YouTube will operate AI to generate ideas, titles, and even entire videos

The first feature is the modern Inspiration tab in the YouTube Studio app, which YouTube has rolled out limited testing over the past few months. The bookmark’s job is basically to suggest what to do: The AI-powered tool will suggest a video concept, provide a title and thumbnail, and even write the outline and first few lines of the video for you. YouTube presents it as a helpful brainstorming tool, but it also admits that it can be used to create entire projects. And I’m just guessing, but I’d bet that these AI-generated ideas will be pretty damn good at playing YouTube’s algorithm.

Once you’ve found your AI inspiration, you can create AI videos with Veo, DeepMind’s super-powered video model that’s now being integrated into YouTube Shorts. Veo will primarily be part of the “Dream Screen” feature YouTube is working on, which is an extension of the green screen concept but with AI-generated backgrounds of all kinds. You’ll also be able to create full Veo videos, but only with clips up to six seconds long. (After a few seconds, AI videos tend to get… really weird.)

Veo is integrated directly into the regular Shorts editor, “just like my camera roll,” says Sarah Ali, YouTube’s director of product management. But she emphasizes that it’s still up to the creator to bring it all together. Clips will also be watermarked using DeepMind’s SynthID tool, as well as a visual cue that they’re AI-generated.

Both of these features are rolling out slowly and should be available to creators slow this year or early next year. Other AI features are also coming to YouTube. The platform’s auto-dubbing feature, which converts videos into multiple languages, is coming to more creators and languages. It’s also giving creators AI tools to interact with fans through a modern Community section in the app.

There are some stimulating possibilities for what could happen as creators have an easier time creating modern things, but it’s also possible that YouTube could be flooded with AI-created, AI-written, AI-produced videos that all look, sound, and feel similar. Most of these modern features could be useful tools or shortcuts to making creation more complex, and each creator will have to decide what they want them to be. But from YouTube’s perspective, the company has spent the last few years trying to lower the bar for being a YouTube creator, particularly through Shorts, trying to compete with TikTok and Instagram and countless other places where people are now creating things. It seems certain that AI could make almost every part of a creator’s job easier — and maybe even make them create more.