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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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 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

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

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

I see the comments below with the positive and negative aspects of AI, and I think there are very good points made. I've had this discussion before with many friends of mine, and the point I usually make is this: good or bad, there's no going back to the "good old days." I think of those movie trailers where the cast appears to plead with us to watch their upcoming movie in a theater, "the way it's meant to be seen." Do I agree with them? Yes. Do I think that as a society we're going to give up on streaming and go back to the theaters en masse? Not a chance in hell. You can always take a side on whether progress or change is a good thing or not, but what you can't do is turn back the clock. So the real question is: where do we go from here?

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.

Would really be nice if they did the same with their ads, but don't see that happening

Will a hybrid of AI and man-made content be flagged as an AI-generated video? I wonder what the threshold of the ratio of AI-generated content has to be to be classified as one.

I hope they're able to reliably detect it. I think theres some hope for images and videos, but ai generated text detectors are already throwing false positives at an absurdly high rate.

If they have a large preexisting AI-ERA subscriber base, which many do, it must be tempting preserve the time by reading AI text for segments of their content.

Submitted some pretty harsh feedback about this back in Jan after my old school technical father in law sent me a few AI generated “news” videos in a row about Trump and Venezuela. The AI label was technically on all of the videos but 3 taps away hidden in the video description, and not visible from the search results at all. So thankful YouTube is doing something about this.

I'm willing to bet this is just an easily bypassable SynthID check

AI versus AI, the final faceoff. Who's gonna win? Probably not us.

This is what YouTube needs to start doing:

1. Allow us to filter any and all content based on category or tag, this would include AI tagged videos 2. Demonetize any and all videos that incentivize antagonizing people (Looking at you prank videos) 3. Allow the reporting of video for "Criminal Activities" 4. Bring back the number of dislikes 5. Put the "not interested" option on video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail) 6. Put the "do no recommend this channel" option on the video playback page (currently only on the video thumbnail)

Hmmm. I have a game on steam that has almost entirely AI-generated graphics (and AI-generated animations/code that move them), but we pay someone to do our promotional videos. Wonder if something like this would tag the video as AI-generated or not.

One field I was wondering about. There are a lot of channels/videos where they take movie summaries, feed it into an AI to generate TTS, graphics... I hate these videos but I'm also like damn good job trying to capitalize on that, why don't I do it kind of thing. I don't have that money making drive/hustle. I need to.

Some are funny some SORA, Neural Viz

I wonder why they're really doing this. It's definitely not for users' benefit.

I can already imagine this won’t be perfect (false negatives / false positives, for one thing) but this seems like a huge step in the right direction. Even just giving the “AI” label a more prominent spot than the description is a big deal, particularly for those who are less tech-savvy than your average HN user. My mom, for instance, can watch your one video that’s entirely AI-generated and not bat an eye, but then watch another video that’s clearly real and say it looks “off.” Say what you will about whether AI-generated content is valid or whether it should be allowed on the platform at all, but more transparency is only a good thing.

is this gonna affect the monetization of those videos too? Well i think even if not directly, people will somehow loose interest in ai generated videos, people would not want a low effort content grabbing there attention.

One of those HN titles I didn't even click before I upvoted, I'm ashamed/not ashamed to admit.

With AI.

Good start, but it seems you still need to click on the video though.

Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI content". Work together with the hardware and software layer with an open approach, building on top of contend id. I appreciate the privacy implications here are complex, and Google is dubious on using any tracking/fingerprinting technology for its self-serving and privacy-invading motivations, but an open cross-industry foundation owning and operating it may be a first step?

If only they could automatically label all the videos made by real people with obviously heavily AI-involved scripts. Those "give me the ick" as the kiddos say these days.

I want to filter out ai generated videos

youtube really needs to go. like myspace. Ruined

if they would offer youtube plus, i would pay: - no ads. none. nothing - videos with sponsored content tagged, and option to auto skip - Option to HIDE ALL AI-videos. ALL. And channels. from search also - Option to HIDE ALL slideshow-videos (generated) all. From search also. - Community driven filter list that would auto-update. To hide all the shit content.

