YouTube denies AI was involved with odd removals of tech tutorials

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 no clear way to trigger human review to overturn removals. AI seemed to be running the show, with creators’ appeals allegedly 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.

Shocked creators were stuck speculating

Rich White, a computer technician who runs an account called CyberCPU Tech, had two videos removed that demonstrated workarounds to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

These videos are popular, White told Ars, with people looking to bypass Microsoft account requirements each time a new build is released. For tech content creators like White, “these are bread and butter videos,” dependably yielding “extremely high views,” he said.

Because there’s such high demand, many tech content creators’ channels are filled with these kinds of videos. White’s account has “countless” examples, he said, and in the past, YouTube even featured his most popular video in the genre on a trending list.

To White and others, it’s unclear exactly what has changed on YouTube that triggered removals of this type of content.

YouTube only seemed to be removing recently posted content, White told Ars. However, if the takedowns ever impacted older content, entire channels documenting years of tech tutorials risked disappearing in “the blink of an eye,” another YouTuber behind a tech tips account called Britec09 warned after one of his videos was removed.