YouTube is increasingly adding automatically generated AI synchronization to its videos, but these can quickly become annoying due to the sometimes poor quality. We’ll show you how you can turn off automatic AI translations in just a few steps and see videos in the original.
YouTube announced the feature for automatic AI-supported synchronizations as early as September 2023. Since December 2024, this function has become increasingly available to more and more creators.
The platform wants to enable its creators to “make their content accessible to a global audience.” The aim is to reduce language barriers and make videos accessible to an international audience without complex or professionally produced translations.
In practice, however, the feature can quickly become annoying if the AI-generated soundtrack plays automatically with every video. Important details of the original audio such as voice or pitch as well as background noise are quickly lost. Unnatural accents or translation errors usually do not contribute to a good viewing experience.
Turn off automatic AI translations on YouTube
Basically, YouTube only offers its creators the ability to activate or deactivate automatic AI synchronization for their videos. Users themselves cannot decide that they generally do not want to use the function.
If you don’t use the feature and would prefer to hear your videos in the original, you have two different options. You can either set the setting manually for each video or add certain languages to your preferred languages in the settings.
For the latter option, however, you must be logged in to YouTube. If you are not, it is only possible to manually switch to the original audio track in the respective video. In this case, you will have to change the setting again for each video.
If you want to deactivate AI synchronization in a video on YouTube, you can do this using the small gear symbol in the video. To do this, hover your mouse over the video to see the list of different options.
Click on the gear here and navigate to the “Audio Track” section in the settings. Here you can see which languages are available via automatic synchronization, but you can also switch to the original. The original language is usually at the top and is marked accordingly in brackets behind it.
Against AI Synchro: Add preferred languages to YouTube
If you are logged in to YouTube and would like to add a specific language to your preferred languages, you can do that in this area too. To do this, scroll to the bottom of the available languages and click on “Edit preferred languages in the settings”.
Alternatively, you can also find this section via the settings. To do this, click on your profile picture in the top right corner of your screen and then click Settings.
In the “Playback and Performance” section you will find your “Preferred Languages” menu item. Click “Add or edit languages” and select the respective languages from the list.
For example, if you want to add English here, all you have to do is select the general option for this language. You don’t have to select every single country variant.
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