Is YouTube's use of AI upscaling for Shorts unethical?

This was uploaded back in August, and YouTube subsequently responded on Twitter to clarify that it was testing AI upscaling, not altering content. I've changed the title here in an attempt to avoid sensationalism while retaining valid concern.

I try my best to avoid YouTube Shorts for all sorts of reasons (that they have in common with other social media video feeds like TikTok, Instagram, etc.), but one of them is the proliferation of what seems to me like AI-generated content. In my rare forays into YT shorts (before coming across this video), I see many with the same kind of smeary effect Rhett mentions, but surely a lot of them are actually real videos that have had some sort of weird filter intentionally applied over them. However, I don't like it, so even seeing videos that are upscaled and have an unintentionally similar filtered result is disgusting to me. Add that on top of mountains of clickbait and propaganda and you can argue that YouTube has, at minimum, been irresponsible with this. It's easy to be paranoid - for example, try searching for Burkina Faso president Ibrahim Traoré on YT, for any first-party reporting, and see how much crap you have to trawl through. By the time I finally found some, I started wondering if I was imagining that telltale AI character stiffness in him or not, even in regular, non-shorts videos.

This gets to what I think may be the core question on the ethics of AI use, which is mentioned in the latter part of the video - the inevitable erosion of trust when humans cannot easily determine whether they are interfacing with AI-generated content in any format.

The trust of my audience is the most important thing that I have as a YouTube creator. Whether or not you like my content or agree with what I have to say, underneath all of that is this underlying foundation that you trust what I'm making and what I'm saying and what I'm doing is truly me. It is my real opinion. It is my real thought. It is my real work. and replacing or enhancing my work without my consent or knowledge with some kind of AI upscaling system. Not only I think erodes that trust with the audience, but it also erodes my trust in the platform of YouTube. If they're going to roll this kind of thing out without my knowledge or permission, what else are they doing in the background with my content and with my data in order to optimize the platform or to increase safety?

My hope is that we implement some sort of requirement that any published media discloses whether it uses AI and maybe even how much, in the same way that food products containing GMO ingredients must be labeled accordingly. How this can be practically applied and/or enforced, I have absolutely no clue... we're heading down the road where everyone and everything will need a label. Still, there need to be guardrails for the fundamental assumptions we have utilized for millennia to navigate human society. I'd even go as far as making it illegal for any chatbot, AI agent, etc. to use first-person pronouns.