Interesting. Although it seems they are focusing primarily on detecting AI generated video and imagery. But most of the annoying slop videos I come across seem like they are using real footage/video clips. It's just edited together by AI and there's an AI narrator reading an AI script. I wonder if they'll do anything to guard against this type of junk

Good. The flood of AI slop has basically meant, when searching for videos of a given topic, having to ignore videos created in the last couple of years because a high percentage of them are garbage - a situation that must be devastating for creators of new quality content.

I am really sick of AI generated videos. I don't have anything against AI videos per se but the fact that it's so easy to generate videos that people are churning out really really bad quality videos out there.

There's another phenomenon I have been noticing more and more lately: the frequent scene cuts. One scene lasts a mere 3 seconds before being cut to a different scene. Whether it is entirely different scene, or a different angle of the same thing or zoomed in/out.

I am not sure if this phenomenon is due to AI but I sense some correlation there.

I want to believe it (and filter all that crap), but YT recently removing the sort by new/date option because 99% of results being useless AI slop doesn't inspire much trust.

this is a welcome change but if the creator doesn't disclose the use of AI, how do they detect what is AI and what is not?

I've been thinking for some time that it wouldn't be too hard to create a third-party browser extension to crowdsource detection of channels that use primarily AI-generated content (for example, the AI slop music channels that put out multiple hour+ long genre or cover "playlists") and hide them from suggestions or home feeds.

My guess is that Google sees some kind of trend in a contingent of users preferring non-AI content and that surfacing AI content misleadingly has a negative effect on retention / watch time, and/or they're trying to get ahead of long-standing creators taking issue with the platform surfacing AI content disproportionately on account of it being excessively easier to upload in large quantities.

Sure .. but I still can't blacklist creators based on keywords. It's impossible to avoid certain creators which are like cancer.

https://m.youtube.com/VaniaManiaKids

This shit pops up everywhere and is impossible to filter, as it is translated into many languages.

the ability to simply exclude such content from recommendations & search results would be welcome.

Now label AI ads and let us filter them out.

Leading up to tax day, every ad was a terrible AI slop Turbotax ad.

This is awesome. I am building something similar for writing - https://trulytyped.com

do they detect ai-generated ads?

"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."

Welcome to the future and the brave new world I guess.

"detect". God help us all.

about time

Now can LinkedIn please label posts

This is fine, good, whatever... but my thing is can creators remove it successfully for 'false flags'.

> However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will “remain permanent” in some cases,

YouTube isn't exactly known for taking care of complaints/having any human on the other end to deal with these kinds of things.

I really wish there was a button to voluntarily say / tag your own content as AI assisted.

The assumption that users will always hide this results in flaky auto detection.

Too bad they are not including the script writing, some people pass on the visual but you can tell in 10 seconds or less it was written by AI - or an AI voice that is reading AI written slop.

I would not mind either one if it was quality. But it's NOT this, it's sloppy that!

This could backfire.. im thinking of "real" videos with elements of AI in them. Those elements might not get the video flairs as an AI video and people will get fooled

Let the cat and mouse begin, since this will be a moving line.

hot take: terrible idea

this just applies high quality selection pressure to have ai videos be more realistic

Hell yea!

They need to have a way to report AI videos not labeled as such, AND a checkbox to filter out AI videos on the home page and in search results. Not holding my breath for either.

There are two things needed for this to be successful,

1. Detection of AI voiceover. The article makes several references to photo realistic AI content but it's the voiceovers that are killing me.

2. Filtering options for viewers. It's not enough to be able to know if a video is generated. I don't want to see them, ever.

Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?

I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....

Wouldn’t it be easier to just label AI-free videos?

good first step.

better next step: allow us to block them

even better next step: charge them egress, storage, compute, and energy fees for uploading them.

By the way, also this:

> As this technology continues to improve, creators remain in control.

Well, some folks disagree that they are in control. See the rise of FairTube - granted, FairTube has infrastructure issues, but the problem is Google controlling videos via youtube. This has to change in the long run.

Also:

> Our commitment to responsibility

^^^ pointless self-promo by an AI slop adCompany. They censor at will. I know that because so many videos I had bookmarked, suddenly were taken down at a later time - and not by the original author. Often you can find the same (!!!) video again on youtube.

