YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos(blog.youtube) |
YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos(blog.youtube) |
Who are we to impede all of the incredible journeys of AI bros?
/s
So all shorts will be labeled?
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?
I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.
Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.
YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.
My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.
Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.
Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz
I'm not super optimistic about it, and last I saw, Apple wasn't a part of it either.
My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.
better next step: allow us to block them
even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.
The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.
> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,
YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.
Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.
I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....
I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.
the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.
Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.
The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.
And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.
> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.
> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.
So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
Cryptographically verifiable provenance and chain of custody is going to be necessary to get to the human only stuff, before long, but the good AI stuff will be better. Just a matter of time, at this point.
We don't need the metaphysical solution to the problem of detecting AI videos for the rest of time. Certainly, it's fairly easy to make something that mostly works most of the time. Enough to be very, very useful.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.
The parent post's worry is warranted, IMO.
This is better than nothing, but it's not going to provide immunity against AI fakes trending and having impact before they're identified as AI.
But for creators who write scripts for their content - it seems some of their speech patterns aka "their voice" may completely change in large segments of their video content.
I am really curious if they might be reading AI generated text where they use to do full scripting. If this is actually disclosed to date, and if this tool catches that.
If they have a large preexisting AI-ERA subscriber base, which many do, it must be tempting preserve the time.
- Occasional AI b-roll during explainer videos
- AI generated backing track (music)
- AI generated shots sprinkled in a short film
- Showing examples of AI video as an AI capability update or commentary
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.
What I absolutely loathe and instantly block is AI narration. That’s an instant deal breaker for me. And it’s gotten to the point that without a shot of the creator or obvious humanisms like microphone sounds, I assume a new creator is AI tts reading an LLM generated script. There are thousands of these channels.
I recently was recommended a video about one of the political frictions between the US and Canada, it was posted in January 2026 but after about 30 seconds I realized that it was very obviously talking as though it was January 2025; it was a year behind, and therefore spreading effectively misinformation about the current state of negotiations, policies, politics, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a lot of cases these channels aren't just "using AI to produce their content", but using AI to mass-produce content with zero effort on their part - meaning zero attempt to make sure what they're saying is accurate. While I do mean that from the "not deliberately spreading misinformation" perspective, I also mean it from the "knowing what year it is" perspective as well.
That said, I was also recommended a channel that was very confusing; the voiceover was obviously AI, but the video content itself wasn't. Since it's usually the other way around, if anything, I went to look at their channel and they had an "intro to my channel" video that was a man behind the camera, speaking strongly accented English, talking about his office setup - laptop, desktop, etc. - that he uses for making his videos. It became obvious that he was using AI scripts and voiceovers to produce the content he wanted to produce, but without his accent or lack of strong English fluency being a detriment.
It was the first time I've ever seen someone using AI-generated content in a way that I couldn't obviously say that not using AI would have had a better result.
I find them to be flatly insulting to the original content. I'd rather hear the creators original voice and read machine translated subtitles.
Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.
Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.
And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...
The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.
Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.
On the other hand, as soon as people share those things on the logical platform for sharing videos, they'll be branded with the scarlet letter.
I wonder what Google is thinking - that people won't mind? That it won't matter? That Omni is just marketing and they don't actually want people to use it?
If the video is entertainig I doubt people will mind it's AI. Let's wait and see.
There is an infinite supply of AI written variants of Reddit HFY stories that are sometimes fun to listen to for their sheer badness: I mean all of HFY is bad, the original authors are novices, and then you feed that into the AI to make more of it. Even so, some of these videos have 100K+ views.
The process by which the videos are made is interesting: it's text to voice, then voice to subtitles, so the subtitles end up amusingly bad (why not text direct to subtitle?). Also, it's very easy to distinguish between AI and human written. The human writers are young and can barely type- a common mistake is to leave out the space after the periods at the ends of sentences. The AI narrator always interprets the word after the period as a member name, as if you were dereferencing the member of a class right in the middle of your science fiction story. The AI subtitle generator dutifully renders this as "word dot word", it's very confusing :-)
If you don't know: in HFY, the human's name is almost always either "Jake Morrison" or "Sarah Chen". You need to listen to a few to see what they are up to now.
They generate lots of formal glitches that pass human perceptual concern but make no sense physically. It's not unlike how AI generated photos are still prone to make nonsense light and shadow patterns or weave objects through each other, except it's even harder to train AI music generators out of doing that kind of thing.
> “If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label,” YouTube said.
> YouTube creators who believe their content was incorrectly flagged as AI-generated can modify the disclosure status using the YouTube Studio tool.
detect how? synthid is the only obvious one I can think of. user reports would make some sense. But what's the sota for ai detection?
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.
As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.
[0] https://leica-camera.com/en-int/news/partnership-greater-trust-digital-photography-leica-and-content-authenticity-initiativethey're already locked down as-is.
what gives you that impression?
Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.
I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.
unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.
Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.
Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.
My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.
I'm sure many content creators' videos will be labelled as AI generated. For good reason.
I just think there is a world of difference between "certainty" and "plausibility" when it comes to videos on the internet. Yes, state actors might circumvent it, and skepticism should remain, but there is a world of difference between North Korea trying to convince me of some political scandal, and Pepsi Co trying to convince me that someone I trust loves Pepsi.
There might be a specialised line of cameras for forensics that signs the output and has lidar to detect when the camera is pointed at a screen, but the average person won’t have a camera with this kind of crypto. It would just be too easy for hackers to extract the keys from.