YouTube is reinventing itself for the era of generative AI.
What’s new: The Google-owned video platform is adding generated topic ideas, backgrounds, music suggestions, and audio translations. These capabilities will be available in late 2023 or early 2024.
How it works: The new features are designed to assist video producers in planning, designing, and publishing their works.
- A model called AI Insights for Creators recommends potential topics and outlines based on a video maker’s past uploads and trending topics.
- The Dream Screen option generates images and short videos from prompts. Producers can incorporate its output into the backgrounds of TikTok-like YouTube Shorts.
- A tool based on Google’s Aloud translates spoken recordings from English into Spanish or Portuguese. The tool transcribes English audio, producing an editable text script. Then it translates the script and renders the audio in the desired language.
- Another model will recommend background music based on a text description of a video.
Meanwhile, at TikTok: YouTube rival TikTok requires users to clearly label synthetic videos that depict realistic scenes. The guidelines also prohibit synthetic likenesses of private individuals (public figures are allowed unless they are the subject of abuse or misinformation). To help contributors comply, the company announced a tool that enables uploaders to manually label their videos as “AI-generated.” TikTok is also testing a system that detects AI-generated or AI-edited elements in a video and automatically adds the label.
Why it matters: YouTube depends on crowdsourced content. Generative tools could make the platform’s contributors more productive, attracting more viewers and boosting revenue all around.
We’re thinking: While generative tools may engage the crowd, generated content that’s as compelling as human-produced content could upend YouTube’s business.