Youtube unleashed new AI tools from Google DeepMind to help content creators

Artificial intelligence is running rampant across Google's entire product portfolio, and Youtube is adopting some of the company's newest tech in service of helping creators create. Uring its Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a series of new artificial intelligence features for creators on its Shorts platform that tap into Google’s DeepMind video-generation model.

The first feature is the new Inspiration tab in the YouTube Studio app, which YouTube has been testing for months. The tab essentially prompts you on what to make: suggest a video concept, provide a title and a thumbnail and even write an outline and the first few lines of the video for you.

Youtube is framing it as a brainstorm tool, but it can do more than that; it can also use it to build out your entire project.

Once you have the inspiration and concept for the idea, then you can execute it with the help of the Veo, which will allow creators to add AI-generated backgrounds to their videos as well as use written prompts to generate stand-alone, six-second video clips.

“Everything that we showed with AI was meant to really enhance the work that you do, make it faster, more efficient, to bring your creative ideas to life faster,” said Mohan, speaking at the Made on YouTube event in New York.

The Veo AI backgrounds are an upgrade over a similar AI-generation feature announced by YouTube in 2023 called Dream Screen. The company said its Veo AI background feature will roll out later this year, while the six-second AI clips will become available in 2025.

Other announcements at the event included new features in the YouTube Studio app that will allow creators to use AI to generate titles, thumbnails and video ideas. Those features will roll out in late 2024, YouTube said.

Creators have been exploring various ways to leverage generative AI technology. Creators have used the new technology to insert clips in their videos or produce entirely AI-generated videos.

However, some creators expressed concerns that their videos on YouTube are used to train the AI models that built Veo.

“I don’t know how I feel about all this AI stuff,” said Thomas Simons, a comedian with more than 15 million subscribers on YouTube. “It doesn’t fill me with confidence and love.”

There has been criticism that other services such as Facebook have become overrun by spammy, AI-generated content. There are also concerns that AI-generated content could violate intellectual property protections.

YouTube’s AI-generated content will be watermarked and will have a label indicating it was created by AI, the company said.

Generative AI places a new perspective on the creator economy, giving creators free access to tools utilized by large language models.

We “really sit at the nexus of that technology and creativity,” Mohan said. “Putting those two things together gives us this unique lens that everything we build is really about enhancing that human creativity.”