Earlier this year, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan said he wanted to reduce the amount of “AI slop” on the platform. While this still seems like a lot of work, the YouTube team has announced some changes to make AI-generated videos easier to identify.
First, YouTube now uses AI detection tools to automatically apply labels to AI-generated videos. The platform also allows AI-generated content labels to be more prominent in long-form content and short-form videos.
Google currently requires content creators to manually disclose whether they used AI when uploading videos to the platform. Although Google has stuck to manual disclosure of these AI usages, it now uses AI detection tools to automatically label content generated by AI. Videos created with Google’s own AI tools like Veo and Dream Screen will also always have an AI label.
“We now automatically apply labels when our systems detect significant photorealistic AI usage, even if creators don’t explicitly say whether they used AI,” the YouTube team explained. “If a creator believes their content was incorrectly identified as AI-generated, they can update their disclosure status in YouTube Studio.”
Google is also making AI labels for YouTube videos more visible. For long-form videos, the label now appears just below the video player and above the video description. However, for short vertical videos, AI labels will appear as a permanent overlay.
“We’ve always heard from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generated AI content,” the YouTube team said today. Unfortunately, YouTube cannot reasonably expect all content creators to disclose that they used AI to create their videos. This is why automatically labeling AI-generated videos seems like the right thing to do, even though YouTube’s AI detection tools are likely to make some mistakes.
