Yes. The answer is Yes. And Hank Green brings receipts.
That ‘feature’ has been around on no official YouTube apps for a long time now. Zero reason to pay for it.
It’s called sponsorblock, and there is no machine learning involved whatsoever. The data is crowdsourced.
That data is also publicly available (of course), so a model could be trained on it. I’d love to say I’d doubt Google/YouTube would ever do that, but at this point nothing would surprise me.
If you move the slider on a video you’ll see which parts were watched most. The big peaks usually indicate people skipping sponsored segments.
You don’t need AI for it.
As a other premium user, trust me that is not the main reason I use it, it’s entirely to get rid of ads on mobile. I use the feature occasionally on mobile too but on desktop I use sponsorblock and it’s wayyy better both from an accuracy and user interface standpoint.
Sidenote: I also am on a plan that my parents pay for, though I used to pay for it myself after getting it for free for 6 months and I couldn’t go back to the ads
