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