I've seen a bunch of different shorts which have the same AI-generated horrible voice. I always assumed this was just the author preferring to script the audio and generate the voice. Can I assume this is actually big-G auto-dubbing the short? If so, then I'm guilty of (incorrectly) complaining to the author of several shorts.
Google is auto translating their videos unless the content creators explicitly opts out.
The worst about this feature is that it depends on the language setting of the user, so the creator will likely never find out it's happening, because they're probably using YouTube in the language they're making the videos in.
It's a toggle in their creator profile that I believe was auto enabled at some point.
It's especially horrendous when the short has foreign language music. I was a following some Japanese cooking/baking channels some time ago, until this feature made them intolerable through the music translation.
Anyway, you can easily see wherever YouTube ruined it via this feature: it gets a small "dub" badge next to the title - and you can manually switch the audio via the gear icon... Which isn't available for shorts, so you need to open these via the regular video URL... Which is way too much effort, obviously.
