It’s no secret that YouTube is overrun with AI slop. It’s made gestures towards reining in the flood of chintzy AI imagery, and now it’s signaling that it’s getting a little more serious about enforcing its own (still relatively lax) standards on videos made with the tech.
On Wednesday, the Google-owned platform announced changes to how it would start labeling AI-generated content. The most noticeable update is that the labels will be more prominent: going forward, traditional YouTube videos will show an “AI” label right below the video player, instead of being hidden in the video description. And for its vertical video TikTok knockoff Shorts — the format that’s proven most susceptible to being taken over by low effort slop, especially the kind that purports to be educational — an AI label will be displayed as an overlay at the bottom of the video.
But there’s an even more significant escalation in YouTube’s slop-stemming tactics. Starting this month, the company will begin scanning for signs of “photorealistic” AI usage so it can automatically label suspected videos. Before, AI labels were only applied if the uploader chose to disclose it.
YouTube didn’t specify what systems it’ll use to detect AI content, but like other companies, it’s adopted C2PA, a standard for embedding provenance data in AI content, and SynthID, a tool Google developed that watermarks AI content.
The video giant says the disclosure labels are intended for “photorealistic and meaningfully AI altered or generated content.” Evidently the company understands the risks of letting misleadingly real-looking AI fakes abound on its platform, but it’s not going for a sweeping rebuke against all forms of the stuff.
Unrealistic AI content — like those nonsensical animated slop videos that target children — won’t be slapped with the new front-and-center label, and will continue with the older label hidden in the expanded description. More piecemeal uses of AI won’t be prominently labeled, either.
In any case, beyond the potential stigma that a big “AI” label entails, YouTube isn’t trying to punish content for heavily using AI. The changes “are designed to balance transparency with creator control,” but they won’t “change how a video is recommended or whether it’s eligible to earn money,” according to the announcement.
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