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YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/youtube-ai-video-labels-automatic-detection-1236758865/
145•nopg•59m ago

Comments

nemomarx•56m ago
> 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?

duskwuff•16m ago
I don't know about SOTA, but Sight Engine (sightengine.com) has AI image detection which seems pretty solid. It can even identify specific image generators.
asveikau•55m ago
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.
Bender•51m ago
I know they can identify them because if I click on one by mistake that's all I get until I go to about:blank, close YT tab, clear cache, close browser, run bleachbit and start browser. I never log into their site.
floxy•46m ago
I suppose it all depends on the false positive and false negative rates. But better to start now, before AI ruins the platform.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090418141450/http://www.theatl...

luckylion•37m ago
_before_? youtube is like the top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities, 5% actual videos, and the rest is slop of various types for me.

The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.

Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.

floxy•30m ago
Fair enough
tredre3•28m ago
If you only visit youtube.com logged out in a private window, obviously it's going to show you what's the most popular. What else should it be doing?

Personally I never see those top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities. If anything I find the recommendation algorithm too tuned to my topics of interest so it rarely surfaces new things.

Agreed on the search being less than useless, though.

asveikau•14m ago
You and I must be watching a very different YouTube. I don't see a lot of AI generated stuff in my recommendations or search.

My teenage daughter gets served a lot of iffy stuff with the ElevenLabs Adam voice though. Though sometimes I suspect some of that content is written manually by people who may not have great English speaking voices, so they add generated audio.

Imustaskforhelp•54m ago
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.

floxy•53m ago
That's great news. Hopefully there will be a filter to allow or disallow AI video on your homepage/feed.
schmiddim•51m ago
Can't await this checkbox
650REDHAIR•43m ago
Create your own browser extension to block them!
postalrat•40m ago
Some searches might have 99% videos I want filtered out.
varjag•43m ago
Sounds like a premium feature!
floxy•41m ago
Honestly, that might get me to subscribe.
dalmo3•25m ago
Yes, like filtering out shorts.

/s

whywhywhywhy•32m ago
They could use the same data to pay AI posters less and push their content more. Which will get you a promotion at Google.
epolanski•20m ago
No joke, I would pay for this more than i do for premium.

Half my feed or suggestions are AI crap.

Sadly I have lots of niche interests (various history topics, or engineering) and there's an endless amount of channels and videos that are entirely AI generated.

And it takes you a while to catch them, because they are well done, even the narrator is fake. But then I realize I'm just watching an AI dramatized summary and I get mad at Youtube.

fugalfervor•17m ago
I really doubt that google will implement that filter. But I guarantee it'll be added soon to revanced and other patched youtube apps.
andrewstuart•51m ago
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.

spogbiper•28m ago
Your wish has been granted - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491
stillnotalone•49m ago
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
numpad0•49m ago

  > “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.
What's the general overall state of AI-based AI flagging tools development? They seemed to have absurd false positive rates of not even 50% while it's obvious to whom it is obvious, no matter who or how it's done.
GodelNumbering•48m ago
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.
simlevesque•44m ago
AI versus AI, the final faceoff. Who's gonna win? Probably not us.
GuinansEyebrows•18m ago
Whoever wins, we lose.
apercu•44m ago
"Please prove your content was created by a flawed biological organism."
floxy•32m ago
Seems better than the alternative: "This content was created by a machine, but being pushed/promoted by a flawed money-grubbing biological organism".
650REDHAIR•43m ago
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”.

Raed667•43m ago
I'm willing to bet this is just an easily bypassable SynthID check
p1necone•43m ago
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.
hungryhobbit•40m ago
"AI generated video that's impossible to detect" is already something many companies are working on; it's hardly Google-specific.
FloorEgg•36m ago
YouTube scale is Google specific
nicce•35m ago
It already is quite impossible. Just generate something decent with lower quality. Then maybe take screen recording of the output. Voila.
justinator•27m ago
Then "low-quality for no reason in year the 2026 and beyond where phones shoot at 8k" become part of the heuristics.
tombert•39m ago
Isn't this literally how GANNs are trained?
scoofy•20m ago
I think that "impossible to detect" is not something realistic if camera manufacturers are willing to start adding encryption signatures to their cameras outputs and are willing to vouch for them.

I realize this would still allow fakes to be presented by governments in all likelihood, but not everyone.

Ajedi32•18m ago
Who posts raw output from cameras anywhere? This doesn't seem useful outside some niche use-cases (like security camera footage). At a minimum just about every recording is going to be re-compressed for streaming.
paulddraper•16m ago
Yeah I’m not sure this makes sense when images are getting their third ifunny watermark.
AmbroseBierce•9m ago
I bet the cameras' companies will start automatically uploading the real footage to their servers for attestation, and allow the camera owners to get those links, so people will just add that link on YouTube or whatever and say "See, its real, Sony vouches for it", heck maybe they will make their buyers to sign up with YouTube and do it for them.
thfuran•1m ago
How on top of security do you think all the camera manufacturers are going to be? That is, how long until people can sign videos that were not, in fact, shot with their camera?
Ukv•4m ago
Pointing the camera at a screen could potentially evade that.
mkhalil•19m ago
> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."

what gives you that impression?

Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.

I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.

unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.

AmbroseBierce•7m ago
Yeah, like Google doesn't know other hundreds of companies are also generating videos and improving their algorithms daily, they know SynthID its just PR.
smrtinsert•1m ago
Why is that tinfoil? That's just good business?
whalesalad•42m ago
Thank fuck. There is SO much garbage on YT lately which amounts to a powerpoint deck with ai audio overlaid.
abeyer•19m ago
Unfortunately I'm not sure this will affect those at all...it's specifically for "realistic" AI use according to all the quotes. I'm not sure narration or illustration/slides generated by AI would be covered at all in that case.
jonbaer•38m ago
Would really be nice if they did the same with their ads, but don't see that happening
zamadatix•10m ago
The ads are labeled, much more so than the AI generated content.
sunaookami•38m ago
Original article: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/improving-ai-labels-vie...
gitpusher•37m ago
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
antran22•31m ago
Let’s use probabilistic models to find the probability of something being the output of another probabilistic model
techtivist•27m ago
Honestly, this whole AI-labeling approach seems to be the opposite approach to take. Instead why not authenticate genuine "non-AI photos". 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?
ge96•27m ago
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

dwa3592•25m ago
This is awesome. I am building something similar for writing - https://trulytyped.com
burkaman•20m ago
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.
loganc2342•20m ago
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.
eclipticplane•18m ago
Now label AI ads and let us filter them out.

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

pnw•18m ago
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?
dragontamer•14m ago
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....

chrsw•4m ago
There's no way to switch back to the original audio track? I agree you shouldn't have to but I'm wondering if it's possible.
Jubijub•1m ago
You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there
MrGrinchh•14m ago
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?
perarneng•9m ago
The dangers is videos that slip through the cracks, they get an indirect seal of being non AI.
delichon•7m ago
It's too late to stuff all of the AI into a .ai top level domain, but maybe we can get a .human TLD on which to build a parallel non AI internet including youtube.human.
Willish42•3m ago
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.

chrsw•2m ago
I wonder why they're really doing this. It's definitely not for users' benefit.
jameson•1m ago
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

YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos

https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/youtube-ai-video-labels-automatic-detection-1236758865/
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