If you’ve ever been lured into clicking a video with a “captivating” thumbnail only to be disappointed by the actual content, YouTube’s latest feature may be of interest to you. Team YouTube officially dropped a new experiment today – video summaries automatically generated by artificial intelligence.
By piecing together a short summary of the clip you’re thinking about clicking on, you’ll hopefully have a better decision-making tool to help you determine if you should engage with the video or keep scrolling. This new feature, as explained on the YouTube Help page, does not replace a YouTube content creator’s manually injected video description.
For now, this will only work on certain videos on the platform, and only videos in English since the AI will generate the text in English (makes sense, right?) My guess is that if this is successful, it will expand to other regions and languages.
It’s worth noting that this feature seems to be independent of the other recent YouTube Experiments, such as the “Avoid accidental taps with Lock Screen”, “Long press to watch at 2x”, and “Bigger previews while seeking”. These features, which are currently available to Premium subscribers, are shutting down within the next two weeks (Accidental taps shuts down in just four days!)
Anyway, what are your thoughts on AI being injected into YouTube in this way? Would you appreciate a quickly drafted overview of a video before clicking on it, or are you cool with getting roped into the hype of the thumbnail and potentially being baited and having your time and attention stolen?
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