As AI video models become more powerful, YouTube is no longer solely relying on creators to label their AI videos — it will now automatically label videos on their behalf. The company announced on Wednesday that its internal systems will apply labels when it detects that “significant photorealistic AI” has been used.

YouTube will also be making its AI labels more prominent, so they’re easier to spot across both long-form videos and YouTube Shorts.

AI labels on the video platform have been in use for over two years, after YouTube updated its AI policies and rolled out a tool in Creator Studio that required creators to disclose their videos included AI content that could be mistaken for a real person, place, or event. Videos that obviously depicted some sort of animated or imaginative scenario — like a unicorn prancing through a fantastical world — did not have to be labeled.

The company says its policy around AI labeling hasn’t changed, but it will take a more active role in policing the content on its platform. The move follows Google’s release of Gemini Omni, a new family of multimodal AI models at its Google I/O developer conference last week that can output high-quality videos that reflect an understanding of physics, culture, history, and science. 

Starting in May, YouTube will now use new internal signals to help identify AI-generated content and label it accordingly, the company says. This doesn’t mean that creators shouldn’t continue to disclose their use of AI, but if they neglect to do so, YouTube will label the video for them.

While creators whose content was misidentified will be able to update the disclosure status in a YouTube video, they won’t be able to remove those labels if the content was created with YouTube’s own AI tools, like Veo or Dream Screen, the company says.

Labels will also be permanently attached to videos when the content contains C2PA metadata indicating it was fully AI-generated. (Recently, OpenAI committed to the C2PA standard, joining Nvidia, Kakao, and Eleven Labs.)

The addition of automatic AI detection functionality comes shortly after the expansion of YouTube’s AI deepfake detection, which now allows any adult to scan YouTube specifically for face matches, after initial tests with celebs, public figures, politicians, and other creators.

YouTube says it will also make its AI labels more consistent and prominent.

Before, labels would appear in the expanded description, unless the video touched on more sensitive topics like health or news; if so, a prominent label would appear directly on the video itself.

Now, the labels will appear directly below the video player above the description for long-form videos and overload directly on YouTube Shorts.

The company said moving the labels will make them more obvious to people who come across photorealistic, AI-altered, or AI-generated content on the site.

Meanwhile, for AI video that is only slightly altered, animated, or unrealistic — like the above-mentioned prancing unicorn — the label will appear in the expanded description only.

Notably, YouTube says that AI labels won’t have an impact on how a video is recommended or its ability to monetize.

In addition to its policing of AI content, the company has been investing in AI for things like its interactive search feature, Ask YouTube, a playlist generator for YouTube Music, AI video summaries, and other generative AI creation tools.

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