Google-owned YouTube will lean into the artificial intelligence craze by integrating its own generative AI tool Veo 3 into the platform’s Shorts feature later this year.
The affirmation was made by YouTube CEO Neal Mohan during a conversation at the Cannes Lions festival in France on Wednesday.
“The possibilities with AI are limitless,” Mohan said. “A lot can change in a generation — entertainment, itself, has changed more in the last two decades than any other time in history.”
Mohan said creators — the term YouTube gives to its independent content producers — “led this revolution.” Curiously, he was joined by three human creators on stage while affirming AI tools were the future of video creation on the platform.
AI won’t replace those creators anytime soon, but tools like Veo 3 will supplement parts of the workflow over time and “push the limits of human creativity.”
Google unveiled Veo 3 during a developer conference earlier this year. Within days of being announced, developers, content creators and journalists were using the tool to generate realistic videos that resembled legitimate television news reports.
YouTube is the largest video sharing platform in the world, and accounts for more than one-tenth of all time spent with TV in the United States, according to data from Nielsen. The app earned more than $9 billion in advertising revenue during Google’s most-recent financial quarter.
The key element that makes YouTube so successful is also one of the things that makes it so problematic: Anyone can create, upload and distribute content on the platform. Some choose to spread false news, conspiracy theories and propaganda through YouTube, and the platform has few limitations and safeguards to ensure viewers aren’t duped by bad actors.
In 2022, a consortium of more than 80 fact-checking organizations found YouTube was the leading platform for false information online. A letter sent to then-YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki claimed the platforms’ “current measures are proving insufficient” to protect audiences from false information and propaganda.
Integrating AI tools that allow anyone to generate realistic news reports with conspiracy theories and propaganda will almost certainly make the situation worse, at a time when reliable, facts-first news is already difficult to come by.
