YouTube Teases AI-Powered Creator Tools

YouTube announced it’s rolling out many new tools to leverage artificial intelligence to boost the creator experience. Beginning as early as this year, creators can use AI to make unique backgrounds, generate content ideas, search for audio tracks, and more.

The video-sharing platform described its plans for AI-powered features at its Made On YouTube event. According to YouTube vice president Toni Reid, these tools will “enable people to push the bounds of creative expression” across both Shorts (60-second “off-the-cuff” videos made for scrolling) and long-form videos.  

Dream Screen will be the first AI tool to make its way to the public, with its test phase slated for late 2023. Dream Screen will allow creators to generate custom video and still-image backgrounds for YouTube Shorts on a whim. Once a handful of select creators have tested the feature, it’ll roll out to a broader range of users in 2024. 

But making sure one’s video content reaches—and pleases—its ideal audience isn’t just a matter of making it look pretty. YouTube is also introducing AI tools to help creators produce videos that follow audience trends and fulfill various demographics’ needs. Beginning next year, creators can ask YouTube Studio for personalized AI-generated ideas that mesh with their previous content. The unnamed insights tool will also build video outlines on request. These suggestions will ultimately be based on what types of content a channel’s viewers are looking for at a given time. 

For those who need a little help in the audio department, an AI-assisted search option will appear in Creator Music. When creators type in a video description, the feature will suggest music to fit behind it. Yet another feature will perform automatic dubbing via Aloud, a service that aims to improve video content accessibility by using AI to produce translated audio overlays. These features and YouTube Studio’s audience insight tool will become available sometime next year. 

YouTube’s AI efforts were announced alongside YouTube Create, a new smartphone app allowing creators to edit and publish videos on the go. The app is currently in beta testing among a select group of Android users. Reid also mentioned that YouTube will eventually revamp the Shorts experience by allowing users to “instantly reimagine their videos by simply typing in an idea to edit their content.” However, information about this idea appears to be quite limited.