this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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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?

https://youtube.com/shorts/9V90gOkOJBc

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I've tried GrayJay. I currently use Tubular.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago

Oh and it fixes the titles too, very nice

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Thank you for setting me straight on this.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Hopefully more video creators switch to Peertube.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

Newpipe defaults to the original dub without the ai slop

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 !!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's a whole "watch later" system, witw are you doing it that way for?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

That was horrible