summary
- YouTube is focusing on AI features to help creators, such as its Dream Screen tool, which generates virtual backgrounds.
- The Dream Screen feature is aimed at helping smaller creators save the expense of buying physical green screens and simplifying editing.
- The green screen feature was first added to YouTube Shorts in 2022, but Dream Screen takes this a step further with in-app image generation.
Google hasn't been shy about introducing generative AI features to one of its best products, YouTube. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant has been testing AI-enabled features on its video-streaming platform since August last year, including AI-generated video summaries, and conversational AI to answer questions and create topic summaries of comments.
Recently, there seems to be a shift in intent with feature releases. The streaming platform is moving away from releasing AI-enabled features for end customers to releasing features focused on empowering creators. Take for example the recently released GenAI content inspiration tool, which aims to help creators come up with and create content ideas. Now, building on that, the streaming platform has started testing new AI-enabled creator-facing features for YouTube Shorts.
YouTube's latest AI tool aims to keep your subscription feed full
Even after your favorite creators run out of ideas
Google updated its support page for testing features and experiments on Monday, June 3rd, saying: Dream screen. The feature essentially creates virtual green screen backgrounds for short video creators, allowing them to simply input the background of their choice into the tool to generate it. While not explicitly stated in the blog post, it sounds like the AI-generated backgrounds could be still images or animations.
The feature essentially helps smaller creators save on the expense of buying actual green screens and eliminates the need for editing knowledge. It's worth noting that the feature is only rolling out to a handful of short video creators at the moment and only supports English prompts. According to Google, the feature may roll out to more creators later this year. “This experiment will initially roll out to a small number of short video creators, but we'll keep you updated on our plans to roll out the feature to more creators later this year.”
Green screen feature added to YouTube Shorts for the first time in 2022
YouTube's next Shorts feature continues its proud tradition of shameless TikTok imitation
Green Screen is releasing today for iOS and coming to Android later this year.
It's worth noting that the green screen feature isn't entirely new to YouTube Shorts. Image-generated green screens were first added to the platform in 2022. Initially, you could select a photo or video from your gallery to use as the background for your short. However, the new Dream Screen feature takes the tool a step further, allowing creators to generate images directly within the app.
To see if you have access to the new features, create In YouTube, tap the green screen in the right menu. If Dream Screen is available, you'll see a star logo at the bottom. YouTube may be using Gemini to generate the background for your Dream Screen.
If this tool might be useful to you, but you don't have access to it, here's a workaround: Go to gemini.google.com/ and enter the image generation prompt → Download image and save to gallery → Tap create In the YouTube app → tap on Green Screen from the menu on the right → select the image you generated with Gemini Now you've basically recreated the same thing YouTube does with Dream Screen, with a few extra steps.
