YouTube has announced a slew of AI-powered tools (on top of the existing bits and pieces) designed to make life easier for content creators on the platform.
If The edge During the ‘Made on YouTube’ event that just took place, one of the big AI revelations was discovered called ‘Dream Screen’, an image and video generation facility for YouTube Shorts.
get ready to make your wildest content dreams come true 💫 meet brand new AI tools from YouTube. pic.twitter.com/PYjKaFggScSeptember 21, 2023
This allows a creator to simply type in whatever they want as their wallpaper. Like, for example, a panda drinking a cup of coffee – upon that request the AI will take control and produce such a video background for the clip (or image).
This is how the process will be implemented initially – you command the AI and it creates something for you – but eventually creators will be able to remix content to produce something new, we’re told.
YouTube Studio will also get a number of AI tools that will suggest content for individual creators to create, and generate topic ideas for videos that suit them, based on what’s popular with viewers interested in the type of content the creator normally sees. has to do with.
A system of AI-powered music recommendations will also come into play to provide audio for a given video.
Analysis: Grab the shovel?
Is it just us, or does this sound kind of creepy? Okay, so content creators may find it useful and convenient to add AI-generated video or image backgrounds very quickly, and put some music on top of them, and so on.
But won’t this result in a whole bunch of boring (and perhaps homogenous) content ending up on YouTube? That seems like the obvious danger, and perhaps one exacerbated by the broader idea of suggested content that people want to see (according to the great YouTube algorithm) being served to creators on YouTube.
Is YouTube ready to become a video platform that groans under the collective weight of content that is quickly put together and scooped out by the half-ton thanks to AI tools?
While YouTube seems very excited about all these new AI tools and utilities, we can’t help but think this is the beginning of the end for the video site – at least when it comes to meaningful, not generic content.
We hope we’re wrong, but this whole brave new direction fills us with fear more than anything. A tidal wave of AI-generated this, that and the other, eclipsing everything else, is clearly a prospect we should guard heavily against.