Summary
With the rise of AI, we’ve also seen the rise of “creators” making brand new (and lazy) content to post on their social media. And a lot of it does go viral often. YouTube Shorts is gaining new features to generate AI content, so it’s about to get a lot more effortless.
YouTube has announced a suite of new AI tools for Shorts creators. One of the most notable additions is “Photo to video,” a tool designed to instantly transform a static image from your camera roll into a dynamic video clip. According to the announcement, you can select a picture and choose from several creative suggestions to animate it. The company provided examples such as adding motion to landscape photographs, animating pictures of everyday objects, or bringing life to group photos.
YouTube is also introducing new generative effects that allow for more complex and creative transformations—these AI-powered effects let you make AI edits to your content right from the app. Examples cited include turning hand-drawn doodles into polished images and modifying selfie videos to create unique scenes, such as someone appearing to swim underwater or being twinned with a lookalike sibling. These new options can be accessed by navigating to the “Effects” icon within the Shorts camera and selecting the “AI” category to browse the available generative tools.
These features will live in a new “AI playground,” which is honestly an extremely cursed concept. This section of the app will serve as a central destination for the platform’s generative AI tools. It will feature not only the creation tools themselves but also a gallery of inspirational examples and pre-filled prompts to help you generate videos, images, and music more quickly. The AI playground is accessible by tapping the “create” button and then selecting the sparkle icon in the top right corner. All video modifications, including photo to video, are powered by Google’s older Veo 2 model rather than the more realistic Veo 3, but Veo 3 will come to YouTube Shorts eventually.
Namely, photo to videowas also introduced on Google Photostoday. I feel like it’s more justified there, though. Some people might want to animate some older photos or memories in their gallery for nostalgia reasons, or because it’s fun. Here, though, I feel like it’s mostly facilitating slop. It allows you to generate a ready-to-post video from a photo within a few seconds.
While AI content generated right on YouTube will have tags clarifying they’re AI-generated, partly thanks toSynthID tags, I feel like there’s already enough lazily-generated AI content on the platform. Now, there’s about to be a lot more. I would hope there’s eventually a feature to filter out AI content, but there isn’t one right now.
