YouTube will automatically label AI videos soon

If you're an active YouTube user, you've probably noticed that the platform, especially Shorts, has been inundated with AI "slop" content. Creators have been leveraging AI tools to quickly spin up AI-generated content and mercilessly posting it on the service. While that alone is not a problem, it can be deceiving to unsuspecting users and arguably reduces the overall quality of the published content too. Now, YouTube is finally making some moves in this area to proactively manage the situation.

For starters, YouTube will soon begin automatically labeling videos with "significant" photorealistic AI content as being AI-generated. This is an autonomous system is rolling out this month and will leverage internal signals to determine the presence of AI content in uploaded videos. If a creator believes that their content has been wrongly identified as being AI-generated, they can update its status via YouTube Studio.

That said, labels will be permanent if the content is generated via YouTube's own tools like Veo or Dream Screen, or if they contain C2PA metadata. Additionally, it's worth noting that creators are still obliged to manually label content as being AI-generated, which is something that YouTube has been encouraging since 2024, and the automatic labeling simply augments this existing process and makes it more seamless.

Furthermore, AI labels will be becoming more prominent across content uploaded on the platform. For long-form videos, it will appear below the video player and above the description, while for Shorts, it will be overlayed on the video. This allows AI-averse users to understand at a glance if a video is worth their time. However, this prominent label will only be featured for "meaningfully AI altered or generated content". If the content is only slightly altered, the label will be positioned in the expanded description.

All of these are decent changes, which provides users additional context about the content they are viewing while also not making the situation too difficult for content creators leveraging AI tools. Of course, whether or not AI tools should be encouraged for platforms like these is another discourse altogether, but this is a arguably a decent middle ground for now.