YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

Children and seniors are victimized by AI content on a huge scale. Regular adults like most of us here don't ever get such videos in their feeds.

I saw kids spend many hours a day watching automatically generated videos. Not always AI-generated, sometimes it's AI-assisted and procedurally generated.

It is quite unbelievable how vulnerable weaker minds, for the lack of a better term, are to AI content.

I saw a group of 3-8 yo kids spend hours watching obviously procedurally generated content that is completely random and contentless: it was more about an intense rhythm, imagery of violence (animated stick figure motorcycle accidents with blood and slow-down effects at random points), a lot of movement, chaos, very short inserts of people laughing hysterically on some middle-eastern tv show and similar. Brainrot doesn't feel like hyperbole for this content.

Another time, I saw an 80 yo lady watch a doctor sit in front of the camera and speak about a health topic for 45 minutes straight. Only it's not an actual person, but a convincing AI avatar: his gestures and face match what he is saying, the voice is convincing too, but for the 45mn he doesn't make any movement that is not a gesture lastin 1-3 seconds. And his tone of voice has no variation that is longer than a few seconds either. If you fast forward, he always looks the same. It's all extremely monotonic. The lady couldn't believe that it's not a real person.

Currently, AI videos are a gold mine for black hats.

Last weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key.

Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.

By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.

The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.

I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.

Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.

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).

This is much needed. I’ve had family members sending me videos about what looked like news when in fact it was 100% AI. There are photorealistic AI videos pretending to be an old man giving life advice, or business advice, etc. and the disclosures were all the way at the bottom of the video description, very hard to find.

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

Last year a non-technical friend sent me a YouTube video about a niche history topic that we had been discussing. I was surprised because there wasn't much information online. The video was clearly AI generated, with that sheen on the pictures and that perfect voice. I couldn't listen to it. I told my friend and he was adamant it was original. Yikes...

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.

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

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.

This is what we need to move forward.

I really want Spotify to follow. I feel cheated and deceived when I'm enjoying some music, then I realize that there's no bio for the artist and they released 7 albums in 2025. Users should be empowered to filter out AI content if they choose.

There's probably a sizable niche market for an absolutist anti-AI video hosting platform.

It doesn't need to be perfect, just needs one simple policy: Post AI and you're banned for life, no appeals.

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?

Everywhere (reddit, YouTube, Spotify) need to have a button to flag and then flag as ai. Reddit really has it buried in multiple levels of menus.

People are pretty darn good now at spotting ai.

An alternative is just use ai to look at the comments. Almost anything with AI has comments complaining about it.

All of these sites need to deal with it because it does drive away users.

Good. This should be done everywhere. I have ZERO interest in watching an AI movie or an AI song or an AI video

Genuinely don't care if its good or not. It's not for me

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.

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.

AI has completely ruined animal short videos on Youtube. Videos of pets behaving like humans are everywhere. At first they warm your heart, then you realize that you've been tricked.

I wonder how are they going to implement it. Many creators with even decent content use AI-generated visuals. In fact, everything could be AI-generated visual and whether that would be like Kurzgezagt, Asianometry or Sabine Hossenfelder content value wouldn't drop significantly. How do you draw the line?

Rich Beato can finally take a breath! Musicians truly hate the AI generated stuff, I guess in a way that only artists understand. I think it's completely different from AI generated code, in the sense that code is made by code, instead of code making music. People make music.

I can appreciate the talent and effort involved in developing new styles of music by scribbling on paper while being partially deaf, or dropping photographic painting skills for a weird style mimicking the anime of the era, but let's not pretend that average–human–level Turing-test–passing AGArtist has not yet been reached.

At this point, I bet the next human genius is going to be labeled as AI —by an AI.

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.

I would remove automatically the video if the creator did not label as AI. Or making a new part of Youtube like AiTube.

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.

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

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

I don't think this will do much against AI scripts. Which I feel are pretty common. Formulaic scripts read to utmost monotonic voice and boredom. Or simply just so good TTS I don't notice...

Something, Youtube should have done earlier. But anyway its a good step. But again there are many open models out there on HF that could bypass this just like synthid is not used is every image, similarly not every chinese AI model wants to get their output detected. Time will tell how this goes...

> 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?

I'm wondering how they deal with AI-operated channels with non-AIG videos? I ask this because I'm the author of github.com/eat-pray-ai/yutu , which is a CLI/MCP for YouTube

Probably good for about two more years, tops. Like Google's CAPTCHA.

Youtube has also started AI translating other languages written in roman letters to english in chat for live streamers etc. Will be interesting to see what happens when they start doing this with google translate etc. English usually picks up words from other languages but if everything gets translated it will be interesting to see what happens. I am wondering if it will translate the slang that the current generation uses that goes over my head a lot of the time.

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.

Much needed however, the future is definitely a mixture of AI and human in every field going forward. It might be relevant in short term but not for long.

If they could start labelling and allowing me to filter out the shitty AI Voiceover videos, I might even start using youtube shorts again.

They forgot to AI-label that Bender-sounding voiceover in the article…

I really appreciate this. AI content - even if we all use AI - and especially AI videos are a pain in the b*tt. Ai voice over with Ai imagery packed in 10-20 minutes lonog videos.

Who watches those anyways?

Maybe google web search should automatically label ai-generated articles

  > “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.

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.

I wonder, will this impact those awful shorts that rip out and tack together the highlight seconds of longer videos and add a terrible AI voiceover?

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?

If they can pull this off correctly it would be amazing as a filter. Only Human videos please!

> While we still require creators to manually disclose when they use realistic AI, we want to make the process more seamless and reliable. Starting in May 2026, we’re rolling out new internal signals 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.

I can't wait for their detection to repeatedly get this completely wrong (as it does for many other things) and for innocent content creators to complain on social media about how their appeals get automatically dismissed by AI-powered bots.

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.

Hopefully this will also include human-generated content with AI scripts, which are not that hard to detect but require a certain amount of wasted time listening to the slop before I skip the video.

Just a heads up that Deezer has been tagging AI music already: https://business.deezer.com/ai-detection/

Gemini already labels images with a watermark even if you are using plain text on an original photo or template.

Basically forces me to use image editing software for something that could be greatly streamlined.

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