As AI video models become more powerful, YouTube no longer relies solely on creators to tag their videos with AI — it will now automatically tag videos on their behalf. The company was announced on Wednesday that its internal systems will apply tags when it detects that “significant photorealistic AI” has been used.
YouTube will also make its AI tags more prominent so they’re easier to spot in both long-form videos and YouTube Shorts.
AI tags on the video platform have been in use for more than two years, after YouTube updated its AI policies and released a tool in Creator Studio that required creators to disclose their videos including AI content that could be mistaken for a real person, place or event. Videos that apparently depicted some sort of animated or imaginative scenario—like a unicorn traversing a fantasy world—didn’t need to be tagged.
The company says its policy on AI flagging hasn’t changed, but it will take a more active role in policing content on its platform. The move follows Google’s release of Gemini Omni, a new family of multimodal AI models at the Google I/O developer conference last week that can produce 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 and flag AI-generated content, the company says. That’s not to say that creators shouldn’t continue to disclose their use of AI, but if they neglect to do so, YouTube will tag them in the video.
While creators whose content was misidentified will be able to update the disclosure status on a YouTube video, they won’t be able to remove those tags if the content was created with YouTube’s AI tools like Veo or Dream Screen, the company says.
Tags will also be permanently attached to videos when the content contains C2PA metadata, indicating that it was created entirely by AI. (OpenAI recently committed to the C2PA standard, joining Nvidia, Kakao, and ElevenLabs.)
The addition of the AI auto-detect feature comes shortly after extending YouTube’s deep fake AI detectionwhich now allows any adult to scan YouTube specifically for face matches, after initial tests with celebrities, public figures, politicians and other creators.
YouTube says it will also make AI tags more consistent and visible.
Previously, tags would appear in the extended description unless the video touched on more sensitive topics like health or news. If so, a prominent tag would appear directly on the video itself.
Tags will now appear directly below the video player above the description for long-form videos and will be uploaded directly to YouTube Shorts.
The company said moving the tags will make them more visible to people who encounter photorealistic, AI-modified or AI-generated content on the site.
Meanwhile, for AI videos that are lightly altered, animated, or unrealistic — like the aforementioned unicorn — the tag will only appear in the extended description.
Specifically, YouTube says AI tags will have no impact on how a video is recommended or its ability to monetize.
In addition to AI content policing, the company has invested in AI for things like interactive search, Ask YouTube, a playlist maker for YouTube Music, AI video summaries, and other AI creation tools.
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