Honestly, I'm a bit concerned here. YouTube's automated tools aren't the greatest at flagging content, and quite a few videos have been mistakenly marked as for kids/infringing copyright/being in the shorts format.

The fact this status can be removed by the uploader certainly helps fix this issue, but then it feels like something any good conman will be able to work their way around really easily. Make sure the video doesn't blatantly use any tools that YouTube identifies as AI without extra changes, then put the video unlisted or private for a bit to see if it gets caught.

But something like this is needed. YouTube is currently overrun with AI generated videos, and the current systems make it really easy to hide that fact from 99.99% of viewers. It just needs to be done in such a way that:

A: Innocent creators aren't wrongfully screwed over B: Actual liars/scammers/grifters can't easily work around it.

Also the amount of scammy crap quality on YouTube has exploded since developing countries have more access. The cost of publishing is tending to zero.

It would also help if there was a public way for viewers to indicate slop, regardless of AI. Maybe a dislike button?

Hopefully it will allow you to filter out AI slop. TikTok currently does not do this, and it’s infuriating.

GOOD!

I’ve been blacklisting AI slop channels on my feed. I don’t want to reward this content either views.

I got Netflix recently because I wanted my 4 year old son to have a bit of screen time. He is very active, loves to play outside, draw, paint and does a lot of different activities so I thought there's no harm in a bit of screen time... But YouTube was awful because he would end up watching creepy AI slop videos of extremely colorful 3D cars or airplanes or whatever... Very repetitive. Or sometimes there would be videos of colorful painted toys being washed with a monotonous voice repeating the same thing over and over and saying stuff like "Wow, it's big" in the most monotonous voice possible (and no, the toy was not even big)... There's something very creepy about hearing emotionally charged sentences being expressed with such dull apathetic tone and saying things that aren't even factually correct. Complete trash. I could feel myself getting brainwashed in realtime. No more YouTube. Definitely this AI slop should not be promoted.

Thank fuck. There is SO much garbage on YT lately which amounts to a powerpoint deck with ai audio overlaid.

Using AI to detect AI is just another step in an endless arms race to insanity.

This is great. We don't want to drown in AI slop, and (perhaps more importantly) we don't want people to think that real videos are AI generated. Any signal which helps distinguishing the two is helpful, even if it isn't perfect. This is also why I think it's good that OpenAI is adopting Google's Synth ID watermark for images.

"We've heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content."

As if Google really cares about the opinion of people. They just realised that AI is killing youtube - if you come to that conclusion, then "labeling" the AI slop isn't going to solve the problem really. Personally I already classify ALL AI-videos as slop-spam. I've also noticed the "suggested" videos in the last few weeks, on youtube, to really go down in quality a LOT. Google does not seem to understand how severe this problem is.

Can we add the AI voice over videos as well please?

"Please prove your content was created by a flawed biological organism."

Finally a decent change by Youtube! Great job Youtube but overall unsure about the situation at Google itself and what Google itself is doing.

I do overall wish if Youtube could've been spinned independent from Google given there might be some conflict of interests, Youtube still tries to push a lot of AI slop towards the creators and sometimes even the viewers perhaps because of google, but seems like Youtube has pushed back against some aspects of the AI slop.

the thing I am wondering is how easy it might be to break that bypass and also about the false positives. A lot of creators recently got demonitized for apparently not much of a reason aside from false positives which is incredibly sad if one's livelihood depended on it. These people end up taking it on twitter from my understanding but it only really sometimes end up working if enough people watch the twitter or get attention overall on the topic so I hope that youtube works towards its (creators support??) side too.

Original article: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-vie...

Isn’t YouTube applying weird AI processing to shorts?

So all shorts will be labeled?

Maybe I’m not the target audience for Google products anymore?

I have to use Yandex and DDG for search results now.

Gemini has insane throttling so I’ve just embraced local models for most things and the occasional API call to whatever frontier model I think will work best.

YouTube search is abysmal and new content is 98% consumerism BS.

My Gmail is mostly spam and mailing lists I can’t seem to get off of with the occasional scam attempt thrown in.

Guess I’m just ranting to rant at this point. I grew up online and now the internet feels weird and I think I might be “over it”.

I agree , AI got so good that you can hardly distinguish real video from AI generated , especially cartoons