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trump-obtains-another-settlement-as-youtube-agrees-to-pay-$24.5-million

Trump obtains another settlement as YouTube agrees to pay $24.5 million

Donald Trump, Policy, youtube / /

Google owner Alphabet today agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit that President Trump filed against YouTube in 2021. Trump sued YouTube over his account being suspended after Trump supporters’ January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Alphabet agreed to pay $22 million “to settle and resolve with Plaintiff Donald J. Trump… which he has directed to be contributed, on his behalf, to the Trust for the National Mall, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom,” a court filing said. Trump recently announced plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

The settlement notice, filed today in US District Court for the Northern District of California, said Alphabet will also pay $2.5 million to settle claims with plaintiffs the American Conservative Union, Andrew Baggiani, Austen Fletcher, Maryse Veronica Jean-Louis, Frank Valentine, Kelly Victory, and Naomi Wolf. Under the settlement, Alphabet admits no wrongdoing and the parties agreed to dismiss the case.

When contacted by Ars today, Google said it would not provide any comment beyond what is in the court filing. Trump was suspended from major social media platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack and was subsequently impeached by the House of Representatives for incitement of insurrection.

Meta settled a similar lawsuit in January this year, agreeing to pay $25 million overall, including $22 million toward Trump’s presidential library. In February, Elon Musk’s X agreed to a $10 million settlement.

“Google executives were eager to keep their settlement smaller than the one paid by rival Meta, according to people familiar with the matter,” The Wall Street Journal wrote today.

Trump obtains another settlement as YouTube agrees to pay $24.5 million Read More »

youtube-music-is-testing-ai-hosts-that-will-interrupt-your-tunes

YouTube Music is testing AI hosts that will interrupt your tunes

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Tech, youtube, youtube music / /

YouTube has a new Labs program, allowing listeners to “discover the next generation of YouTube.” In case you were wondering, that generation is apparently all about AI. The streaming site says Labs will offer a glimpse of the AI features it’s developing for YouTube Music, and it starts with AI “hosts” that will chime in while you’re listening to music. Yes, really.

The new AI music hosts are supposed to provide a richer listening experience, according to YouTube. As you’re listening to tunes, the AI will generate audio snippets similar to, but shorter than, the fake podcasts you can create in NotebookLM. The “Beyond the Beat” host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations.

The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify’s AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn’t create playlists like Spotify’s robot. This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google’s Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses.

YouTube Music is testing AI hosts that will interrupt your tunes Read More »

youtube-will-restore-channels-banned-for-covid-and-election-misinformation

YouTube will restore channels banned for COVID and election misinformation

covid-19 misinformation, election misinformation, Google, misinformation, Tech, youtube / /

It’s not exactly hard to find politically conservative content on YouTube, but the platform may soon skew even further to the right. YouTube parent Alphabet has confirmed that it will restore channels that were banned in recent years for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and elections. Alphabet says it values free expression and political debate, placing the blame for its previous moderation decisions on the Biden administration.

Alphabet made this announcement via a lengthy letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The letter, a response to subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee, explains in no uncertain terms that the company is taking a more relaxed approach to moderating political content on YouTube.

For starters, Alphabet denies that its products and services are biased toward specific viewpoints and that it “appreciates the accountability” provided by the committee. The cloying missive goes on to explain that Google didn’t really want to ban all those accounts, but Biden administration officials just kept asking. Now that the political tables have turned, Google is looking to dig itself out of this hole.

According to Alphabet’s version of events, misinformation such as telling people to drink bleach to cure COVID wasn’t initially against its policies. However, Biden officials repeatedly asked YouTube to take action. YouTube did and specifically banned COVID misinformation sitewide until 2024, one year longer than the crackdown on election conspiracy theories. Alphabet says that today, YouTube’s rules permit a “wider range of content.”

In an apparent attempt to smooth things over with the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, YouTube will restore the channels banned for COVID and election misinformation. This includes prominent conservatives like Dan Bongino, who is now the Deputy Director of the FBI, and White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka.

