This week, tech content creators began to suspect that AI was making it harder to share some of the most highly sought-after tech tutorials on YouTube, but now YouTube is denying that odd removals were due to automation.
Creators grew alarmed when educational videos that YouTube had allowed for years were suddenly being bizarrely flagged as “dangerous” or “harmful,” with seemingly no way to trigger human review to overturn removals. AI seemed to be running the show, with creators’ appeals seemingly getting denied faster than a human could possibly review them.
Late Friday, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed that videos flagged by Ars have been reinstated, promising that YouTube will take steps to ensure that similar content isn’t removed in the future. But, to creators, it remains unclear why the videos got taken down, as YouTube claimed that both initial enforcement decisions and decisions on appeals were not the result of an automation issue.