the automatic subtitles on YouTube are not properly accessible. swear words being blanked out is not neutral accessibility for Deaf people like me. if the person in the video is swearing, we need to have that information conveyed to us, not [_____]. we are Deaf, not children. but no one wants to talk about this.

@love they are also starting to rephrase what is being said, so not only are entire words missing they don’t even match what the youtuber is saying

@love yeah it always bothers me this is like rule number one about subtitling shit, you subtitle it exactly as it is

you dont correct grammar, you dont censor words you dont like, it is your job to just transcribe what you hear into text

bugs me so much when people take different approaches

-carrie

@love US cultural hegemony: swearing ❌ graphic violence ✅

@love It always drives me nuts to see a YouTube video with high production values - excellent expensive cameras, careful cinematography, vibrant tone mapping - and then they have automatic subtitles.

Just extend that commitment to excellence a TINY bit farther and either author subtitles or hire a caption service. We've hired professional caption services at work a few times when we needed live captions and they're shockingly affordable.

@love youtube has incredible tools for finding whether a video has copyrighted content, but they can’t even use OCR to create a list of words for the subtitle generation to use as reference, so it constantly gets stuff wrong as well

@Velveteen @love my favorite robocaptionism is "heat. heat." during periods of background music and occasional woodworking sounds

@mausmalone @love YES. For minor amateur makers like me*, it isn't important, but for any company or individual that has spent time and money on doing decent video, this should be a simple decision, like having a title screen and crediting others properly. *This subject isn't really applicable to me, as I just upload simple, usually one take, video of me playing my uke and singing. But if I were to do an explanatory or tuition video in future, I'd consider this as part of the creative process.

@love when I was a junior subtitler many, many years ago, this was one of the first lessons. Subtitles are not censors, and if deaf people do not wish to see swearing, the television has a channel changer and a power button. I wish more hearing people understood this in social media times.

@marcjones @love I've seen censored alt-text too. "Die" changed to "hear the worst" in text from a speech bubble in a cartoon, for example.

@timtfj @marcjones @love I see audio "die" changed to text "unalive" and I hate it

unrelated, recently I was watching a movie on Netflix with captions on, and they did not match the speech. How is one of the richest companies on earth failing at this?

@love Yeah, and it doesnt help that people making videos are having to moderate their language. (for example, they cannot say the word "rape", they have to say "grape" or abbreviate it as SA (Ess Ayy) . )

The auto subtitles could get confused by that alone. If the translate system is part of Youtube's AI (or Gemini) than it probably means that the LLM Agent is also learning things incorrectly because it may not understand the context of the self-censoring

@love automatic subtitles seem generally bad. I was watching one earlier. Why can't some of this "AI compute" be used to make better ones? The automatic generation seems to totally ignore any context.
For example, today I watched a video about some device management software, which instead of writing "42 gears dot com" (at the very least), it said "42 years comm". "Comm" isn't even an English word!

No one says "dot com" to mean anything else but ".com", this should be obvious, even if "gears" might sound like "years" <sigh>.

@love They have declined in quality dramatically over the past few years. Now every other word is "heat" or "foreign" or "[__]".

@love I think #YouTube exporting #USian prudishness is just inexcuseable!

@love It's American prudeness. Let the people have guns, but having a swear word in the subtitles... proposterous!

@love

Exactly! It makes no sense to censor the subtitles if the audio track isn't censored. Not that I think that makes sense to do either, but in that case the two would at least match.

@autonomousapps yep. A lot of that is due to censorship, including when crossposting to other platforms. Creators get their videos shadowbanned or demonetized if they use the actual words, so they hide them - quite often with live play videos, they are edited out so we can't hear them either, there will either be silence or silly noises, all because big tech has decided *nobody* can handle hearing words like "dead." I have language processing issues and it's a nightmare for me as well.

@UkeleleEric @mausmalone @love another issue is YT auto subtitles often mangle any kind of regional accent (they default to on for a lot of videos these days) and last night I saw them making a total pigs ear of what a lad from Yorkshire was saying..