YouTube will restore channels banned for COVID and election misinformation Read More »

ai-video-is-invading-youtube-shorts-and-google-photos-starting-today

AI video is invading YouTube Shorts and Google Photos starting today

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, google photos, Tech, youtube / /

Google is following through on recent promises to add more generative AI features to its photo and video products. Over on YouTube, Google is rolling out the first wave of generative AI video for YouTube Shorts, but even if you’re not a YouTuber, you’ll be exposed to more AI videos soon. Google Photos, which is integrated with virtually every Android phone on the market, is also getting AI video-generation capabilities. In both cases, the features are currently based on the older Veo 2 model, not the more capable Veo 3 that has been meming across the Internet since it was announced at I/O in May.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan confirmed earlier this summer that the company planned to add generative AI to the creator tools for YouTube Shorts. There were already tools to generate backgrounds for videos, but the next phase will involve creating new video elements from a text prompt.

Starting today, creators will be able to use a photo as the basis for a new generative AI video. YouTube also promises a collection of easily applied generative effects, which will be accessible from the Shorts camera. There’s also a new AI playground hub that the company says will be home to all its AI tools, along with examples and suggested prompts to help people pump out AI content.

The Veo 2-based videos aren’t as realistic as Veo 3 clips, but an upgrade is planned.

So far, all the YouTube AI video features are running on the Veo 2 model. The plan is still to move to Veo 3 later this summer. The AI features in YouTube Shorts are currently limited to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but they will expand to more countries later.

AI video is invading YouTube Shorts and Google Photos starting today Read More »

google-begins-rolling-out-ai-search-in-youtube

Google begins rolling out AI search in YouTube

AI, ai search, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Tech, youtube / /

Over the past year, Google has transformed its web search experience with AI, driving toward a zero-click experience. Now, the same AI focus is coming to YouTube, and Premium subscribers can get a preview of the new search regime. Select searches on the video platform will now produce an AI-generated results carousel with a collection of relevant videos. Even if you don’t pay for YouTube, AI is still coming for you with an expansion of Google’s video chatbot.

Google says the new AI search feature, which appears at the top of the results page, will include multiple videos, along with an AI summary of each. You can tap the video thumbnails to begin playing them right from the carousel. The summary is intended to extract the information most relevant to your search query, so you may not even have to watch the videos.

The AI results carousel is only a test right now, and it’s limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. If you’re paying for Premium, you can enable the feature on YouTube’s experimental page. While the feature is entirely opt-in, that probably won’t last long. Like AI Overviews in search, this feature will take precedence over organic search results and get people interacting with Google’s AI, and that’s the driving force behind most of the company’s decisions lately.

It’s not hard to see where this feature could lead because we’ve seen the same thing play out in general web search. By putting AI-generated content at the top of search results, Google will reduce the number of videos people click to watch. The carousel gives you the relevant parts of the video along with a summary, but the video page is another tap away. Rather than opening videos, commenting, subscribing, and otherwise interacting with creators, some users will just peruse the AI carousel. That could make it harder for channels to grow and earn revenue from their content—the same content Google will feed into Gemini to generate the AI carousel.

Google begins rolling out AI search in YouTube Read More »

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One of the best Pac-Man games in years is playable on YouTube, of all places

arcade, Classic, gaming, Google, Namco, Pac-Man, youtube / /

Those who’ve played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game’s original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully excecuting those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn’t get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately).

Collecting those high-value items at the bottom is your ticket to a lot of extra lives. Credit: Youtube Playables

As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage.

Despite this, the game doesn’t give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score.

Credit: Youtube Playables

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score. Credit: Youtube Playables

Those issues aside, I’ve had a blast coming back to Pac-Man Supefast over and over again in the past few days, slowly raising my high score above the 162,000 point mark during coffee breaks (consider the gauntlet thrown, Ars readers). If you’re a fan of classic arcade games, Pac-Man Superfast is worth a try before the “YouTube Playables” initiative inevitably joins the growing graveyard of discontinued Google products.

