YouTube’s looking to get into the generative AI game, with the addition of new AI-generated video summaries that are designed to help users better understand the context of clips.
As explained by YouTube:
“We’re starting to test AI auto-generated summaries on YouTube, so that it’s easier for you to read a quick summary about a video and decide whether it’s the right fit for you. To begin with, you may see these summaries on watch and search pages. While we hope these summaries are helpful and give you a quick overview of what a video is about, they do not replace video descriptions (which are written by creators!).”
So it’s not as cool or interesting as some of the generative AI creation tools that we’ve seen in other apps. But it is a way for parent company Google to implement more practical use of its own AI tools, and begin to merge them into the user experience, in order to enhance and complement your existing process.
Which is more in line with how Google’s approaching AI, in variance to the new wave of tools that can create whole new documents and visuals for you. Google’s looking to take a more cautious and measured approach to implementing such tools, as a means to both maintain its current business opportunities, while also ensuring that generative AI is not used in a way that could be harmful.
Because generative AI produces a lot of misleading, untrue, and confused content. And the more of this type of material that’s spit out from these apps, the more of it there is in the general digital ecosphere, which, over time, could have a significant negative impact on our broader digital ecosystem.
Google is acutely aware of this, which is why it’s urged caution in rolling out generative AI tools. But other companies have been less restrained, which has also forced Google to accelerate its own plans, and merge new AI tools into its systems.
Hence, this new addition.
It doesn’t seem like this will have a heap of practical value, but maybe, by providing AI summaries, that could help to reduce the time spent on non-relevant video clips, while also providing more assistance for differently-abled users.
It could also, eventually, help YouTube highlight more relevant content matches, by using these summaries as a guide to what you want. If you go looking for a video about something more specific, the new summaries could eventually enable YouTube to show you better matches based on refined parameters, and what’s actually included in clips, as opposed to just titles and user-created descriptions.
YouTube says that this experiment is currently underway with a limited number of English-language videos.
