT premium which might be why?
I think the ideal functionality would be having (ORIGINAL) next to the audio track that isn't dubbed and have that set to the default setting.
I think if they can get the dubbing correct and actually working as intended, that would be incredible for opening up cultures for everyone. I think crossing language barriers is really cool.
On my menu it does say original next to one of them, but tapping on the options (any of the options) doesn't do anything. My phone is set to french because I'm an immigrant in a french-speaking region and am making sure to engage with the language as much as possible. But this means the autodub puts a stupid robo-french voice on everything -- and it's not always a faithful translation either.
At this point I just let the creators know that YouTube is making their videos unwatchable to people with different language settings and that they can disable this when they upload videos.
That sounds frustrating! I've been seeing similar messages on various comment sections now. You would think there would be some kind of QA testing prior to launching this lol.
Kinda not surprising though, because youtube seems to launch experiments very haphazardly.
They also started cramming videos in other languages with these absolutely trash quality dubs into my recommendations.
Amazing how in less than the span of my 31 year lifetime the internet turned from absolutely world-changing great and probably directly or indirectly the most fun and useful tool humans can play around with to not-yet-unusable-but-definitely-closing-in slop where you can't spend an hour without getting mad at some system working against us.
Edit: I hate ending on a dismal note, so let me remind everyone that the "small web" (human-created blogs made with nothing but passion for their craft) exists, even if it's harder to find. Similarly, for most enshittified websites like YouTube, there's an alternative to the enshittification (even if it's just getting something like Grayjay to circumvent the crap on YT)
Similarly, for most enshittified websites like YouTube, there's an alternative to the enshittification
I mean there are but if you simply try to view them privately, they make the experience super shitty. Even if you pay for the Premium subscription, still shitty.
GrayJay is absolutely awesome but there's only so much they can do about this.
It's still "world-changing great". All the knowledge sharing, all the collaboration, all the scientific advances, have been growing at the same rate as the "commoners" have been joining it and getting trapped in the slop.
The only change, is the Internet is not just for nerds anymore, it's also for preachers, scammers, and the average brainwashed populace.
It used to be easy to ignore the peasants from inside an ivory tower's echo chamber. The Internet has brought those voices out for everyone to hear... and to realize humanity is not as idealized as they thought. Time to put some real work into fixing some real problems.
You can change the audio track but you have to do it on every video. What's more annoying is it can't even decide on a language. I've had both Spanish videos auto dubbed to English and English videos auto dubbed to Spanish.
There's a browser addon that lets you disable auto translation.
Doesn't seem to work on Firefox on Android. Do I need a YouTube API key?
Oh and it fixes the titles too, very nice
You cannot select the audio track when watching from mobile browsers, so you are stuck with what you were served.
No, I won't open the native app.
Yeah, even if it’s disabled on your channel they still waste resources and do it unless it’s disabled for every video. Nobody likes it, the translations always suck. They killed community captions for THIS!
It also returns these auto dubbed videos in search results, making it increasingly difficult to find intelligible videos about foreign topics. You'll get a native describing the problem to other natives with a common understanding, auto transcribed, auto translated, and auto dubbed.
Here's a hilariously bad example. This video has an AI English dub. https://youtu.be/DNceEVQulwY?t=908 (warning: up close whispering) Have you ever noticed YouTube's automatic translation system sometimes buffers up a lot of text and dumps a whole paragraph on screen at once?
Oh wow!
Newpipe defaults to the original dub without the ai slop
Hopefully more video creators switch to Peertube.
Haha... Had a similar though 2 days ago. What a dumbshit move and this actually told me that "AI" isn't that good actually... Because the dubbed version was so horrible that the video became unwatchable xD.
Nice AI slope YouTube !!
From what I've heard, it's nothing but over glorified TTS that strips all form of actual emotion in the voice of whoever is speaking.
That was horrible
How to fix youtube:
Sadly, I use my watch-history as a bit of a que. Watch a second of a few different vids that catch my interest before the feed refreshes and buries them. Once I've saved a dozen like so, go back and watch them, or download for offline viewing.
I assume it must be a very misguided A/B-test, one which I imagine won't actually roll out in the end.