One of the best Pac-Man games in years is playable on YouTube, of all places Read More »

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Google’s frighteningly good Veo 3 AI videos to be integrated with YouTube Shorts

AI, Ai video, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Tech, youtube / /

Even in the age of TikTok, YouTube viewership continues to climb. While Google’s iconic video streaming platform has traditionally pushed creators to produce longer videos that can accommodate more ads, the site’s Shorts format is growing fast. That growth may explode in the coming months, as YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has announced that the Google Veo 3 AI video generator will be integrated with YouTube Shorts later this summer.

According to Mohan, YouTube Shorts has seen a rise in popularity even compared to YouTube as a whole. The streaming platform is now the most watched source of video in the world, but Shorts specifically have seen a massive 186 percent increase in viewership over the past year. Mohan says Shorts now average 200 billion daily views.

YouTube has already equipped creators with a few AI tools, including Dream Screen, which can produce AI video backgrounds with a text prompt. Veo 3 support will be a significant upgrade, though. At the Cannes festival, Mohan revealed that the streaming site will begin offering integration with Google’s leading video model later this summer. “I believe these tools will open new creative lanes for everyone to explore,” said Mohan.

YouTube Shorts recommendations.

YouTube heavily promotes Shorts on the homepage.

Credit: Google

YouTube heavily promotes Shorts on the homepage. Credit: Google

This move will require a few tweaks to Veo 3 outputs, but it seems like a perfect match. As the name implies, YouTube Shorts is intended for short video content. The format initially launched with a 30-second ceiling, but that has since been increased to 60 seconds. Because of the astronomical cost of generative AI, each generated Veo clip is quite short, a mere eight seconds in the current version of the tool. Slap a few of those together, and you’ve got a YouTube Short.

Google’s frighteningly good Veo 3 AI videos to be integrated with YouTube Shorts Read More »

google’s-cheaper-youtube-premium-lite-subscription-will-drop-music

Google’s cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription will drop Music

Google, music streaming, youtube / /

YouTube dominates online video, but it’s absolutely crammed full of ads these days. A YouTube Premium subscription takes care of that, but ad blockers do exist. Google seems to have gotten the message—a cheaper streaming subscription is on the way that drops YouTube Music from the plan. You may have to give up more than music to get the cheaper rate, though.

Google started testing cheaper YouTube subscriptions in a few international markets, including Germany and Australia, over the past year. Those users have been offered the option of subscribing to the YouTube Premium plan, which runs $13.99 in the US, or a new plan that costs about half as much. For example, in Australia, the options are AU$23 for YouTube Premium or AU$12 for “YouTube Premium Lite.”

The Lite plan drops YouTube Music but keeps ad-free YouTube, which is all most people want anyway. Based on the early tests, these plans will probably drop a few other features that you’d miss, including background playback and offline downloads. However, this plan could cost as little as $7–$8 in the US.

Perhaps at this point, you think you’ve outsmarted Google—you can just watch ad-free music videos with the Lite plan, right? Wrong. Users who have tried the Lite plan in other markets report that it doesn’t actually remove all the ads on the site. You may still see banner ads around videos, as well as pre-roll ads before music videos specifically. If you want access to Google’s substantial music catalog without ads, you’ll still need to pay for the full plan.

Bloomberg reports that YouTube Premium Lite is on the verge of launching in the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand.

“As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we’ve been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets,” Google said in a statement. “We’re hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners’ support.”

Google’s cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription will drop Music Read More »

“zero-warnings”:-longtime-youtuber-rails-against-unexplained-channel-removal

“Zero warnings”: Longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained channel removal

censorship, content moderation, deceptive content, online bans, Policy, spam, youtube / /

Artemiy Pavlov, the founder of a small but mighty music software brand called Sinesvibes, spent more than 15 years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business’ products. Over all those years, he never had any issues with YouTube’s automated content removal system—until Monday, when YouTube, without issuing a single warning, abruptly deleted his entire channel.

“What a ‘nice’ way to start a week!” Pavlov posted on Bluesky. “Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to ‘spam and deceptive policies.’ Which is the biggest WTF moment in our brand’s history on social platforms. We have only posted demos of our own original products, never anything else….”

