The next video summary you see online may not be written by a human. YouTube is testing AI-generated video summaries that will appear on search and watch pages. The text is intended to provide a “quick overview” of a clip to help you decide if it’s worth watching. The company is quick to emphasize that these are not a replacement for creators’ video descriptions.
The test will only be visible to a “limited number” of English-language videos and only to certain viewers. YouTube has not said which countries, platforms or video types will receive the AI-generated summaries.
YouTube has been giving users a few preview features in recent weeks, as Android Police explains. Premium subscribers could lock the screen during playback to prevent accidental commands. They also had the option to turn Shorts comments into entirely new short-form.
The experiment comes nearly three years after YouTube began testing AI-generated video chapters, but it's part of a larger AI push at Google. The tech giant unveiled Bard , which uses the technology to generate everything from spreadsheet templates to entire news articles.
YouTube’s summarization feature might be one of the most logical extensions. According to the service, more than 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute — it’s impossible for humans to keep up with it all. The question is how accurate the AI’s summaries are. Google has warned that production systems like Bard can be prone to inaccuracies and misinformation, and it’s not yet clear how well YouTube’s experiment works in practice.
Information source: engadget.com
