YouTube is rolling out a new generative AI video tool called Veo Later this year, creators will be able to create six-second clips using just a text message, the company announced Wednesday during its Made on YouTube event held at its Pier 57 offices in New York.
Veo, an update to last year’s Dream Screen created in partnership with Google DeepMind, uses AI to generate videos and images that can then be embedded into YouTube Shorts. Currently, Veo is limited to YouTube’s short-form video section.
Google enlisted YouTubers and showed videos made by creators to demonstrate the technology. Adrian Blissa creator known for his sketches in which he anthropomorphizes features in the human body, showed a video in which he had to save a princess in a castle. He created a green screen of himself on a stone road and a castle using AI. YouTube also invited musician d4vd, whose music video for Here with me has amassed over 135 million views, which — with the help of Veo — made a music video inspired by Disney’s Up, where characters were created in a stop-motion style.
AI generated videos are marked with SynthID to make it clear to viewers that the content was created with AI.
With the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has quickly taken over all parts of the internet. Social media sites TikTok and Instagram have been awash with AI, with short videos being created entirely with AI. These videos can include: AI kittens scream as they are thrown from a burning building and a orange kitten is bullied by a classroom full of white kittens.
At this point, it’s difficult to estimate exactly what percentage of content on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube is created with AI, but research published by Amazon Web Services in June claims that 57% of internet-based text is now generated by AI. There are concerns that the influx of spam AI content on the internetwhere people create content entirely with AI with little effort, leading to a “zombie internet.”
Even then, as AI companies emerge offering tools to generate text, images, and video, Google is also striving to be a leader in the space. It helps that Google has a deep well of YouTube videos to draw from to train its AI models, a prospect so enticing that other companies like OpenAI reportedly did the same without Google’s permission.
Creators at the Made by YouTube event raised questions about ownership of AI-generated content in YouTube Shorts with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Mohan dodged the question, saying that monetization for YouTubers would remain the same, but he wouldn’t explicitly say who owned the rights. When asked if creators could opt out of having their content used to train AI, Mohan said that implementing such an opt-out wouldn’t be easy and that it would slow YouTube’s ability to push content creation.
Other announcements include a music generation tool that helps creators avoid copyright issues, an Inspiration tab in YouTube Studio that can help with brainstorming, AI autodubbing that not only dubs a video into a different language but also preserves a user’s intonations and inflections, and updates to the TV experience.