Officially, YouTube told Pavlov that his channel violated YouTube’s “spam, deceptive practices, and scam policy,” but Pavlov could think of no videos that might be labeled as violative.

“We have nothing to hide,” Pavlov told Ars, calling YouTube’s decision to delete the channel with “zero warnings” a “terrible, terrible day for an independent, honest software brand.”

“We have never been involved with anything remotely shady,” Pavlov said. “We have never taken a single dollar dishonestly from anyone. And we have thousands of customers that stand by our brand.”

Ars saw Pavolov’s post and reached out to YouTube to find out why the channel was targeted for takedown. About three hours later, the channel was suddenly restored. That’s remarkably fast, as YouTube can sometimes take days or weeks to review an appeal. A YouTube spokesperson later confirmed that the Sinesvibes channel was reinstated due to the regular appeals process, indicating perhaps that YouTube could see that Sinesvibes’ removal was an obvious mistake.

Developer calls for more human review

For small brands like Sinesvibes, even spending half a day in limbo was a cause for crisis. Immediately, the brand worried about 50 broken product pages for one of its distributors, as well as “hundreds if not thousands of news articles posted about our software on dozens of different websites.” Unsure if the channel would ever be restored, Sinesvibes spent most of Monday surveying the damage.

Now that the channel is restored, Pavlov is stuck confronting how much of the Sinesvibes brand depends on the YouTube channel remaining online while still grappling with uncertainty since the reason behind the ban remains unknown. He told Ars that’s why, for small brands, simply having a channel reinstated doesn’t resolve all their concerns.

“Zero warnings”: Longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained channel removal Read More »

how-one-youtuber-is-trying-to-poison-the-ai-bots-stealing-her-content

How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content

AI, youtube / /

If you’ve been paying careful attention to YouTube recently, you may have noticed the rising trend of so-called “faceless YouTube channels” that never feature a visible human talking in the video frame. While some of these channels are simply authored by camera-shy humans, many more are fully automated through AI-powered tools to craft everything from the scripts and voiceovers to the imagery and music. Unsurprisingly, this is often sold as a way to make a quick buck off the YouTube algorithm with minimal human effort.

It’s not hard to find YouTubers complaining about a flood of these faceless channels stealing their embedded transcript files and running them through AI summarizers to generate their own instant knock-offs. But one YouTuber is trying to fight back, seeding her transcripts with junk data that is invisible to humans but poisonous to any AI that dares to try to work from a poached transcript file.

The power of the .ass

YouTuber F4mi, who creates some excellent deep dives on obscure technology, recently detailed her efforts “to poison any AI summarizers that were trying to steal my content to make slop.” The key to F4mi’s method is the .ass subtitle format, created decades ago as part of fansubbing software Advanced SubStation Alpha. Unlike simpler and more popular subtitle formats, .ass supports fancy features like fonts, colors, positioning, bold, italic, underline, and more.

It’s these fancy features that let F4mi hide AI-confounding garbage in her YouTube transcripts without impacting the subtitle experience for her human viewers. For each chunk of actual text in her subtitle file, she also inserted “two chunks of text out of bounds using the positioning feature of the .ass format, with their size and transparency set to zero so they are completely invisible.”

In those “invisible” subtitle boxes, F4mi added text from public domain works (with certain words replaced with synonyms to avoid detection) or her own LLM-generated scripts full of completely made-up facts. When those transcript files were fed into popular AI summarizer sites, that junk text ended up overwhelming the actual content, creating a totally unrelated script that would be useless to any faceless channel trying to exploit it.

How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content Read More »

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YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email

copyright troll, digital millennium copyright act, DMCA takedown, Nintendo, Policy, youtube, youtubers / /

Defending his livelihood, Neumayer started asking questions. At first, that led to his videos being reinstated. But that victory was short-lived, as the supposed Nintendo lawyer only escalated his demands, spooking the YouTuber into voluntarily removing some videos, The Verge reported, while continuing to investigate the potential troll.

