Well yeah the AI support is just the next iteration of confusing telephone trees and long wait times. The direct hope is that they make it just convoluted enough that a chunk of people that they before would have to “waste money” serving and fixing whatever problem they had will instead just give up without opening them up to liability for denying service. Only now they can do it while hiring even fewer actual people to handle the cases that get through.

I think I get what it’s saying? It’s saying that while your phone isn’t directly listening to your conversations in any meaningful way they collect crazy amounts of other data on basically everyone and can piece it together in such a way that they can make some scary accurate guesses as to the kind of ads to serve you based on what their systems have gathered your interests are and where/with whom you spend your time.

I’m not entirely sure. They didn’t really seem to present much more than speculation on it.

In group and out group baybee!

Kind of? It’s more like if all of YouTube functioned like the subscriptions tab. You still have a trending page but it seems to be just the raw “this has gotten X views in Y time” kind of trending. Not the “this is what our Ineffable Algorithm God™©® thinks will maximize the amount of time you spend on our platform” kind. Then you’ve got the subscriptions page which is just chronologically all the videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. But then there’s also the stuff like sponsor block, dearrow, and such.

It’s pretty good what little I’ve used it. It was just a bit of a pain to bring over your my subscriptions at least when I did it on mobile with the NewPipe app. I had to like download my data from Google, find the archive with my subscriptions data and give that to the app so it could find the channels I was subscribed to.