YouTube tests AI-generated video summaries

at 04 August 2023

In some situations, you will see the text.

You might not have read the next internet video summary that you come across. On the watch and search pages of YouTube, AI-generated video descriptions are being tested. The text's purpose is to provide you a "quick overview" of the video so you can determine whether it's interesting enough to watch. The company makes a point of emphasizing that these don't take the place of the creators' own video descriptions.

Only a "limited number" of English-language videos, and only for some viewers, will have the test available. The summary will be visible on mobile devices for vlogs, how-to videos, and shopping videos, a YouTube official said in a statement. These videos will be seen everywhere.

As Android Police explains, YouTube has just provided some sample tools to its customers. To avoid unintended commands, premium customers could lock the screen while playback was in progress. You could even create brand-new short-form video from scratch using comments from Shorts.

Although it's been over three years since YouTube first tested video chapters created by AI, the experiment is still a part of Google's bigger initiative to develop generative AI. The internet giant unveiled its Bard chatbot and is utilizing the technology to make a variety of things, if not necessarily for public consumption, such as spreadsheet templates and entire news pieces.

However, one of the most obvious expansions might be the YouTube summary tool. Over 500 hours of content are reportedly uploaded per minute, which would be hard for humans to keep up with. Whether the AI summaries are sufficient in their accuracy is the question. Google has cautioned that generative systems like Bard may be prone to errors and false information, and it is still unclear how well the YouTube experiment performs in actual use.