YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

Curious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).

I have a hard time believing that AI can be used to label AI-generated videos without there being a significant number of false positives/negatives. I think back to ZeroGPT and it labeling the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.

I'm curious where the line is.. several ambiguous but common scenarios:

- 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

There are clearly entire channels that do AI generated videos. This tool should be all over those.

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.

I suggest turning off recommendation if you dislike what they suggest

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

I hope their detector is better than the typical 'AI detection in text' services. False negatives are bad, false positives are worse as some creators could lose their source of income.

Anyone remember GAN? With enough iterations with a discriminator, we're gonna see more AI generated videos that are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. What then?

Funny enough, this also seems to directly contrast Google's effort towards generating videos with better quality.

I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.

That's great news. Hopefully there will be a filter to allow or disallow AI video on your homepage/feed.

Maybe google web search should automatically label ai-generated articles

The idea that you can automatically detect AI generated content seems misguided. It will make mistakes. I think I've heard of things being wrongfully tagged as AI generated on other platforms.

It must be a tricky problem to balance. On the one hand, you as Google want people to create 30 seconds of video per month with your cool Omni, Flow, Gemini, etc. tools.

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?

Let’s use probabilistic models to find the probability of something being the output of another probabilistic model

the ability to simply exclude such content from recommendations & search results would be welcome.

Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, YouTube is in a position here to simultaneously iterate on automatic AI video detection while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect.

I don’t care about gen AI video content. That’s fine. Saves creators from having to buy b-roll. I appreciate cinematography, but it’s not what I come to YouTube for.

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 wonder if they will try to do this for songs in YouTube Music. I've stopped using their auto-generated playlists/recommendations/whatever because it kept playing AI-generated songs.

One advantage is that if it's labelled as AI, we don't need to have a conversation in the comments about whether it's AI or not.

GOOD!

I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.

Maybe they could fix their moderation and appeal process before adding a half-baked feature like this which is certain to cause more issues requiring moderation?

we had to say that our launch video today was AI-generated lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7rORkN0nVM

do they detect ai-generated ads?

  > “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.

What's the general overall state of AI-based AI flagging tools development? They seemed to have absurd false positive rates of not even 50% while it's obvious to whom it is obvious, no matter who or how it's done.

> Under YouTube’s guidelines, creators will still be required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI. But starting this week, it also will roll out a new internal system to help identify AI-generated content. “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.

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?

The dangers is videos that slip through the cracks, they get an indirect seal of being non AI.

Good start, but it seems you still need to click on the video though.

I'm willing to bet this is just an easily bypassable SynthID check

is this gonna affect the monetization of those videos too? Well i think even if not directly, people will somehow loose interest in ai generated videos, people would not want a low effort content grabbing there attention.

I wonder why they're really doing this. It's definitely not for users' benefit.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just label AI-free videos?

They need to have a way to report AI videos not labeled as such, AND a checkbox to filter out AI videos on the home page and in search results. Not holding my breath for either.

One field I was wondering about. There are a lot of channels/videos where they take movie summaries, feed it into an AI to generate TTS, graphics... I hate these videos but I'm also like damn good job trying to capitalize on that, why don't I do it kind of thing. I don't have that money making drive/hustle. I need to.

Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz

I can already imagine this won’t be perfect (false negatives / false positives, for one thing) but this seems like a huge step in the right direction. Even just giving the “AI” label a more prominent spot than the description is a big deal, particularly for those who are less tech-savvy than your average HN user. My mom, for instance, can watch your one video that’s entirely AI-generated and not bat an eye, but then watch another video that’s clearly real and say it looks “off.” Say what you will about whether AI-generated content is valid or whether it should be allowed on the platform at all, but more transparency is only a good thing.

Would really be nice if they did the same with their ads, but don't see that happening

Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI content". Work together with the hardware and software layer with an open approach, building on top of contend id. I appreciate the privacy implications here are complex, and Google is dubious on using any tracking/fingerprinting technology for its self-serving and privacy-invading motivations, but an open cross-industry foundation owning and operating it may be a first step?

I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.

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.

AI versus AI, the final faceoff. Who's gonna win? Probably not us.

Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk

this is a welcome change but if the creator doesn't disclose the use of AI, how do they detect what is AI and what is not?

This is awesome. I am building something similar for writing - https://trulytyped.com

I really wish there was a button to voluntarily say / tag your own content as AI assisted.

The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.

good first step.

better next step: allow us to block them

even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.

Also the amount of scammy crap quality on YouTube has exploded since developing countries have more access. The cost of publishing is tending to zero.

This is fine, good, whatever... but my thing is can creators remove it successfully for 'false flags'.

> 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.

Now label AI ads and let us filter them out.

Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.

Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?

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....

Thank fuck. There is SO much garbage on YT lately which amounts to a powerpoint deck with ai audio overlaid.

"Please prove your content was created by a flawed biological organism."

Finally a decent change by Youtube! Great job Youtube but overall unsure about the situation at Google itself and what Google itself is doing.

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.

Original article: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-vie...

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But isn't this unfair? After all, AI was supposed to be "democratizing" video production and this effectively punishes the use of it.

Who are we to impede all of the incredible journeys of AI bros?

/s

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Isn’t YouTube applying weird AI processing to shorts?

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”.

This could backfire.. im thinking of "real" videos with elements of AI in them. Those elements might not get the video flairs as an AI video and people will get fooled