YouTube Forces Dubs Now
from sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to technology@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 14:02
https://lazysoci.al/post/30200488

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?

youtube.com/shorts/9V90gOkOJBc

#technology

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astro_ray@piefed.social on 13 Jul 14:15 next collapse

That was horrible

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 13 Jul 14:15 next collapse

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 !!

AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip on 13 Jul 17:00 collapse

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.

MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub on 13 Jul 14:21 next collapse

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.

isgleas@lemmy.ml on 13 Jul 16:00 next collapse

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.

salmoura@lemmy.eco.br on 13 Jul 16:16 next collapse

If you don’t want to go through the revanced route, you can install another front end like newpipe (assuming you’re using an android device).

brisa1795@preferred.social on 13 Jul 16:42 collapse

I'm using ReVanced extended and I'm still encountering this autodubbing mess. I watch videos in English, Spanish, German and Dutch , and I hate being forced to listen to a trerrible AI voice butchering the whole video. Is there a setting that I have to adjust?

CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml on 14 Jul 20:46 collapse

Oh nice, I can help :P

There is a fairly well hidden setting

You can go to Settings > revanced settings (top one) > player > flyout menu > hide audio track

It was greyed out for me, I had to first change Settings > revanced settings (top one) > miscellaneous > spoof video streams > default client > iOS TV

MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de on 13 Jul 17:31 collapse

Don’t worry, I’m not seeing the option in the native app either. Gross.

jarfil@beehaw.org on 14 Jul 14:54 collapse

Settings (gear icon) → Audio Track → (whatever) original

MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de on 14 Jul 20:35 collapse

Thank you for setting me straight on this.

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de on 13 Jul 19:41 collapse

There’s a browser addon that lets you disable auto translation.

MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub on 13 Jul 22:02 next collapse

Oh and it fixes the titles too, very nice

jarfil@beehaw.org on 14 Jul 15:57 collapse

Doesn’t seem to work on Firefox on Android. Do I need a YouTube API key?

Moonrise2473@feddit.it on 13 Jul 14:22 next collapse

Newpipe defaults to the original dub without the ai slop

t3rmit3@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 16:35 next collapse

How to fix youtube: <img alt="" src="https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/df30fb48-cde6-4014-ad5d-fb191ca4118b.png">

MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de on 13 Jul 17:34 collapse

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.

Hexarei@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 21:12 collapse

There’s a whole “watch later” system, witw are you doing it that way for?

MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de on 14 Jul 00:33 collapse

Because I regularly reference, purge ads/trash-vids from, and occassionally search, my watch history anyways. Also, selecting which watchlist to save to is an additional step of going through menus when I can just open a video and then hit the Back button. Although that’s kind-of an after-the-fact justification, as I don’t really recall how or when I fell into this habit.

GammaGames@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 17:20 next collapse

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!

i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de on 13 Jul 17:44 next collapse

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. 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?

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al on 13 Jul 18:28 collapse

Oh wow!

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 18:30 next collapse

Hopefully more video creators switch to Peertube.

Crotaro@beehaw.org on 13 Jul 19:10 next collapse

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)

jarfil@beehaw.org on 14 Jul 14:40 next collapse

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.

Geodad@beehaw.org on 14 Jul 17:01 next collapse

I’ve tried GrayJay. I currently use Tubular.

Ulrich@feddit.org on 14 Jul 18:20 collapse

Tubular is great but only supports 2 platforms, whereas GrayJay supports 17 officially, and several others unofficially.

Geodad@beehaw.org on 15 Jul 00:17 collapse

I’ll have to try Grayjay again.

Can you download shows with it?

Ulrich@feddit.org on 15 Jul 00:25 collapse

Shows?

Geodad@beehaw.org on 15 Jul 00:26 collapse

Tubular lets you download whatever you’re watching.

Ulrich@feddit.org on 15 Jul 00:28 collapse

Yes, you can download videos.

Ulrich@feddit.org on 14 Jul 18:19 collapse

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.

Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org on 14 Jul 18:30 next collapse

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.

AbelianGrape@beehaw.org on 15 Jul 03:08 collapse

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.

Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org on 15 Jul 09:02 collapse

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.

Ulrich@feddit.org on 14 Jul 19:28 next collapse

They also started cramming videos in other languages with these absolutely trash quality dubs into my recommendations.

GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml on 15 Jul 06:12 collapse

I assume it must be a very misguided A/B-test, one which I imagine won’t actually roll out in the end.