If you have a Youtube channel you can now get ideas for your videos randomly generated by AI thanks to new feature launched by Youtube a few months ago. I only noticed it recently, so it's news to me!
The feature lets you type a text prompt and get a bunch of convincingly generic examples of made up Youtube videos, the sort you can actually expect to encounter on Youtube these days. The examples include an AI-generated title, an AI-generated description, and even an AI-generated thumbnail for some reason.
Clicking on one of these items displays a page telling you how you should create a video for Youtube. The page contains other potential titles you could use, other randomly generated thumbnails, and an outline of the video's contents.
Clicking on the outline reveals the main points of each point in the outline. This is pretty much a recipe for creating a video.
Observations
Relevant to the Channel
It's clear from the generated content that this AI at least tries to match the topic of your channel. It's unclear how it does it. My channel has a few videos related to Krita. The prompts I used had nothing to do with Krita. Considering the generated results were all related to Krita, it's extremely liked that the channel's topic influences the AI output somehow.
Good for Clickbait
The AI seems to have been trained on Youtube's own content, considering it's already generating clickbait titles like "Powerful Techniques You Probably Don't Know."
If you struggle writing your own clickbait titles, this tool can probably help you.
In fact, although I do not trust AI at all, I do trust Youtube's greediness. This AI is probably trained on videos that perform well on Youtube, that have a high engagement, that brings Youtube lots of money from the ads it places around. It makes sense that Youtube would optimize the AI to optimize the engagement of its creators so it can make more money off their labor. With this in mind, it's not a bad idea to use it as reference, since whatever the AI tells you is probably based on what makes the most money for Youtube.
Personally, I think I'll use this feature to write some clickbait titles for my articles, and maybe also for a few of my Youtube videos.
The Great Wheel Reinventer?
If the AI is based on Youtube's content, that means some of the "ideas" that it will give you will be copied verbatim from videos that already exist on Youtube. Basically, Youtube will be telling you to make a video someone else already has made and uploaded before you.
Pointless Thumbnails
Why is the thumbnail AI-generated? I can tell because one of them literally has the word "Krita" in it. Was this really necessary? I assume this is orders of magnitude more expensive to generate than the text. They don't even fit the video when I tried it. You could have just picked a random geometric shape and nobody would even notice the difference. Specially considering that, if your thumbnail doesn't match your video, people will click it but then leave without watching, and then the algorithm will penalize you for that. Or at least that's what I heard. So in practice it wouldn't even make sense to use the generated thumbnail as-is.
For the sake of reference I tried prompting for "cat videos" and the first result was "Cats reacting to Krita art." The thumbnail was an AI-generated image of a cat. So the reason the thumbnails didn't match previously was because whatever AI-powered image generation software they used doesn't know what a "Krita" looks like, but it does know what a cat looks like, so it can generated more relevant thumbnails in this case. Except the thumbnails will look like AI.
It's worth noting that not all AI-based image generation software can generate text. In one of the thumbnails, the word "Krita" was written, which means this is specifically an AI that can do text on images. But why though?
Strange Priorities
This AI feature lets you "save" ideas for later, making Youtube Studio a tool for planning your new Youtube videos.
Although this is good, it's odd to me that Youtube Studio didn't provide any planning features for creators before this featured was launched. Google does have an online notes tool called Google Keep, but it seems there weren't any productivity tools integrated in Youtube Studio before AI arrived. It feels like the priorities are inverted. Youtube could have provided creators with productivity tools, but hasn't, however AI warrants them. It's like AI gets more attention than the creators.
Quotes
There is the concern that all this AI will make Youtube full of videos that are worthless "slop."
There are some exciting possibilities for what could happen when creators have an easier time making new things, but it’s also possible that YouTube is about to be flooded with AI-conceived, AI-written, and even AI-produced videos that all look and sound and feel kind of the same. Most of these new features can be useful tools or shortcuts to slop creation, and each creator will have to decide what they want them to be.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24247559/youtube-ai-videos-veo-inspiration-tab (accessed 2024-12-16)
I don't know what Youtube full of AI "slop" is going to look like, but I already don't like the current state of Youtube, so I wonder what the difference is going to be.