I was browsing Youtube on my phone as one does when I landed on some random Japanese short. My ears are immediately assaulted by some robotic TTS voice speaking English and I start frantically tapping for an option to change the audio track, and of course there is none.
I run Youtube Vanced, and I have both “Force original audio” and the iOS TV spoofing options enabled which should get rid of autodubs on regular videos and shorts respectively, but apparently spoofing just doesn’t work on some URLs.
I didn’t even really care to see the video but I was so infuriated about having the shitty autodub foisted on me I copied the URL and opened it in Firefox (with Ublock installed, obviously). Turns out that the YT Shorts player does not have the option to change audio tracks, so I switched to the desktop version of the page, but no, it uses the same player.
I then installed Greasemonkey and a script that auto redirects Youtube Shorts URLs to use the regular player instead, and after one more change to the desktop version of the page, I could finally, after all that, switch the audio to the original Japanese and watch the stupid video I didn’t even care about.
The best part was that since the video had hardcoded Japanese subtitles I could immediately tell the automated English translation sucked. There was also a song playing in the background that got butchered in the dubbed version after Youtube had done whatever it did to splice in the robot voice.
Words can’t express how much I fucking hate Google for forcing this autodub shit on everyone. As an option, it’d be fine for foreign-language tutorials or whatever but to leave it as the default and actively hide the options to switch to the original audio makes me go 
You will consume the AI slop and you will be happy
this goddamn “feature” drives me insane too oh my god. it’s clearly made for dumbass murricans who start pissing and crying when they have to hear a language that’s not english, but i genuinely cannot understand why they force this onto every single person by default. what a dogshit company
This shit makes my tin-foil hat start buzzing. I feel like it is created deliberately to aid in the distribution of propaganda, which language barriers have siloed for better or worse.
It’s because those people you’re talking about would literally never find it without it being on by default. Making it a nightmare to turn it off is a huge problem though.
Nowadays I can’t live without ublock and my userscripts. Firefox is a lifesaver on mobile for supporting extensions.
Fucking American megacorp assuming nobody is bilingual. Shit drives me up a fucking wall.
Some of my devices are on English. Some in Spanish. My Spanish devices often auto-dub videos in English to Spanish and vice-versa
I wouldn’t even mind this being a default thing BUT THERE’S NO FUCKING OPTION TO TURN IT OFF WHAT THE FUCK
IF I UNDERSTAND THE AUDIO I DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING SLOP DEAD MONOTONE SOUNDING AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION LET ME TURN IT OFF HIJO DE PUTA PERSONAS BILINGÜES EXISTEN
That sounds nightmarish.
It’s the sheer arrogance of not hiding the option to turn it off on mobile that really irks me, especially when there are plenty of cases like ASMR videos where dubbing actively ruins the video
They just automate this shit and don’t give a fuck if it works or not
4·2 hours agoThe option to make dubs is really cool. If it is done by the creator and not this generative ai shite.
Sometimes video playback will crash on SmartTubeNext, and my video will die and come back Spanish. It’s so fucking shitty!
suicide
Watched a video of someone’s spouse saying that their loved one committed suicide, all crying and understandably emotional, and saw comments saying that YouTube autodubbed it for some reason.
It’s actual fucking ghoulish shit
spoiler
lmao, I can imagine the AI’s chirpy robot cadence
My wife took her own life, I am devastated
I noticed this garbage feature a few months back when I wanted to watch an ASMR vid in French and I was immediately greeted with that loud ass English overdub. The only possible demographic this could appeal to is Americans who shit themselves when they hear anything that isn’t English, which to be fair is at least 40% of the country. Anyone know if Google autodubs to other languages or if you’re just forced to listen to English even if you’re in a non-English speaking country?
I’ve seen plenty of complaints from Spanish and German speakers that they get English videos auto-dubbed based on their location so it’s not just English.
Autodubbing ASMR videos is a very galaxy brained move
My personal favourite autodubbing fail was when a short featuring a cute talking pet crow got dubbed over by a robot
Invidious ftw
fuck youtube
God damn I’ve also encountered this issue on youtube revanced a few days ago. Apparently you can turn off auto-dubbing in the official app (but only on per-video basis unfortunately)
I’m so tired of monolinguoids and their bullshit
Time to go to the public library and borrow some DVDs, internet video is over.
