YouTube Shorts Previews Generative AI Features for Creating Video Backgrounds
YouTube has outlined plans to incorporate several new generative AI features. The new features, announced at the Made on YouTube annual event, include a synthetic image and video generator for YouTube Shorts videos called Dream Screen, analytics and inspiration for video ideas within YouTube Studio, and a new mobile app called YouTube Create with a suite of AI-assisted video creation and editing tools.
Dream Screen
YouTube aims to leverage generative AI to help users come up with ideas, settings, and effects for their videos. Dream Screen (a reference to green screens) does that directly, enabling creators to type a prompt that will instantly create animated backgrounds for Shorts videos. For example, a user could request the surface of Mars, a desert under a full moon, or the pandas drinking coffee in the video above as the backdrop for their next short video. Dream Screen is undergoing testing with select creators and will roll out next year.
“Ever wish you were filming in outer space? Trekking through an enchanted forest? Dreamt that your pug drove you to school? With Dream Screen, creators will be able to generate new, fantastic settings for their Shorts that are only limited by what they can imagine,” YouTube vice president of emerging experiences and community products Toni Reid explained in a blog post. “In the future, we’ll expand to features that will allow anyone to instantly reimagine their videos by simply typing in an idea to edit their content or remix existing YouTube videos and turn them into something entirely new.”
The new YouTube Create mobile app, meanwhile, is designed to streamline capturing, editing, and uploading the actual videos users want to make. The app provides uses AI for features like automatic captions, audio dubbing, and quick editing. The idea is to make producing Shorts and longer videos easily accessible, allowing more people to turn creative ideas into YouTube content. The Create app is currently in beta testing on Android.
For existing creators, YouTube plans to bring generative AI-powered recommendation tools to YouTube Studio next year. These will suggest personalized video topics, and draft outlines to inspire creators’ next projects based on current viewing trends. That’s also where the users can get video soundtrack recommendations by writing text prompts in the Creator Music library. Creators can describe video themes and generative AI will suggest fitting royalty-free songs and music. The slate of reveals aims to showcase YouTube’s focus on AI as part of its commitment to fostering creativity and innovation. The company said it continues to be amazed at what creators dream up using the platform’s ever-expanding set of capabilities.
“Since YouTube Shorts launched in 2020, it has been a destination for sharing off-the-cuff ideas and inspiration. Driven by this creativity, Shorts has now climbed to over 70B daily views from over 2B signed-in users every month,” explained Reid, who joined the Google subsidiary last year after leaving her role as vice president of Alexa experiences and Echo devices at Amazon, where she worked for almost 25 years, including helping create Alexa’s personality before launching and managing Alexa and the Echo line of smart speakers and smart displays in 2014. “The future of creation on YouTube is bright as we start to see how AI-powered tools can help transform people’s dreams into reality, and we can’t wait to see what gets Made on YouTube next.”
Follow @voicebotai Follow @erichschwartz
Alexa Experience Vice President Leaves Amazon for YouTube Exec Role
