YouTube is continuing to lean into AI to help make content, and that next YouTube Short you watch might not contain real footage of its creator. CEO Neal Mohan announced the latest move in this trend in his annual letter on Wednesday: Creators will soon be able to make Shorts using their own AI likeness.
“This year you’ll be able to create a Short using your own likeness, produce games with a simple text prompt and experiment with music,” Mohan wrote. “Throughout this evolution, AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement.”
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YouTube’s Shorts, which are short-form videos designed for quick viewing, draw roughly 200 billion daily views, Mohan said. YouTube hasn’t provided details about the new AI tool or how it will fit in the current Shorts ecosystem.
Google, YouTube’s parent company, announced in September the addition of its generative AI tool, Veo 3, to YouTube Shorts, allowing anyone to create AI-generated videos, further putting the platform on a more competitive footing with TikTok.
Not all AI is welcomed
When it comes to AI-generated likenesses, YouTube may soon allow creators to use them, but that doesn’t mean they can copy others’ images. The company rolled out likeness-detection technology last fall to help prevent unauthorized use of a creator’s face or voice in videos.
As YouTube adds AI creation tools, it is also targeting AI slop and misleading deepfakes.
“It’s becoming harder to detect what’s real and what’s AI-generated,” Mohan wrote. “This is particularly critical when it comes to deepfakes.”
The company’s policy for policing and removing AI-generated content from its open platform continues to face challenges.
“To reduce the spread of low-quality AI content,” he wrote, “we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combating spam and clickbait and reducing the spread of low-quality, repetitive content.”
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