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?
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.
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!
Newpipe defaults to the original dub without the ai slop
Hopefully more video creators switch to Peertube.
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'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.
They also started cramming videos in other languages with these absolutely trash quality dubs into my recommendations.
I assume it must be a very misguided A/B-test, one which I imagine won't actually roll out in the end.
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.
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.
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).
Don't worry, I'm not seeing the option in the native app either. Gross.There's a browser addon that lets you disable auto translation.
Oh and it fixes the titles too, very nice
Doesn't seem to work on Firefox on Android. Do I need a YouTube API key?