Reaching out directly to Nintendo helped, but questions remain

The Verge has all the receipts, sharing emails from the fake lawyer and detailing Neumayer’s fight blow-for-blow. Neumayer ultimately found that there was a patent lawyer with a similar name working for Nintendo in Japan, although he could not tell if that was the person sending the demands and Nintendo would not confirm to The Verge if Tatsumi Masaaki exists.

Only after contacting Nintendo directly did Neumayer finally get some information he could work with to challenge the takedowns. Reportedly, Nintendo replied, telling Neumayer that the fake lawyer’s proton email address “is not a legitimate Nintendo email address and the details contained within the communication do not align with Nintendo of America Inc.’s enforcement practices.”

Nintendo promised to investigate further, as Neumayer continued to receive demands from the fake lawyer. It took about a week after Nintendo’s response for “Tatsumi” to start to stand down, writing in a stunted email to Neumayer, “I hereby retract all of my preceding claims.” But even then, the troll went down fighting, The Verge reported.

The final messages from “Tatsumi” claimed that he’d only been suspended from filing claims and threatened that other Nintendo lawyers would be re-filing them. He then sent what The Verge described as “in some ways the most legit-looking email yet,” using a publicly available web tool to spoof an official Nintendo email address while continuing to menace Neumayer.

It was that spoofed email that finally ended the façade, though, The Verge reported. Neumayer detected the spoof by checking the headers and IDing the tool used.

Although this case of copyright trolling is seemingly over, Neumayer—along with a couple other gamers trolled by “Tatsumi”—remain frustrated with YouTube, The Verge reported. After his fight with the fake Nintendo lawyer, Neumayer wants the streaming platform to update its policies and make it easier for YouTubers to defend against copyright abuse.

Back in May, when Ars reported on a YouTuber dismayed by a DMCA takedown over a washing machine chime heard on his video, a YouTube researcher and director of policy and advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Katharine Trendacosta told Ars that YouTube’s current process discourages YouTubers from disputing copyright strikes.

“Every idiot can strike every YouTuber and there is nearly no problem to do so. It’s insane,” Neumayer said. “It has to change NOW.”

YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email Read More »

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Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers

Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency scam, fake x accounts, Gmail, Google, LinkedIn, phishing, Policy, Twitter, X, youtube / /

“I’m fighting with Google now,” Townsend told Ars. “I don’t expect any real answers from them.”

How YouTubers can avoid being targeted

As YouTube appears evasive, Townsend has been grateful for long-time subscribers commenting to show support, which may help get his videos amplified more by the algorithm. On YouTube, he also said that because “the outpouring of support was beyond anything” he could’ve expected, it kept him “sane” through sometimes 24-hour periods of silence without any updates on when his account would be restored.

Townsend told Ars that he rarely does sponsorships, but like many in the fighting game community, his inbox gets spammed with offers constantly, much of which he assumes are scams.

“If you are a YouTuber of any size,” Townsend explained in his YouTube video, “you are inundated with this stuff constantly,” so “my BS detector is like, okay, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. But this one just, it looked real enough, like they had their own social media presence, lots of followers. Everything looked real.”

Brian_F echoed that in his video, which breaks down how the latest scam evolved from more obvious scams, tricking even skeptical YouTubers who have years of experience dodging phishing scams in their inboxes.

“The game has changed,” Brian_F said.

Townsend told Ars that sponsorships are rare in the fighting game community. YouTubers are used to carefully scanning supposed offers to weed out the real ones from the fakes. But Brian_F’s video pointed out that scammers copy/paste legitimate offer letters, so it’s already hard to distinguish between potential sources of income and cleverly masked phishing attacks using sponsorships as lures.

Part of the vetting process includes verifying links without clicking through and verifying identities of people submitting supposed offers. But if YouTubers are provided with legitimate links early on, receiving offers from brands they really like, and see that contacts match detailed LinkedIn profiles of authentic employees who market the brand, it’s much harder to detect a fake sponsorship offer without as many obvious red flags.

Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers Read More »