Artificial intelligence is running rampant across Google’s entire product portfolio, and YouTube is adopting some of the company’s newest tech in service of helping creators create. On Wednesday, at its Made on YouTube event in New York City, the company announced a series of AI-related features on the platform, including a couple that might change how creators make videos — and the videos they make.
The first feature is the new Inspiration tab in the YouTube Studio app, which YouTube has been testing in a limited way over the last few months. The tab’s job is, essentially, to tell you what to make: the AI-powered tool will suggest a concept for a video, provide a title and a thumbnail, and even write an outline and the first few lines of the video for you. YouTube frames it as a helpful brainstorming tool but also acknowledges that you can use it to build out entire projects. And I’m just guessing here, but I’d bet those AI-created ideas are going to be pretty darn good at gaming the YouTube algorithm.
Once you have some AI inspiration, you can make some AI videos with Veo, the superpowerful DeepMind video model that is now being integrated into YouTube Shorts. Veo is mostly going to be part of the “Dream Screen” feature YouTube has been working on, which is an extension of the green screen concept but with AI-generated backgrounds of all sorts. You’ll also be able to make full Veo videos, too, but only with clips up to six seconds long. (After a few seconds, AI video tends to get... really weird.)
Veo is integrated right into the normal Shorts editor, “just like it’s footage from my camera roll,” says Sarah Ali, a director of product management at YouTube. But she emphasizes that it’s still dependent on the creator’s vision to pull it all together. The clips will also be watermarked with DeepMind’s SynthID tool, plus a visual indication that it’s generated by AI.
Both of these features are rolling out slowly, and should appear to creators late this year or early next. There are other AI features coming to YouTube, too. The platform’s auto-dubbing feature, which converts videos to multiple languages, is coming to more creators and languages. It’s also giving creators AI tools with which to interact with fans through the new Communities section of the app.
There are some exciting possibilities for what could happen when creators have an easier time making new things, but it’s also possible that YouTube is about to be flooded with AI-conceived, AI-written, and even AI-produced videos that all look and sound and feel kind of the same. Most of these new features can be useful tools or shortcuts to slop creation, and each creator will have to decide what they want them to be. But from YouTube’s perspective, the company has spent the last few years trying to lower the bar to becoming a YouTube creator, particularly through Shorts, as it tries to compete with TikTok and Instagram and the countless other places people make things now. It seems confident that AI can make practically every part of a creator’s job easier — and maybe get them to create even more.
(Originally posted by David Pierce)