YouTube has once again tried to enhance the user experience in the platform and this time it has done it in the worst way possible with the comment summarization feature powered by artificial intelligence. The feature, which applies machine learning to summarise lengthy comment threads into short snippets, was designed to assist users in identifying the key points of conversation under popular videos.

However, many people have accused the summaries of capturing the wrong tone and meaning of the original comments, thus creating a lot of confusion.

The fiasco started when several popular YouTubers realized that the AI-generated summaries of the comments were painting a rather distorted picture of the conversations that were taking place in their videos’ comment sections.

Beauty vlogger James Charles was also unhappy with the AI system as he tweeted, “The AI summary made it seem like everyone hated my new makeup line when the actual comments were very positive. This is really hurting the creators.

There are also some technical problems: some users noted that the summaries contain illogical statements or miss some crucial points of the discussion. One of the worst examples was the AI summary for a video about mental health awareness where the AI chose to focus on comments about the creator’s hair rather than the supportive messages that were the main focus of the comments.

YouTube has come out to support the feature saying that it is still in the beta stage and therefore the performance will only improve as the AI is trained with more data. A representative of the company stated that, “We are dedicated to offering tools that improve the experience of YouTube for both the content creators and the audience. We have noted the issues raised and are in the process of finding solutions to the problems. ”

However, there are some critics who state that the idea of automated comment summarization is wrong in its approach. Dr. Lisa Patel an AI ethicist said that ‘Comments are often nuanced, contextual and could be sarcastic or humorous. The current AI systems are not complex enough to capture and summarize human interaction in this manner.

This has brought back into the limelight the discussions concerning the use of artificial intelligence in content moderation and recommendation on social media. While companies like YouTube are keen to use AI to moderate and moderate the vast amounts of user generated content, this is a clear example of how over reliance on automation can lead to problems.

Some creators are demanding YouTube to either enhance the feature to a great extent or completely get rid of it. Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee in his video pointed out that YouTube should give creators an option to turn off the AI generated summaries for their videos stating that “Until the comments are more accurate we should at least be given the option to stick with the traditional comments. ”

Thus, the controversy goes on, and YouTube stands at a turning point. The company needs to decide whether it wants to go deeper into the development of the AI summarization of comments or take a step back and reconsider the whole approach to the comment management.

Regardless of the result, this case is a good example of the problems that social media continue to encounter when it comes to content moderation and UX enhancements in the age of AI.