YouTube has implemented a new setting which, by default, allows content to be sampled for free to create YouTube Shorts.
YouTube Shorts are YouTube’s solution to TikTok. They allow creators to sample original content from YouTube videos which are opted in to sampling. However, all content is now automatically opted-in, potentially to make it more difficult to opt out of sharing their content.
This is considered to be dark patterning. Which means they’ve made it very easy to give away access to your content, but significantly more difficult to stop sharing your content. To turn off sampling for your content you have to scroll down to the bottom of the video editing page, open a show more menu and scroll to the bottom again before finding the opt-out tick box.
There’s also currently no way to bulk opt-out of sharing. So users with thousands of videos face a bit of a problem if they don’t want to share their content for this purpose.